RUSH: We are going to get to some Hillary sound bites, just a few. But really gotta focus on her health care program. Can I just give you a setup question? Can you, folks, think of any other circumstance similar to health care where the business is going broke? For example, in almost every other business sector, an abundance of customers would mean tremendous profits, would it not? But not when the business has been socialized and then required to provide free service to illegal aliens and whoever else. This is a simple free-market concept. Why does Wal-Mart work? Lots of customers. Why do they have lots of customers? Because a lot of people can afford it and like what they get when they go there. It’s the same thing with any other successful business.
Now, the health care business in this country has more customers because we are out there creating the notion that everybody every day is sick. We don’t talk about health. We talk about sickness. We wail, and we whine, and we moan about all of these uninsured and these poor sick people here and there. We are creating in the minds of the American people every day that they are sick and that their bad sick and that they are not going to get the health care they need because of George Bush or Republicans or whoever. So the mind-set is, everybody is sick. What happens when they think they’re sick? They go to the doctor. They go to a hospital. The health care business in this country has more customers than it knows what to do with, and it’s losing money! Would somebody explain this? You don’t have to explain it to me. I will explain it to you. It’s called government being in charge of way too much of it, way too much of it having been socialized, and the customers are people who think that they are entitled to go get as much of what this business offers without paying anything for it.
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RUSH: This is Susan in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s always a roll of the dice when we go to Madison, Wisconsin. Hello, Susan.
CALLER: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. I’ve been trying to call you for years, and this is the first time I’ve gotten through, and I just want you to know that you are one of my heroes. George Bush being another one. But the reason I called today was, as I was driving to work a few minutes ago, I heard you talking about Hillary and health care, and it just amazes me when I hear about how there are so many people who supposedly don’t get appropriate health care. I, who practice emergency medicine and have for 20 years, see all comers, no matter what their complaint is, whether it’s a hangnail or whether they have serious trauma or serious illness. We never turn anybody away based on their ability to pay or not pay or their health care insurance, whether or not they have it. I actually am very proud of that ability to serve all people as a physician, and when we see in our facilities upwards of 300 people per day, believe me there are a great percentage of them who, quote, ‘don’t have health care insurance,’ but actually the bottom line is, they choose not to have health care insurance, because they’re young, they’re healthy —
RUSH: And you still —
CALLER: — or they don’t want to spend their money on health care insurance. But instead, what I’m expected to do as a physician is not charge them my physician’s fee, or downsize that fee to a minimum cost.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Yet if I take my car to have it serviced at the service station, never once do they ask about my ability to pay for my car care.
RUSH: That is an excellent point. I’ve gotta take a break here. I’m going to expand on this, Susan. By the way, Susan is one of my all-time, top-ten favorite female names.
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RUSH: I want to pick up on something that Susan in Madison, Wisconsin, was saying. She’s an emergency room doctor and she made the point here that she gets fed up with the incessant criticism of the health care business, and one of the points that she made was they see 300 people a day. The people who walk in the emergency room expect the doctor to do their work for nothing. ‘Health care is a right, and as such, it’s a constitutional right, and I shouldn’t have to pay for it if I’m sick.’ They don’t have insurance because they choose not to have insurance. We don’t talk enough about this aspect of health care, be it Hillary’s proposal or anybody else’s. And it’s what’s the effect going to be on the doctors? Do you realize doctors are perceived as part of the enemy to people like Mrs. Clinton and others on the Democrat side who propose nationalized or socialized health care?
The doctors are the enemy, and nobody ever talks about, well, they are the providers. If you drum them out of the business, if you don’t make it profitable for them to recoup what it costs to become a doctor, if you don’t allow them to earn enough money to make it worthwhile, who’s going to go into the profession? Is the government going to have to mandate certain people go into it and become doctors? This is something that nobody thinks about. The doctors in this country are being portrayed as the enemy just like the CEOs at Wal-Mart and Big Oil are the enemy. They’re overcharging, they don’t care, they don’t do good work; and nobody talks about the tort lawyers, the trial lawyers that have run up the cost of malpractice insurance, ambulance chasers running around just seeking piles of money wherever they can get it. She has an excellent point.
There’s a story here in the Los Angeles Times, and it is from yesterday: ”Financial Woes Jeopardize Area Hospitals.’ — Nearly two dozen are at risk. Losing even a few would mean greater strain on the region’s healthcare network.’ This goes back to my point that I made not long ago. In most every other business sector, an abundance of customers would mean obscene profits. It’s how Wal-Mart does it. It’s how any number of people do it. Apple doesn’t. Some people go for profit margin on price with what they consider to be superior products, but, regardless, they’re all seeking more customers, because more customers mean more sales. More sales leads to more profit, more productivity, the whole cycle. Yet the health care business, the more customers, the worse the system gets, the poorer the system gets, the poorer the coverage is, the service, or what have you. There’s a simple explanation for this. The health care business is not operating in a free market. It’s operating in a socialized government-controlled circumstance which has taken so many incentives out of it, which has led to so much entitlement on the part of so many people, that the whole thing is busted. The fix for it, as proposed by Mrs. Clinton, is to just compound existing problems.
Now, listen to the details of this story. By the way, the people that wrote this story, Daniel Costello and Susannah Rosenblatt, should be fired for being too stupid to mention the reason why all these hospitals in LA are actually shutting down. ‘Nearly two dozen private hospitals in Los Angeles and Orange counties, accounting for up to 15% of beds in the region, are in dire financial straits and in danger of bankruptcy or closure, according to hospital administrators, industry experts and state data. The troublesome development follows the closure of community clinics and hospitals in recent years that has left the healthcare system seriously overburdened. If even a few other hospitals close or reduce costly critical-care services, it could mean longer ambulance rides to hospitals, additional delays in emergency rooms and less access to care, especially for poor and uninsured people.’ Can we be honest, which these two reporters were not? Who are these poor and uninsured people?
You will not find in this story the fact that free service is being provided to illegal aliens. I know of these hospitals that have shut down in Los Angeles. I’ve read the Los Angeles Times about them, and I know why they’ve shut down. It’s because nobody going in there can pay for anything, and that’s what Susan from Madison was talking about. In order to give them coverage, or care, which they are required to by federal law, somebody has to eat it. So the doctors have to eat their profit, the hospitals have to eat their profit, and there’s no business incentive here. And so they’re shutting down. They can’t stay open. That’s why these hospitals have closed down. The Los Angeles Times is all concerned, ‘What’s going to happen to the poor and uninsured?’ The poor and the uninsured are what’s causing the problem, and most of the uninsured are illegal aliens. This myth about how many uninsured we have in this country, we never break it down. We just use this number, 47 million it is now. I never see any proof of this. We just hear the assertion, but we don’t know how many of them are illegal, but we figure we got 12 to 20 million illegals in this country.
Well, duh! Right there, 12-to-20 million of the 47 are illegal. And how many of the rest are children? And how many of the rest don’t want it on purpose because they don’t see any need because they’re healthy, they’re young, they don’t see any need to go out and buy insurance? They’d rather have a nicer car, a plasma TV, whatever the hell it is. But the impression is left that this country is so rotten and so mean-spirited and so uncaring, so lacking in compassion that we will sit around and have 47 million of our own citizens sick and dying because we don’t care to insure them. That’s the message Mrs. Clinton puts forth, that we gotta fix this.
We had a guy make a brilliant point. People’s hearts and minds are sometimes not on the same page. So your mind might tell you what I just told you. There aren’t really 47 million uninsured, America is not bad, we’re not a horrible, rotten country lacking in compassion. Your heart says, can’t let these people suffer. So Mrs. Clinton comes along with ideas, ‘Hey, I can fix it. I can fix it, and we’ll never have a problem again.’ And your heart says, ‘That’s good. I want to feel good about my country. I want to feel good about the way we treat the poor,’ while your mind is saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is a ruse.’ So the feelings win out. But how in the world can you write a story about how financial woes are jeopardizing area hospitals without mentioning the fact that most of these emergency rooms are being shut down because they can’t afford to stay open because nobody going in there can pay, or will pay, whatever the reason. So it’s a serious thing to discuss. But you gotta get your heart out of it if you’re going to do it and be honest.