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RUSH: The Associated Press says that Mrs. Clinton ‘could envision a day when ‘you have to show proof to your employer that you’re insured as a part of the job interview — like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination,’ but said such details would be worked out through negotiations with Congress.’ As will all the details of her program, by the way, she says. Now, when I made that announcement, I’m sure some of you said, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You have to prove you have insurance to the employer? I don’t understand, Rush. I thought you got insurance through your employer.’ No, ladies and gentlemen, no, no, no, no. I’ll tell you what I’m going to have to do, folks. We have a whole new generation of people that weren’t paying attention in the nineties, who weren’t around in the nineties, and I think we’re going to have to go back to fundamentals 101 on this health care thing.

This little blurb from the AP about Mrs. Clinton, you have to show your employer proof of health insurance, made total sense to me because I understand what her proposal is. But a lot of you said, ‘I thought you get insurance through the employer, what do you mean, prove it?’ Folks, we’re talking about a government-run health care plan here! You know how you have to go to the DMV to get your driver’s license and your plates and whatever else? You’re going to have to go somewhere. A government building, a federal government building, a federal government health care center, and you are going to have to go in and get your health insurance. You say, ‘Well, what if I can’t afford it?’ Doesn’t matter. We’re going to tax the rich so that you’re not going to pay for it, you don’t think. You have to go apply. You have to go in there and get your card that says you are insured by the federal government, not some insurance company that’s got a plan that your employer has made a deal with. That’s how this works.

If you go in for a job interview and you don’t have health insurance, the employer, if Mrs. Clinton’s plan follows through, the employer will not be allowed to hire you. Before you can be hired anywhere, you have to go to a government building somewhere and register for health insurance. ‘But who’s going to pay for it? What if I can’t pay for it?’ By the way, you will be paying for it one way or another. There will always be these little add-ons. There will be the administrative fees that you’ll have to pay for taking up the bureaucrat’s time when you’re in line registering for health care. ‘But, Rush, this can’t possibly be.’ Well, you explain it to me. If you have to prove to your employer that you’ve got insurance, then doesn’t it stand to reason you’re not getting your health insurance through the employer? So where you going to get it?

Well, if Mrs. Clinton, or the Breck Girl, or Ubama get their way, you’re going to go to the new government health complex in your town, or in the nearest city to where you live, sign up for it. You will have voted for it by electing Mrs. Clinton. So I am suggesting we may have to go back to the fundamentals of all this and explain from the very beginning, that, despite what Mrs. Clinton says, or the Breck Girl, or anybody else, health care is not a constitutional right. ‘But, Rush, I’m guaranteed a lawyer.’ Yeah, but the Constitution doesn’t guarantee you health care. Where does this kind of thing end? I know people think there’s something special about health care, but I want to know where did this get started, where did this entitlement mentality commence? What are the roots that we all are entitled to medical care, that we are all entitled to be healthy at all times, and that the government will make it so?

Where did this start? Well, the true answer would be FDR’s Raw Deal, that was the starting point for the overall premise that it was government’s job to make sure everybody’s okay and happy or miserable or taken care of or fine; to create the attitude in people’s minds that rather than look to themselves, and rather than accept responsibility for certain things in life, like your health and your needs, that some government agency will be there for you. It’s grown, and grown, and grown to the point now where many Americans think that part of Americanism, being an American, is an entitlement to all of these things that people used to have to go out and take care of themselves and provide for themselves. The majority probably now think that. We’re talking here not about wants, folks. We’re talking about needs. Needs and wants are two different things. Everybody has needs, and you gotta take care of them. When the government moves in and says, ‘We’re going to take care of your needs,’ if you accept that, you are on the path to misery, and you’re on the path to having one of the most disappointing lives you can imagine, because you will never reach your potential because you’ll never try, because you’ll never have to. There’s always going to be a fallback for you; there’s always going to be a government program; a government plan; a government politician somewhere to come along and tell you, ‘Don’t sweat it.’

Where does this kind of thing end? When politicians use this kind of dependence to get elected and stay elected, the more of your needs that they can convince you you have a constitutional right to let them provide for you, the more they’ll provide it. What if we got to the point — just as an example here — when you go on a vacation, everybody’s entitled to a clean and nice hotel room. It’s not fair that some people have to stay in rat-infested motels and other people get to stay in five-star Ritz Carltons. So the government is going to come in and make sure that everybody gets a quality hotel. We’re going to have hotel insurance. You think, ‘Well, that’s absurd, Rush.’ It’s no more absurd than people thinking that the government is responsible for their health. Now, I know what you’re yelling at me: ‘But it’s so expensive. We can’t afford it.’ Why is that? I understand totally. This is how you’ve been lassoed. It’s been run in such a way that nobody — well, very few, can afford it without insurance, although more people can than can’t than you would know, aside from catastrophic or emergencies, just general trips to the doctor. When you get to the point that people expect a $45 or $60 trip to the doctor to be paid for by their neighbors or by the government, which is your neighbors, realize we got a problem.

We’re in the midst of transforming television broadcasts from analog to digital, digital-mandated by 2009, then, after that, we’ll switch to HDTV. Well, those things are pretty expensive. What if some politician comes along, says, ‘I think we need television insurance, HDTV, because it’s the primary mode of communication. Our citizens need to be informed. Everybody is going to be entitled to HDTV, gotta go to the government center to pick it up.’ Where does this stuff stop? You say, ‘Well, Rush, this is ridiculous. It would never happen.’ Don’t say never. I could remember when I was a young child back in the sixties, my dad was a lawyer, he had a lot of friends who were doctors, I can remember them lamenting — I’m nine years old — and these are the days of Medicare and Medicaid, the early days. I can remember them lamenting what was going to happen here once the government got involved in health care. They said it’s going to be out of control. Here it is 40 years later, well, 44 years, whatever, and they were right on the money. This stuff doesn’t happen overnight. It’s creeping.

It happens so slowly you don’t know it’s happening. It’s like the poor idiot frog you put in a pan of cold water, turn on the heat, it warms up gradually, before the frog can figure out what happens, it’s boiled. As opposed to just throwing the frog in the boiling water, it goes, ‘Whoa!’ and it would pop right out. When you boil the water slowly, when you percolate these societal changes slowly, and always under the guise of compassion and caring, sympathy, and, of course, the requisite, ‘Don’t examine the results. Only examine us on the basis of our good intentions.’ So we might have to go back to Fundamentals 101, Conservatism 101, during the course of the next year to explain to people what this health care business is all about, because when Mrs. Clinton talks about having a requirement that you be insured before you can get a job, the Constitution gives no government official that kind of power. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. And not the federal government. States, if they want to try those things — nobody’s ever had the guts. But that won’t stop Mrs. Clinton and the liberal Democrats. They’re on a roll, and they want to control as much of every day life as they can, because in the process, they will ensure their position of exalted power in perpetuity.

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RUSH: I have another question out there for you, folks. ‘What if I’m not the right religion? Will Mrs. Clinton allow me to get health care?’ Well? I’m telling you, once these things start happening, you gotta ask yourself these questions. ‘Will cosmetic surgery be included in HillaryCare?’ Look, folks, when you have to get health insurance by the government, you have no choice. You can’t go anywhere else, and, if it doesn’t cover things what you want, what are you going to do? Why, you might have to pay for it yourself! ‘Oh, my! No, no, no, no. Americans just won’t pay for these things themselves.’ What if it doesn’t cover it? What about breast augmentation, either bigger or smaller? What if they don’t cover that? That’s a slam-dunk. It will be covered because it’s a chickified society, and she’ll cover that for the feminists. The bottom line here is, folks, Hillary Clinton is not qualified to run one HMO. She is not qualified to run one hospital, let alone national health care or national anything.

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RUSH: All right. Here’s Ken in Mansfield, Massachusetts. I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. I’m a long-time listener.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: It’s a pleasure to talk with you. I’m calling because I had your answer to your question of what are they going to do if you don’t sign up. In Massachusetts, they sent a letter to people who didn’t have health care — I being one of them — that said, if you don’t sign up, you’ll lose your income tax return from the date you’re — not the itemized one, but the standard that they just give you if you don’t itemize. So they would take that away from you.

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. I’d be happy if they took my income tax return away. What do you mean?

CALLER: No, not the return. You have a standard deduction on your income tax.

RUSH: Oh, they’ll take away the standard deduction from you?

CALLER: They’ll take the whole deduction away.

RUSH: Okay.


CALLER: If you don’t sign up.

RUSH: Okay, so they penalize you. Of course! There’s no question about it. There’s going to be all kinds of penalties here.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: However, in Massachusetts — correct me if I’m wrong — you’ve still gotta buy your insurance or get it through work. The government’s not paying for it, right?

CALLER: No, they have the government pay for it, too. Yep. If you can’t afford it, then you just sign up and you’re on the government program.

RUSH: No, no. If you can afford it, you have to get it yourself.

CALLER: Yes. Yes.

RUSH: All right. That’s Romney’s plan. It differs somewhat from Hillary’s. Thanks for the call, Ken.

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RUSH: I have a couple other questions for Mrs. Clinton. If we gotta go get health insurance to get a job and we gotta prove that, and there are going to be penalties if we don’t behave, will Hillary require us all to wear those Chairman Mao suits as hospital gowns like she wears? Now, this story we had about cancer and these high-fat diets in Germany that they’re using to treat cancer patients, one of the things that they’re giving these cancer patients is hemp seed, which reminds me of this and raises the question: Will medical marijuana be included in national health care? Well, in California it better be, or she’s not going to be elected. Speaking of controlling behavior, this is a very important question for a lot of men. If a husband, say, cats around on his wife and catches some kind of sexually transmitted disease, will he be covered under Hillary Clinton’s health care plan? Well, these are important questions.

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RUSH: Matt in Ontario, California. Matt, I’m glad you called and waited. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Chiefs dittos.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I just wanted to say, you know, if people really want to know what government health care would be about, over and above politics and money, just look at Walter Reed.

RUSH: Well, that’s certainly one example. You’re talking about the snafu and the controversies there in the treatment of injured soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq.

CALLER: Just the whole bureaucracy of it. You know, it’s just a mess, and it always will be.

RUSH: Well, yeah. I know. You don’t have to do that. It’s not a bad example. I went to Walter Reed and —

CALLER: Yeah, but you got the pretty side. I mean, come on.

RUSH: No, no. I know that. I went to rehab. I went to the area where injuries included, you know, loss of limbs, and they were rehabbing in there. I didn’t see any patients in hospital beds.

RUSH: Well, I’m your average Joe, and I delivered to a couple of them before, just, you know, your average delivery.

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: And it is kind of ugly. It’s sad the way we treat any of our soldiers.

RUSH: Well, plus they’re closing it down.

CALLER: Well, yeah.

RUSH: They’re closing it down and merging it with something else.

CALLER: Ha! More bureaucracy. (Laughing.) But, you know, I actually have a little sidebar on the guy with the broken ankle in the UK. It’s a little black helicopter-ish, but what happened if they get hold of your frequent shopper list and they deny you health care on your heart attack because you ate Twinkies and beer for 20 years? (Laughing.)

RUSH: I know. What do you think these attacks are? When you have the mayor of New York attacking trans fats, he may just be a control freak. But I guarantee you that these people that are aiming at fast foods and other things, their stated reason is, ‘Well, we must maintain a healthy population. People that eat this stuff are causing health care expenses to rise in this country. They’re getting sicker. They’re getting fatter. They’re causing a great drain on our economy.’ They always couch their desire to control your behavior in the best of intentions. ‘We’re only trying to help you!’ It’s like Jim Wright, the former speaker of the House. I’ll never forget this. Reagan would do a State of the Union speech, and they’d send Jim Wright out to do the Democrat response. Of all the duties to get! To have to give the Democrat response to Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union speech! They’d send old Jim Wright out there, ‘Fort Worthless’ Jim, with his big eyebrows up there that look shifty when he raised them, and the Democrats have the majority in the House. He’d say (classic Jim Wright impression), ‘We only want to help the president. We — we only want to work with the president.’ The translation: ‘We only want to screw this president. We only want to destroy his presidency.’ Well, they couch all this in, ‘We want to do good. We want to help. We want to keep you healthy. We want to keep you out of the fast food joints and so forth.’ Hey, the Los Angeles City Council just put a moratorium on the private sector in southern Los Angeles. You can’t have any more fast food restaurants out there.

‘Well, good! (applauding) Good! Good! That’s poison, Mr. Limbaugh, and they shouldn’t be allowed to eat that stuff, anyway.’ We have these new castrati who would go along with all these things because they, ‘Just want to feel good about themselves, Mr. Limbaugh, better than you feel about yourself. We know you hate yourself.’

Wrong. I love myself; I love my life. I’m trying to protect it against the encroachment of little new castrati nerds like you, Mrs. Clinton, John Edwards and all the rest of these people. (sigh) This is serious stuff here, folks. We’re going to still have fun with it, don’t misunderstand. The best way to mock something and call attention to it is to make fun of it, laugh at it, but at some point it’s going to get serious, like it has today.

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RUSH: We’ll go to College Station, Texas. This is Patrick. Welcome, sir. Great to have you with us.

CALLER: Rush, second-time caller dittos from the conservative stronghold —

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: — that is Texas A&M.

RUSH: I appreciate that.

CALLER: All right. Health care is a subject — government health care, socialist on two different levels. It’s government subsidized, it’s socialist in that, but when you get the government to step in, right there you make it more difficult for the private sector to compete. And if private-sector employees emigrate, that’s emigrate with an ‘e,’ over to the government side, that creates yet another government worker. Socialism dictates that there are agricultural armies, industrial armies, where they can send them out wherever they need. So government workers, once you get that many hands in the pot, you just can’t remove the pot.

RUSH: Well, exactly. Exactly. They all need to get raises. They all need to be paid. I’m not sure I understood everything you said, but you don’t think there’s going to be a private health care industry once Mrs. Clinton’s plan takes over.

CALLER: Right. It’s a war of attrition. They can’t kill the private sector so they take its workers one by one as they are forced to get out of business.

RUSH: They can kill it overnight! They can kill the health care private-sector industry overnight.

CALLER: I’m talking about the entire private sector.

RUSH: Oh. The entire private sector.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Oh. Oh. Oh.

CALLER: You raise the bar for a small business. Small business can no longer compete and grow, so the existing businesses become monopoly, and once they are a monopoly the government just says, ‘Good-bye.’

RUSH: Right. So we’re going to end up down the road… Do you remember the Soviets had this giant department store in Moscow called Gum? The Gum store. G-u-m.

CALLER: (Chuckles.)

RUSH: They did. It had nothing in it. It was a crapshoot to go in there and find anything. It was the same thing with their state-run bread and meat stores. There was nothing in them! Do you remember this? The Gum department store. So Wal-Mart will be replaced by Hil-Mart, and then we’ll have US military surplus stores. Those will be called Dick Durbin-Marts. This is scary stuff.

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