{"id":13557,"date":"2013-01-09T17:16:59","date_gmt":"2013-01-09T17:16:59","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-01-09T17:16:59","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T17:16:59","slug":"for_profit_medicine_under_attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2013\/01\/09\/for_profit_medicine_under_attack\/","title":{"rendered":"For-Profit Medicine Under Attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Listen<\/a><\/p>\n

RUSH: Even when I think I\u2019m wrong about something I usually end up being right. So I said, many times my usual attitude of warning you, particularly those of you in the medical professions, why should there be profit in making people well? Why should healing involve profit? Why should that cost anything? Why should that cost any more than what it costs? Well, let me take you to what I hold here now in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. Right here. It is in the New York Times. It is a story by Eduardo Porter, and the headline: “Health Care and Profits, a Poor Mix.”<\/p>\n

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Do I need to even go any further? No. And as H.R., my trusted aide-de-camp and chief of staff, said, “Boy, did you call it.” Yep. And I\u2019m not surprised. “Thirty years ago, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered an interesting pattern in the use of sedatives at nursing homes in the south of the state.<\/p>\n

“Patients entering church-affiliated nonprofit homes were prescribed drugs roughly as often as those entering profit-making ‘proprietary\u2019 institutions. But patients in proprietary homes received, on average, more than four times the dose of patients at nonprofits. <\/line>Writing about his colleagues\u00c2\u2019 research in his 1988 book ‘The Nonprofit Economy,\u2019 the economist Burton Weisbrod provided a straightforward explanation: ‘differences in the pursuit of profit.\u2019 Sedatives are cheap, Mr. Weisbrod noted. ‘Less expensive than, say, giving special attention to more active patients who need to be kept busy.\u2019 This behavior was hardly surprising. Hospitals run for profit are also less likely than nonprofit and government-run institutions to offer services like home health care.”<\/line><\/p>\n

So, not only are these people making profits, they\u2019re not offering you nearly as many options. Really evil. They don\u2019t offer as many options nor as cheaply as the nonprofits. These profit seekers essentially are short-changing you. “A shareholder might even applaud the creativity with which profit-seeking institutions go about seeking profit. But the consequences of this pursuit might not be so great for other stakeholders in the system — patients, for instance.”<\/p>\n

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Oh, my gosh. Folks, when I am right, I am right. When I nail it, I nail it. Now, you\u2019ll never hear this being discussed anywhere. You\u2019ll never see CNN do a panel discussion for four hours on how Limbaugh accurately predicted an assault on the profit sector in health care. Well, where\u2019s Obama? Yeah, the woman on the ABC primetime special who asked if her — that still gives me the creeps, that ABC primetime special back in 2009 where an American citizen, a woman, stood up and asked the president of the United States — this is before we even had Obamacare — if her 100-year-old mother would be given a pacemaker. I tell you what\u2019s creepy about it is what have we become? A citizen has to go on a network TV show and hopefully get the chance to ask the president whether or not he will approve her mom getting a pacemaker. <\/p>\n

What business is it of his? But there she was asking the question. Her real point was (paraphrasing exchange), “Look, my mom is a hundred years old, and she really likes to live. She got a great spirit, a great will to live. Will you factor that in when making these kinds of decisions?” And Obama said, “No. That\u2019s too nebulous. The will to live? How do you assess that? No, probably the compassionate thing to do is just give them a pill.<\/p>\n