RUSH: Here is Robert in Greenville, Tennessee. Great to have you on the program, Robert. How are you doing?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Great to be here, Rush.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Yeah. Have at it.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yeah, well, I have a direct-pay clinic in Greenville, Tennessee, that I\u2019ve been running for the last 16 years, and I\u2019ve calculated that we could save maybe up to a trillion dollars a year —<\/p>\n
RUSH: What?<\/p>\n
CALLER: — in savings through direct payment for routine medical care. And I sent this to all the Republican senators recently. So I hope that this gets out. It might seem far-fetched, but the letter details exactly how I come up with those numbers.<\/p>\n
RUSH: By the way, we need to define terms here. Remember, for Rio Lindans, direct payment —<\/p>\n
CALLER: Right.<\/p>\n
RUSH: — means the patient walks in, gets treated, and pays you. There\u2019s no insurance company.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
RUSH: Back to Robert in Greenville, Tennessee. You\u2019re exactly right, direct pay is where the patient just comes in, gets your service, and pays you, right?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Right, right.<\/p>\n
RUSH: There\u2019s no middle man, there\u2019s no government, there\u2019s no insurance, and this is not catastrophic.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Right.<\/p>\n
RUSH: It would be both preventative and routine treatments, right?<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/650-062217-health.jpg\")
CALLER: Exactly. And so I have patients who purchased last year that are a lot less expensive than the hospitals. They\u2019ll drive 30 miles to get a chest x-ray and save about a hundred dollars. They\u2019ll get a colonoscopy at a place that\u2019s about $3,000 less. I even had one patient go out to Oklahoma and get a surgery for about $10,000 less.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Yeah, insurance companies are —<\/p>\n
CALLER: It\u2019s a network, it\u2019s not just my practice, it\u2019s a network of those who do direct payments.<\/p>\n
RUSH: No, I know. I\u2019ve talked to insurance agents who\u2019ve tried to set things up like this, believe it or not, in Costa Rica —<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yeah.<\/p>\n
RUSH: — to evade American health care regulations. Your point is one of my bugaboos. The primary thing wrong, the primary, one of the foundational things wrong with American health care is it has no relationship to the market.<\/p>\n
In virtually everything — there are exceptions. But in virtually everything else in terms of pricing and availability, market forces determine what something costs. And people that provide products and services have to produce, at prices people can afford in order to for the producer to make a profit and stay in business. It\u2019s that simple.<\/p>\n
My favorite example — I\u2019m sorry for being redundant — is hotels. Regardless what your income, you can find a hotel room or a motel room to stay in. If you want to go five star and spend whatever those costs, they\u2019re everywhere. If you don\u2019t want to waste money like that and if you just want to spend something minuscule on nothing more than a bed and a roof, you can do that. The market provides choices for all desires and income potential. Same thing with airline travel, same thing with automobiles, same thing with iPhones, doesn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n
But when we get to health care, there is none of that. There is no relationship between the patient\u2019s ability to pay and what it costs. And it\u2019s because interference began in the 1960s with the politicization of health care, which really intensified in the 1980s, with the Democrats essentially proposing that health care was a right, much like having a lawyer was a right if you couldn\u2019t afford it.<\/p>\n
And health savings accounts are the government\u2019s way of trying to reintroduce market forces to health care. Catastrophic things are a whole different bailiwick. That\u2019s where you do have insurance, you need it. Nobody\u2019s expected to be able to pay what catastrophic injury or accident would cost. But normal every day tests trip to the doctor — by the way, if you go to the doctor with a headache, you shouldn\u2019t have to get an MRI to see if you have a bad knee. Because of malpractice insurance. So there are a lot of things wrong.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been wondering, I think no matter what kind of health care, even if Obama had succeeded in single payer, guys like Robert here would have set up his own clinic and would have had to operate these things under the radar because there\u2019s clearly a market for this. Anyway, Robert, I appreciate the call. I imagine people that don\u2019t know his clinic in Greenville are now hearing about it. You\u2019re gonna get blasted here, Robert, and have all kinds of people trying to find out who you are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
RUSH: There is no relationship between the patient's ability to pay and what it costs. And it's because interference began in the 1960s with the politicization of health care, which really intensified in the 1980s, with the Democrats essentially proposing that health care was a right, much like having a lawyer was a right if you couldn't afford it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n