RUSH: Now, I mentioned also earlier that John Kasich had a couple things to say last night that just… Well, they were frustrating just a little bit. And here’s one of them. They were talking about individual mandate and health care and Obamacare.
Kasich once again was saying, “Well, look, you know, I’m the only guy up here that’s ever done anything. I’m a governor! I’m a governor! These guys aren’t. I’m a governor. And we governors, we gotta work with people. We gotta cross aisles. We gotta solve things. We gotta get things done. We can’t pass things off. We gotta get things done. I’m a governor!” He was waving his arms and hands up there, and he announced a way to lower health care costs and talked about how he’s doing it, how they’re doing it in Ohio.
This sound bite is a fairly good example of what he was talking about…
KASICH: We have a proposal, a plan that we’re enacting now that says if you are a hospital or a doctor and you’re providing very high quality at lower prices, below the midpoint — some charge high, some charge low. If you are below the midpoint, we are going to give you a financial reward for allowing you to provide services that result in high quality for our people at lower prices. This is not a theory. This is what we are actually doing in our state. We will begin payments next year based on episodes that we have in our lives. If our primary care physicians keep us healthy for a year with really high quality, guess what? They will get a financial reward.
RUSH: Okay, now, I count three separate things that are giant red flags in that sound bite to me. And I’m thinking most people watching the debate last night didn’t hear any red flags, certainly not the ones I saw. They might have said, “You know, this really sounds good, working together and helping people and…” But here’s the first thing I saw. This arbitrary acknowledgment of the “very high quality, lower prices,” and then the midpoint.
“We’ve got high prices, lower charges, got the midpoint — some charge high, some charge low — and we talk about the doctors, and if you’re below the midpoint, we’re gonna give you a financial reward.” So, A, government still is involved in this, as they are involved in it now. But now they’re picking winners and losers, and now they’re gonna tell these doctors, “Look, if you come in and you charge below our arbitrarily set midpoint — you come in and charge less — we’re gonna give you a financial reward.”
I think most people applaud that. “That’s right!”
I don’t. Where’s this “financial reward” coming from, and how does that end up saving money? Who pays for the “financial reward”? Taxpayers do. What is the “financial reward”? What kind of “incentive” is it? What’s the point here? This is just… It’s not quite a Ponzi scheme, but it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul. What is this “financial reward to keep prices low”? It’s so somebody can say, “I got the prices down. Look what our prices are.” And over here, you can fill ’em up with a back pocket in the back end that nobody sees with an amount nobody knows.
But it’s still government doing everything and it’s still government dictating and influencing the market, which is not going to result in actual prices being lowered. I say it’s all being made to be artificial, and the key to that is the next word. “If you’re a doctor and you’re below the midpoint, we’re gonna give you a financial reward for allowing you to provide services.” Spoken like a true authoritarian. For “allowing” you to provide services at a lower price, we’re going to provide you with a reward.
“After we’ve allowed you” to provide service.
And then the last thing: “If our primary care physicians keep us healthy for a year with really high quality, guess what? They’ll get another financial reward.”
It’s up to the doctors to keep you healthy for a full year with really high quality care. You have nothing to do with it! As far as the governor of Ohio is concerned, it’s somebody else’s job to keep you healthy, and if they do it for a full year, then they’re gonna get a reward. What are you gonna get? I don’t know. Continued access to insurance coverage or whatever. The bottom line to me is, what I heard in this answer is more and more government deciding more and more, affecting more and more, under the guise of doing just the exact opposite — which it can’t possibly do.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s the second Kasich bite. I have to say, everybody in that stage last night, Trump included, got the Apple versus the FBI question wrong, in my opinion.
I think they all got it wrong, and they got it wrong in a way, to me, that was alarming. There was an automatic, without any question about it, siding with the government on this. Let me ask you a question, a quick question. Let’s imagine a pharmaceutical company. Give me a name of a pharmaceutical company. (interruption) GlaxoSmithKlein. GlaxoSmithKlein. Let’s say… Give me… (interruption) No. No, no. Give me the name of a drug. Was it Prozac, Zoloft? Give me the name of a drug that’s widely prescribed and used out there. (interruption)
Prozac. What did I say, Proloft? Prozac. It calms you down; is that right? Is that what it’s supposed to? Well, anyway it’s widely used out there. Suppose you run the drug company that makes Prozac and you get a phone call from the FBI. And the FBI is asking you, “In a few pills, to put some arsenic or cyanide, because you want to make sure those pills end up in the hands of Ayman al-Zawahiri or some other Islamic Jihad terrorist.” Would you do it, if you ran that drug company?
Would you knowingly poison one of your products with the assurance, “Oh, no, no, no, it’s only gonna go to the terrorists! We’re gonna make sure that that will only be prescribed to terrorists”? I know what you’re saying, “Rush, that’s the craziest analogy I’ve ever heard.” I don’t care. I need to come up with all, because this is not about a terrorist’s phone. Apple is being asked to write a specific operating system that ostensibly is only going to be on one phone? This one? It doesn’t make any sense.
There are Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment protections against law enforcement being able… You know, the way this is being done is with this All Writs Act, this 200-year-old law that basically says if law enforcement’s having trouble, you have to help them. Well, law enforcement is supposed to have trouble. Where does this end? If a company can be forced to modify their product in order to make law enforcement’s job easier, where does that stop?
Not to mention a company’s got a product and the government’s coming in and ask them to design it in a way that makes it dangerous and harmful and potentially worthless with the promise, “It’s only gonna be the only version of it. We don’t want you to make more than one co.” Well, the code’s gonna be written. And let me tell you a little something about software, folks. Most people don’t think about this, ’cause it’s too hard. But these are intricate things, software programs for operating systems?
There are thousands of people that write the software for your iPhone or iPad.
They’re in teams. It’s so intricate, it’s so complicated. But here’s the point. At every stage of development it has to be documented, recorded, and logged and signed off on by a whole bunch of supervisors in case that’s a lawsuit down the road over something that would not a flaw in the software. There’s no way to keep it secret, is the point. Now, Tim Cook at Apple said it would take a number of people.
He’d have to take them off their jobs at present, assign them to write this specific government OS that they would all know what it is, that their supervisors would know what it is, that the logs would know what it is. It’s impossible there would only be one copy of it that would then be destroyed. You can’t destroy it. You’ve gotta keep the record of it. You have to keep copies of it. You have to keep the logs of it, because of what might involve or be involved with it down the road.
It’s not… It can’t be a one-off. It can’t be just for Syed Farook Skyhook’s phone. But people that normally have this distrust of government last night just said, “Oh, yeah. We can’t let… We can’t let anybody stand in the way of getting to the bottom of terrorism!” Well, that’s all well and good, but that’s not where this is gonna stop. I know.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: No, the other Kasich bite was… I could save it for Monday. It was his idea for solving the Apple, FBI, encrypted phone problem. It was to get everybody in the room with the president and solving it. That’s not… Anyway, maybe save that for Monday, but that’s what that was.