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RUSH: Steve in High Point, North Carolina. Hi. Glad you waited welcome to the program.

CALLER: Oh, it’s such an honor to talk to you Mr. Limbaugh.

RUSH: Thank you. You bet.

CALLER: Let me say I agree with you 100% about the attempt to overthrow our government, our country, but it grieves my soul to say that you made a mistake earlier in the broadcast.

RUSH: Well, it was not an opinion error; it was verbal dyslexia. I said ‘4,500 a year.’

CALLER: It’s 45,000 a year, is the claim that they’re making.

RUSH: Is this the Harvard study?

CALLER. Yes, and when they say Harvard study, that doesn’t mean the university necessarily conducted it itself. It was actually put out by a group called Physicians for a National Health Program.

RUSH: Oh, so an Obama bunch.

CALLER: Exactly. They’re for single payer completely. But the methodology of the survey — the reason I called is I think your listeners should know about this. The methodology of that study was, they checked with a sample group say in 1987, then checked back over 15 years later, and if someone had died in the time since then, they assumed that if you didn’t have health insurance in 1987, that if you died in 1998, it must have been because you didn’t have insurance.

RUSH: Oh, so they did the old assume game?

CALLER: That’s it exactly.

RUSH: So use a static economy. If you didn’t have health insurance in ’87, then you never had it after that.

CALLER: Exactly right.

RUSH: So if you died after ’87, it had to be because you didn’t have insurance.

CALLER: Yeah, I think that your listeners should know that because that number is being bandied about so much, and it’s been thoroughly discredited, but of course that wouldn’t stop the Obama crew from using the numbers.

RUSH: Well, you know what, I’m not good with numbers in my head and half the time I screw it up on a calculator, and everybody I assign number projects to gets it wrong on this staff. It’s just amazing. But 45,000 —

CALLER: That’s the claim, and it’s been thoroughly debunked.

RUSH: Yeah, yeah. So 45,000 divided by 365. Now, I’ll get a number, the commas will be in the wrong place —

CALLER: They even went so far as to divide the country up and begin making claims on how many people died in each state, which they couldn’t possibly do.

RUSH: No.

CALLER: And one other thing before I get off the phone here, I did want to let Mr. — was it Rodriguez that was complaining about the lack of a popup window for the video?

RUSH: No, he was complaining that I hadn’t fixed it yet.

CALLER: Well, all he needs to do is right click and a menu will come up and he can open it himself in a new window.

RUSH: Well, maybe, I’ll have to try that myself. Since I’m hosting the show I never use the media player.

CALLER: Of course. I just wanted to say great job, and I’m a first-time caller and I got through on my first time, unbelievable.

RUSH: Well, that’s great and you remarkably contributed here: 45,000 a year and the methodology. If you didn’t have health insurance in ’87 and you were alive, and you died any year after that, they just assumed you didn’t have health insurance and that was why you died. Forty-five thousand a year is the number out there.

All right, here’s John in Keene, New Hampshire. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. I’m here to surpass caller expectations. Did I hear you say a little earlier that Joe Biden was plugging for the Palestinians?

RUSH: He was.

CALLER: He’s just living up to his nickname.

RUSH: That’s right. Good catch.

CALLER: Anyway, I’m here to discuss basically the totalitarianistic nightmare that will come with the enforcement of the compulsory health care system because many people have drawn parallels to, well, if you get pulled over while you’re driving, you have to show proof of insurance. But if you’re not driving, if you’re walking down the street, the authorities can’t come up and demand your proof of auto insurance. But with the health care, you will have to prove anywhere you are, they’ll be able to set up a checkpoint and have a dragnet, goon squad revenuers that will say, ‘Let’s see if your papers are in order here.’

RUSH: The revenuers, eh?

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: I didn’t know they used that word in New Hampshire. I thought revenuers was strictly Tennessee and maybe Georgia.

CALLER: Well, I lived down here for a while. (laughing) So, yeah. But that’s basically what it will amount to because somebody’s going to have to pay a $700 fine if they don’t have the insurance —

RUSH: Which is what they’re going to do, that’s the whole point — he’s right. The IRS becomes the enforcement agency of this. The IRS will be the enforcement agency on whether or not you have health coverage. Now, of course you’ll be required to have it but then if you don’t there’s a fine. And for most people the fine will be less than 25% of what a policy would cost you. It’s on your tax return. That’s why the IRS, you’re going to have to put it on your tax return if you have health insurance, prove it, and if you don’t, you have to pay the fine. Look, the theory behind this is that citizens will be eager to report that they don’t have insurance because they’ll want to choose the cheaper route of paying the fine rather than buy insurance. And employers are also gonna pay a much smaller fee in the form of a fine if they don’t insure their workers than if they do, and then after that happens don’t forget that there is real no penalty to you in not having insurance because if, to use John’s example here, let’s say that you are up in Keene, New Hampshire, you’re brewing some moonshine, distilling some moonshine and some revenuers come your way and they tell you if they capture you and so forth that you gotta have health insurance. In the process of running away, you run into a tree, you don’t have health insurance, you’re trying to escape ’em for doing moonshine.

The revenuers are chasing you, you run into a tree, and you nearly decapitate yourself. Now, you don’t have insurance because you’ve been paying the fine. Well, guess what? The health insurance company has to pay for your treatment from that day forward even though you didn’t have any insurance. This is called cost control. It’s called compassion. It’s also called let’s destroy the private insurance industry as we overthrow the United States as we’ve known it. So it won’t be long before people figure out the cheaper option is no insurance, especially if you tell ’em that everything is going to be paid for if they haven accident anyway because Obama is going to insist the insurance companies — all of this has as its endgame wiping out private insurance and forcing you on the government exchange rolls for health insurance. At some point the fines for not having insurance will be larger than what insurance premiums would be. It’s real simple, folks, if you understand who these people are. And, if you don’t understand who these people are, trust that I do. And then do not doubt me.

Snerdley just asked me if the revenuers will be armed. Revenuers will not be armed. They’re not going to be chasing you down. It’s going to be on your tax return. Look, it’s impossible for them to catch everybody. They can’t audit everybody. That’s why anti-tax people: ‘Hey, let’s just all not pay one year, they can’t possibly put us all in jail.’ Look it, I’m making this sound like it’s workable. It’s not workable. None of this is possible. It’s their plan but none of it’s possible, don’t you see?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Rob in Glen Cove, Long Island. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. How are you?

RUSH: Very well, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: You know, I wanted to share some thoughts with you and America as someone who is doing health care day in, day out, every day for the last 20 years here in New York. I’m really saddened just to hear the kind of things that they’re talking about where there’s really very little creativity in the solutions, where we could have tremendous changes in health care with preexisting conditions across the country. But I think it’s really important that you with your status could drill down as to what kind of benefits they’re offering. And the point I want to make to America is that you can’t offer these third-party system with these dollar-one benefits and expect any kind of crunching of the cost curve. I spent the first eight years of my career inside a TPA where before they linked with networks where you paid copayments, you paid cash. And as soon as they contracted with these networks where suddenly the employee could just say, well, you know, I’ll just pay $15, we saw some of the stupidest claims that if you had to pay some money out of your pocket, you know they wouldn’t have been done. There’s a study at Mt. Sinai that if you watch your weight, you exercise, you don’t smoke, you watch your blood pressure —

RUSH: You’re going to die someday.

CALLER: No. You reduce your chance of a heart attack over a given ten-year period by 99%. Do you know if you’re hurt in a car accident, no health plan pays for you? Do you know if you’re hurt on the job or workers’ comp, no health plan is paying for you. And at a time now with epic budget crunches across the country. I’m telling you that when US health care and Oxford came to New York in 1993 the promise was we’re going to give you physicals, we’re going to keep the rates low and everyone’s going to stay healthy because we’re going to find the cancers ahead of time. The total opposite happened. Rates went up 600%.

RUSH: Why?

CALLER: Because people had no invitation to want to be consumer oriented and the doctors realized, hey, my business has now morphed into a volume practice. And one of the things I’d like to talk to you about or just put out there is that I believe — you know, in New York we have Boar’s Head on the meat menu at the delicatessen. I believe that if you go to a neurologist’s office and he has an ownership interest in a diagnostic facility he’s gotta clearly display that but also these plans should not be covering forms of radiology or technology where diagnostic studies, where these prices should be publicly showed and people should start to compete —

RUSH: Well, look, I think I get your point. You go to a deli, you know you’re buying Boar’s Head. You go to the doctor you don’t know what you’re getting because you’re not paying for it. There’s no relationship — this has been a bone of contention of mine for a long time and this is what’s primarily wrong with our health care system and that is the patient and the provider and the service have no financial relationship to each other at all. The patient’s ability to pay is not a factor in the pricing, and so the market’s been blown up to smithereens here, and none of it makes any sense. And that’s why there’s such a sense of entitlement to health care on the part of many, many people.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ron in Cincinnati. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Rush, it’s a sincere pleasure.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Following splash zones and colonoscopies is going to be a tough act to follow.

RUSH: Well, we gave you a couple minutes break here, yeah.

CALLER: Just a quick point. President Obama talked quantitatively about the number of people that die every day, I think he mentioned 124 people and as your previous caller mentioned, that may not be a proper conclusion but let’s use it just for the sake of argument. I did a little research and found out that unfortunately in this country many people die as a result of the medical care they do receive, and most of them being insured. There are some 80,000 deaths per year just due to infections in hospitals. I was wondering if maybe we could shift the discussion from quantitative to qualitative and maybe talk about the things that we need to improve beyond the number of people that may be uninsured and that is tort reform and perhaps a critical examination of the way that we deliver health care.

RUSH: This is a key point. None of it is addressed in any Obamacare proposal. They’re addressing things like the uninsured for compassion, claiming they’re going to lower costs, but nobody will believe that’s going to happen. But the very act of passing this is going to retard the improvements you talk about. It’s going to penalize and punish research and development in drugs. It’s going to stop medical progress and advancement in hospitals, treatment dead in its tracks.

CALLER: Exactly. Well, richest country in the world, Rush, and we have hundreds of thousands of people. I hope that’s not an exaggeration but my source indicates hundreds of thousands of people dying every year unnecessarily. So I hope he does address the qualitative issues as well as the 124 people and the poor souls that he indicated die each day from the lack of health care. It’s a very tough thing to prove one way or the other —

RUSH: Because of the lack of insurance. It’s bogus anyway because everybody gets treated at the emergency room. There’s nobody doing because you don’t have insurance, not in this country. The whole thing is bogus. But the problem here — I’m not sweeping your point off the table, but Obama’s proposal is not about qualitative health care, it’s not about health care. And it really isn’t about insurance, other than destroying private sector insurance. Obama’s health care proposal is not about health care. It’s about nationalizing two and a half trillion dollars of the US private sector and putting the government in charge of it and then being able to regulate almost every aspect of life possible. It is an attempt to overthrow a portion of the US private sector, pure and simple.

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