RUSH: Obama is close to having a number of hospitals, part of a hospital association, on his side now for national care. And I want to tell you how he does this. He calls in each part of the health care industry — the hospitals, the insurance companies, big business retailers, big business providers — and he makes it clear that they can join him or he will punish them. So what they do is cut the best deal they think they can and they [the Obama administration] announce that they are supported by doctors and hospitals. So he goes and speaks to the AMA and the AMA, ‘Oh, we’re all for Obama,’ because he goes out and threatens these people. He brings them in in private — we don’t see these meetings — and he says, ‘Join me or I’m going to ruin you; join me or you’re going to pay the price.’ It was the same when he told the bankers, ‘I’m the only guy between you and the people with the pitchforks.’ Everybody is scared to death of the guy. This is the same trick that he pulled with Caterpillar.
You’ll see the news that the American Hospital Association or whatever it’s called has now aligned itself with Obama, that Walmart’s lined itself up with Obama on his health care plan, and this is certainly him taking advantage of the fact that he knows that everybody is scared to death of him, and that everybody is scared to death of massive federal power being wielded against them. Remember they used to dump all over H.R. Haldeman as a ‘strongman’ for Nixon doing this kind of stuff. Obama is treated as a visionary and a nice guy. You know what? What’s missing here is courage and guts. These hospital people and the doctors and the CEOs, they need to challenge Obama. They need to challenge him, confront him, fight him, and expose him. These people can help beat Obama and his health care agenda. He’s not invincible. But if you let a bully keep doing what he does, he’s going to keep doing what he does. Otherwise you confront him and you take him down. And Obama is really using the power of the federal government much as a schoolyard bully terrorizes the playground.
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RUSH: David in Chicago. Nice to have on the program, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. It’s a pleasure. I’m a physician and a geriatrician, and I wanted to agree with you that President Obama’s policies will eliminate competition from the health care marketplace and therefore eliminate motivation to innovate. Not just in technology, but in the health care systems and wide use of resources. Let me give you an example. Most of my patients have Medicare Advantage, which is a program that Obama has railed on and wants to eliminate. This works like an HMO, so my patients’ Medicare benefits are reassigned to an insurance company which contracts with me. And if I can manage their health care within a certain amount, then I will actually do well. In other words, if I meet certain goals including patient satisfaction, I get a little bonus at the end of the year because I’ve managed their health care within that amount of money. President Obama has called this program wasteful spending and says that we’re overpaying insurance companies.
RUSH: See, this is exactly what I mean. Here is a program relying on competition to keep costs down, which means it works. You have an incentive to keep your costs down, to keep your patients happy. You get a bonus. Medicare or Medicaid Plus is who pays you?
CALLER: Medicare pays the insurance company, which then contracts with me to manage the care well.
RUSH: Wouldn’t you love it though if your patients could pay you?
CALLER: Well, those days are gone, I’m afraid.
RUSH: I refuse to believe that. See, I know what you’re saying. I’m not arguing with you. I’m saying, in a philosophical sense, ‘those days are gone’ is exactly why those days are gone. We’re headed that way. ‘Those days are gone where the patients pay. Those days are gone.’ No, they’re not gone! There’s no reason to give up on them being gone. Anyway, this guy, this doctor, says Obama is targeting his plan to shut it down. He says it’s wasteful. It works! It proves you don’t need Obama’s plan. That’s why this doctor’s arrangement here is under assault. I know this is hard to hear, that we’ve elected a president that wants to do that. I don’t know any other way to say it, folks. It is true.
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RUSH: Let me squeeze one more in here before we have to split for the commercial time-out. Tucson, Arizona, it’s Jack. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Longtime dittos to you there, Mr. Limbaugh.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’m just wondering. You know, so many people seem to have missed one of the comments that Obama mentioned about health care only costing us about $175 a month. It seems to me that a lot of people miss the comment he made just before that where it said in ten years he expected people to be paying $175 a year.
RUSH: Yeah. I don’t care whether he means next week or ten years from now. Nobody’s going to be spending as little as $175 a month, a week, a year, whatever on health care. This is one of the things that’s somewhat frustrating for a lot of us. There is no government program in existence that costs less than what they say it’s going to cost. Every damned one of them costs more. There’s no evidence. I mean, look at all the problems people encounter dealing with government agencies.
What evidence is there that this government or Obama or anybody else can tackle something as massive and intricate as health care? There is no evidence. So the selling point, the magic is the belief by some people that it isn’t going to cost them anything, not even $175 a year. We’ve accepted way too many premises on all of this. We had a doctor call today and describes his day and how he gets paid. He gets paid by the insurance company. I said, ‘Don’t you wish you got paid by the patient?’
‘Oh, those days are long gone and will never be again.’
They are not. No, they’re not. There are still a lot of Americans that pay the doctors themselves — and if it’s good for some of us, why not for everybody? That’s something to work toward. The way it used to be. I know how deep the culture is, but they’re paying for it! The people that think they aren’t are paying for it. It’s the bottom line. Anyway, I appreciate the call out there. Thanks, Jack, very much.