RUSH: To the phones. Manhattan, Kansas, this is Dale. Thank you for calling, sir. It’s great to have you here with us.
CALLER: Honored to talk to you, sir.
RUSH: I can understand. Thank you.
CALLER: My question is — and I’m throwing this out to you — what exactly is the crisis in health care? I’ve been hearing about ‘crisis’ in health care ever since the Hillary days. And quite honestly, I don’t see it. Now, I’m not among the intellectual elite in this country —
RUSH: Good.
CALLER: — but I still can’t see it.
RUSH: That means you’re a real guy.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: You bet. It’s a great question. The ‘crisis’ in health care is like the ‘crisis’ in everything else: manufactured.
CALLER: Precisely.
RUSH: Take a little survey. Dale, are you personally fretting? Are you in crisis mode? Are you walking around in a general state of fear over the fact you might get sick?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Do you know anybody who is?
CALLER: Oh, there’s a lot of hypochondriacs out there but —
RUSH: Yeah, but are they worried about losing everything they own if they do get sick?
CALLER: Well, sure, but there’s a real easy solution to that. I’m a small businessman out there — and by ‘small,’ I mean probably microbusiness. I employ anywhere from six to ten people depending on the economy. I am able to offer my employees at no cost to them major medical coverage through Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas for $150 a month each. And I pay for that, by the way.
RUSH: Yes?
CALLER: So what’s the crisis?
RUSH: Well, that’s my point, that’s my point. There is no… You’re asking a very valid question. There is no crisis. The crisis in health care is in the UK. The crisis in health care is in Canada. The crisis in health care is in Cuba. The crisis in health care is with the ChiComs. The crisis in health care is with a lot of other places. The crisis in health care here has been manufactured. My point is, folks — just ask yourself in your own circle of friends, your family, community, your neighborhood, whatever — how many people do you know who are actually walking around daily in fear, constantly fear of an auto accident or a major disease is going to wipe ’em out? This is what we’ve been told every day, just like during the last eight years — well, seven years prior to this year — we were told the economy was sinking fast that it was approaching a recession.
It was horrible while unemployment was low, an historical all-time low of 4.7%. Now it’s 9.4%. When it was 4.7% we were all being told daily by State-Run Media that the economy was in the tank and going south and it was horrible, it was horrible. And so they go out and do surveys and polls of people: ‘How are you doing economically?’ ‘Oh, I’m doing fine, but I’m worried about my neighbor. I guess things aren’t so good out there.’ It’s the same thing with health care. ‘How is your health care?’ ‘I pretty much like it, but I guess there’s a lot of people out there uninsured and really have a lot of trouble out there.’ It’s just been manufactured. There is no ‘crisis’ in health care unless you want to talk about the 47 million uninsured, then if you break down that number, you find that 60% of them are illegal aliens. Others make income over 75 grand who choose not to have it.
That’s the crisis — and there may be people that costs are a little bit high, but that’s because of government involvement. Heritage Foundation today, great stuff here. ‘Yesterday the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary analysis of the Kennedy-Dodd health care plan, and the results were truly frightening. Assessing just Title I of the draft legislation, CBO estimated the plan…’ Now listen to this. Look at me. ‘CBO estimated the plan would add $1 trillion to the federal deficit while only extending health insurance to a net 16 million more Americans.’ Now, I mentioned this earlier: $1 trillion for one-third of the uninsured. ‘As scary as that is, what is even more disturbing is what costs the CBO did not estimate: ‘The proposal does not include a ‘public plan’ that would be offered in the exchanges, nor does it contain provisions that would require employers to offer health insurance benefits or impose a fee or tax on them if they did not offer insurance coverage to their workers.”
In other words, the $1 trillion cost to insure 16 million uninsured does not include the public option! And the public option is the deal that Obama wants. This cost doesn’t even estimate that. What Obama is going to do is throw this out. He’ll say, ‘This is not accurate. We’re not going to listen to this,’ and he’ll have his own Office of Management and Budget do it. Now… ‘Even without the public plan, the CBO analysis undercuts one of the fundamental promises President Barack Obama has repeatedly made about health care reform. Speaking to the American Medical Association yesterday, President Obama promised: ‘If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.’ The CBO’ — the so-called nonpartisan CBO — ‘disagrees. According to their analysis, while the Kennedy-Dodd bill would enable 39 million Americans to obtain health insurance, the plan would kick about 15 million people out of the system because their employers would no longer offer insurance…’ The employers would opt into the public option. There are a lot of employers want to off-load this. ‘[C]overage from other sources would decline by 8 million.’ So 27 million people would be thrown off insurance rolls and have to go public option. You would lose your choice of doctor. ‘These numbers will only look worse once a public plan is factored in. And the public plan is just one of the biggest problems in the Kennedy-Dodd bill:
‘An independent analysis by the Lewin Group, for example, shows that a public plan depending on eligibility and payments rates could result in up to 119.1 million Americans being switched by their employers from their existing coverage or transferred to government-sponsored coverage…’ This is why it’s Trojan horse and this is why he’s denying this, saying it’s not going to happen. But in the real world — where they never score dynamics, they only score statics in these things. Score the dynamics and you got a bunch of businesses with a chance to off-load their health care expenses to the so-called public option, you don’t think that some will do it? And the estimates of the numbers that want to do it will lead ‘up to 119.1 million Americans being switched by their employers from their existing coverage or transferred to government-sponsored coverage,’ the public option.
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RUSH: Back to that CBO report, the public option not even part of this $1 trillion, Obama says nobody’s going to lose their health plan. That’s absolute BS. UAW, the big unions, big companies, they’re going to dump all their health care costs on the taxpayers. That’s why Obama and company are going to fight like hell for this public option. That’s why we gotta continue —
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RUSH: Washington Post today: ‘More Problems Than Solutions in Medicare Report.’ Now, this is not the CBO score of Obama’s health care proposal. This is a separate report on Medicare. Now, keep in mind that Obama’s health care public option proposal is essentially just expanding Medicare as it exists. In fact, they start the story this way: ‘Expanding access to Medicare will not solve the nation’s health-care cost problem. That’s the message of a report yesterday by a commission that advises Congress on the federal medical program for older Americans.’ Expanding access will not solve its problem. Of course not, ’cause it’s broke!
‘To eliminate wasteful spending, policymakers must transform economic incentives for doctors, hospitals and other providers of medical services — though it isn’t clear how, according to the report. As Congress and the Obama administration seek to restrain potentially crushing increases in health-care spending, the report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) is emblematic of the larger debate: long on problems and short on solutions. … To illustrate what it might take to save Medicare, the commission describes how primary-care doctors, specialists and hospitals could be reorganized into ‘accountable care organizations’ whose members would receive bonuses if the organizations met quality and cost targets.’ Oh, they want to have private sector incentives here, is that what they’re talking about? ‘To ratchet up the incentives, health-care providers that fail to meet cost and quality targets could be penalized.’
Now, the program here says this: ‘If current spending and utilization trends continue, the Medicare program is fiscally unsustainable. … Part of the problem is that Medicare’s fee-for-service payment systems reward more care — and more complex care — without regard to the quality or value of that care.’ So we have two things that hit yesterday. We had the CBO report on Obama’s health care plan — well, it’s the Kennedy plan, but it’s the Obama plan being run by Kennedy and whoever else in the Senate. I forget who other guy with him is. Anyway, that would take $1 trillion over ten years just to insure one-third of the 47 million uninsured. And then the Medicare report says that the government’s Medicare program is fiscally unsustainable. There’s no reason to do any of this. There is no reason to do any of it, fiscally, common sense. The only reason to do this is if you are an authoritarian and you want to grab as much control of the US private sector health care system as you can. That’s the only reason to do this, because there’s not one commonsense or financial or fiscal or business reason to do either of these things that are being proposed. Like I said last week, can we just wait to see if anything else Obama does works before we mess up with one-fifth of the US economy?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Rich Lowry makes a good point in the column today I read in the New York Post. ‘Back in the mid 1990s, Gingrich proposed slowing the rate of growth of Medicare and Medicaid…’ Remember the Democrats produced this fraudulent commercial Newt saying, ah, we just want to let Medicare and Medicaid wither on the vine. He wasn’t talking about letting Medicare and Medicaid wither on the vine. He ‘was clobbered by Democrats and the press for waging war on the elderly and the indigent. Now, almost every other day, President Obama finds another hundred billion dollars to cut out of Medicare and Medicaid,’ in order to pay for his big nationalized health care, and nobody is upset about it! Can you remember a time when a government official started talking about cutting Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid and nobody beefed? Never! Obama is getting away with it each and every day. People will takedown their security for liberty all too frequently.
RUSH: Let me ask you to consider another question, another point. Many people in this health care thing think what it’s all about is them getting health care free ’cause it’s unaffordable. They want their insurance free and their health care free. I’ll ask you, the general audience, in addition to specifying how I just did it with people who think that health care is going to be given away. How many of you, at any time in your life, have gotten a comp of anything? Maybe it’s a couple tickets to a game; maybe somebody gave you something, whatever. But just because it didn’t cost you anything, did it mean it didn’t cost anybody anything? Costs don’t go away just because you don’t happen to pay them. They’ll come back and bite you in the rear end in you don’t know how many different ways, what you’re obligating yourself to — or, in the case of Medicare, Medicaid, or health care, you think it doesn’t cost you anything so it doesn’t cost anybody anything? It’s going to cost somebody something, and they’re going to come back and get it from you one way or the other. Either your service is going to go to hell and you’re not going to get as good coverage ’cause you’re not paying anything for it. It’s like Thomas Sowell said, he said this in a column in 2005: ‘Costs don’t go away because you refuse to pay ’em any more than gravity goes away if you refuse to acknowledge it.’ Thinking that something doesn’t cost you when it does have a price is the same thing as thinking gravity isn’t going to kill you when you jump off the mountain.