RUSH: Mark in Palm Beach, Florida, nice to have you, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey. Mega dittos, Rush, from just up the road from you in Palm Beach Gardens. How you doing?
RUSH: Fine, sir. Thanks very much.
CALLER: Point I want to make is Hillary is out there pushing her health care, which is something that’s she’s been doing since the early nineties. And she really doesn’t care about the health of America. You were speaking about it yourself, we’ve got an obesity rate up around 65%, and we know the reasons behind that — it’s exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle and that sort of thing.
RUSH: Well, we’ve learned something today, the British researchers, think tank in the British government says, no, it’s not what you eat and not lack of exercise, it’s just life.
CALLER: Right. I understand. Well, I just received my doctorate as a naturopathic doctor, so I’m fully aware and have been doing this for about 25 years now, regarding health and how you have optimal health. The bottom line here is that if Hillary really cared about these people, she would be working on prevention, and I believe that she’s sort of buying votes. Instead of helping these people, she’s going to say, ‘Well, I’ll give you more money, we’ll give you more drugs, we’ll give you more things,’ that obviously have not worked because statistically when she started this whole health care crusade in the nineties, statistically, obesity and everything else, disease, has increased, so they’ve done nothing to help it. So how is her program and her more money throwing at people —
RUSH: Yeah. Excellent point. But see, I think we make a mistake when we even start debating health care policy with her, because that’s taking the bait and accepting the premise. The real question is, ‘What does she know about it in the first place that people would afford her or accord her expert status and vote for her as president to fix it?’ She’s got zilch experience in any business. The second thing is, you’re absolutely right. She doesn’t really care about the end product of health. This is simply a mechanism to expand government and gain more control over your life. Learn it, love it, but don’t live it.
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RUSH: Rudy Giuliani is the one candidate so far that has taken the gloves off regarding Mrs. Clinton. He was interviewed by Sean Hannity, and they played it on Hannity & Colmes. Hannity asked him, ‘Hillary says, ‘I really think my unique experience uniquely equips me to be president at this time,” and Rudy said…
GIULIANI: I don’t know Hillary’s experience. She’s never run a city. She’s never run a state. She’s never run a business. She’s never met a payroll. She’s never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people. So I’m trying to figure out where the experience is here. It would seem to me that in a time of difficult problems and war, we don’t want on-the-job training for an executive. The reality is that these are areas in which — maybe there are some areas in which she has experience, but the areas of having the responsibility of the safety and security of millions of people on your shoulders, is not something that Hillary has ever had any experience with.
RUSH: She really doesn’t. It’s just… I want to expand a little bit about this on this last call we had. I guess it’s an okay exercise, and it’ll be persuasive and matter to some people to start debating the specifics of Hillary’s health care proposal, but to do that sort of accepts the premise that whatever she has to say is worth anything. In my opinion, it is not. I wish more people in this country would wake up. The health care system that we have is the best in the world, but it is a mess, and you are upset because insurance companies are making medical decisions, and you’re upset at the cost, and you’re upset at the lines and so forth. Folks, who brought this about? Do you know it used to be that medicine was a pay-as-you-go thing? You go to the doctor. You pay when you leave or he sends you a bill. Hospitals, they were a little problem but you had insurance for that. Now we have insurance for medicine. You know what it is. It’s just totally out of control, and it’s people like Hillary Clinton who have made it this way! They are not experts in anything. They don’t even… Forget experts; they don’t have experience in these kinds of things, none whatsoever. So why do we…? I know why we do it. It’s just very frustrating. Why do we turn to the government to solve all these problems when self-reliance would handle it! But somehow we’re going to have a presidential election, and we’re going to say, ‘Well, I like Hillary’s health care plan better than I like Rudy’s or Fred Thompson’s,’ or whatever it is.
I really wish we had… These people have never done diddly-squat in the health care business. They’ve never done diddly-squat in the oil business. They’ve never done diddly-squat in anything — and the business they’re in of government is so bloated and big and inefficient, that it’s a joke. You wouldn’t hire them to run your business. You might hire them to lobby for you and your business, and you might hire them to go out and raise or steal money for you, but you would not hire them to run it. So accepting the premise that Hillary Clinton has a valid health care proposal, to me, is ridiculous. The whole point of her health care proposal is to entrap more and more people in government-run health care with no other choice. It’s all about control. These are ,pure and simple, socialists, folks, who are first and foremost focused on the acquisition of power, and then the wielding and using of that power — and they come along, and they talk about health care and the poor and ‘the children’ to make you think they care, and that they’re caring about it, and that their good intentions are going to get things done. Well, look at every program they’ve put forth. Start with the Great Society. Start with the war on poverty. Start with food stamps, AFDC, all the welfare programs, Medicare, Medicaid. They are all out of control. They are all inefficient.
Nobody is happy with them in terms of functional operation, and yet these people who have had these programs skyrocket 25 times the original projected cost, have not gotten anybody out of poverty, have destroyed the black family, have made more people less self-reliant and dependent on government or incapable of working for themselves and providing for themselves as well as if they’d been trained in a little self-reliance, self-esteem, feeling good about raising and meeting high expectations. I could keep going down the list. Everything that they have done has been an abject failure. Yet you’re not allowed to characterize or criticize the results. No, we’re supposed to examine their good intentions. ‘Well, at least they cared.’ Well, whoop-de-doo! Care and intentions do not equal results. Results are what everybody needs to be oriented around, and this bunch — it’s the government at large taking on these kinds of things, and I’m telling you: a lot of people believe that some of these things are so massive that only government can do it. It’s not the case with health care. There’s no reason health care should be national. There’s no reason it should be run by a state. It should be a private enterprise like everything else is. But, for some reason, we’re in this mode of thinking here that, when it comes to our health, ‘Why, the government and our neighbors, the American people, need to be paying for it. It ought to be free.’
I know how this got started. It started with the Democrat presidential campaigns, and it started because they precisely so gummed up the health care system, it got so unaffordable that the first Democrat that came along and said, ‘Well, I’m going to help you deal with the expense of this. I’m going to make sure that the insurance rates are low and you get this and this and that and that and so forth, and so on,’ and people said, ‘Oh, good!’ Okay, because it’s a mess, so the people that created the mess come along and say, ‘Let me fix it.’ Now we’ve got Mrs. Clinton, who has demonstrated in eight years as co-president that she is not experienced or accomplished in getting anything done, and yet we accept the premise that her health care plan is viable. One day it’s $5,000 for every baby. ‘Ah, can’t have that. Pull it off the table.’ Then it’s $1,000 to seed a 401(k) for everybody, and then it’s this, and now it’s family medical leave for businesses of 25 or more, not 50 or more. And it’s taking Exxon’s profits to start alternative fuel research, and she has no expertise whatsoever! Then we get idiot lamebrains like these two Jurassic Park rockers who were on Chris Matthews a couple of days ago, this Graham Nash and David Crosby, and these guys are out there talking about how the US military are good kids but they find out that the job is to go over there and kill mothers and sisters.
They’re average citizens. No letter from Harry Reid. They say the stupidest things. They start just complaining about the oil and the oil companies and the only reason for the war is profits. It’s ‘obscene profits,’ and we’ve gotta get people to deal with the oil companies — and I’m sitting here thinking, as I am listening to these bites, ‘What a couple of just idiots.’ The government never got them from one concert to the next where they could make their obscene profits. Why is what they earned not obscene? What social relevance and value did they produce? They’re entertainers. Now, granted they got a percentage of what they sold. That’s like the way it works, and no argument. Why is that not obscene? How could it be said that they were not ripping off the customers? I mean, how many songs on an album are really worth listening to? Put 12 songs on an album and you like two of them, you’ve been ripped off. You tell yourself you like the other ten because you think you like the artist, but let’s face it, over half the songs on every album suck and they’re put there just to fill it up — and yet these guys’ profits are not ‘obscene.’ No, no, no, no! In the meantime, it was Big Oil that enabled Crosby and Nash and Stills and Young and all these other people to get from concert, to concert, to concert where they may have shown up stoned and not done the best they could in front of the paying customers.
Why is that not obscene? So when they’re stoned they have to bash the guitar at the end of the concert to create the excitement. Of course, it didn’t matter. Half the audience was probably stoned, too, back in those days with Woodstock, we know. But my point is, they’re undoubtedly going to vote for Hillary Clinton. What has Hillary Clinton ever done, and how has she ever been involved, to enable them to get rich? Big Oil did. Big Oil allowed them to travel around, fly around, who knows? But these are the kinds of idiots that exist throughout our society. Some of them get microphones to publicly display their idiocy, and some don’t. Thankfully for them, living in blessed (for them) anonymity so nobody really knows how stupid they are. They just suspect it. But these guys go on TV and remove all doubt. So we accept these silly premises, and we start debating the merits of it. We’re missing the point. We are totally missing it. When it comes to Hillary health care, the only thing to say is: ‘Who made her the expert?’ Why in the world are we listening to anything she has to say about this? This is no different than if your Aunt Josephine showed up from the room in the basement and said she had a national health care plan.
In fact, your Aunt Josephine may have been a nurse. She may have more knowledge. The only experience Hillary Clinton has with health care is giving birth to Chelsea. She’s even admitted it. She spent a day with a nurse to find out what a nurse does! Big photo-op. I’m sitting there saying, ‘Wait a minute! This is the expert of all people in this country to fix health care, and she doesn’t know what a nurse does?’ I know she was just photo-opping so that she can show she cares. She can show that she wants to really do it right and cares, and cares about people. Caring about people is a wonderful thing, folks, but if you cared more about yourself you wouldn’t need all these other people caring about you. If you cared about yourself, if you liked yourself, and you’re self-reliant, and independent, and able to provide for yourself, you wouldn’t need all of this. I realize most of you in this audience are, don’t misunderstand. I’m not lecturing you. I’m speaking to the country at large here on my presidential campaign. I wouldn’t last one poll after this speech. (laughing) Seriously. So what if she cares? I care about a lot of things. It never got anything done. ‘But it makes you a wonderful person.’ Whoopee! So it makes me a wonderful person, but a wonderful person gets what done? I’m no more qualified to fix the health care system than Hillary Clinton is. In fact, I’m probably more qualified because I understand and appreciate the private sector where the fix is. I know much more how to fix health care than she does. So do you.
Get her out of it! Keep her out of it. Keep the federal government out of it. Start reducing this cycle. Have you ever wondered why you can go to a hotel of your choice, pick a room or a hotel with various prices — you can afford this one; you can’t afford that one? It’s competition. Because the people in the hotel business decide there’s a niche they want to appeal to or they want to appeal to everybody or as broad as base as they can. In health care, there isn’t going to be any competition. There’s precious little of it now. There’s no incentive for the customer, who pays the freight, even though you might think it’s free. There’s no incentive for you to go get the best deal you can when you get care. Of course, you might try to shop for the best insurance, but in doing that, that depends on the job you get, in most cases. So the competition has gotta be brought back into the system, and a hospital room has got to be pretty much the same as a hotel room: It gets priced based on people’s ability to pay it. If you’re talking catastrophic things, that’s where you need the insurance long-term, you know, when you get old and this sort of stuff. But the day-to-day health care needs of the average American, prior to age 50, should be hardly anything at all. There are exceptions, of course. I’m talking about the average here. But where you need the insurance is when you do have these catastrophic injuries and accidents or genetic defects that pop up or whatever. But, overall, you could save so much money by just telling people, ‘You know, wait ’til you’re sick. Wait ’til you’re really sick to go to the doctor.’ I wouldn’t last halfway through the first speech, if I were actually running for president. Anyway, I’ve gone a little long here, folks. I’m not through. I’m not through, but the only reason I have to stop here is because of the programming format, because it’s time for me to make some obscene profits.
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RUSH: Savannah, Georgia, Tom, welcome, great to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush, it’s great to talk to you —
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: — the second time.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Very quickly, the first time was when my late, great fraternity brother Lee Atwater got me tickets to see you in Columbia when you were there in about ’89 or ’90 and Strom Thurmond was there and forgot his punch line. But the point is that one of the first times I heard you talking about Hillary and all of these other ones being such experts, for some reason I thought about an episode of Leave It To Beaver, when Wally is outside, and he’s got the hood of the car up, and Beaver walks out and says, ‘Wally, what are you doing?’ He said, ‘Well, I’m working on the car.’ He said, ‘How do you know how to work on cars?’ He said, ‘Beav, I just turned 14, as soon as you turn 14, you automatically know how to work on cars.’
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So your point is…?
CALLER: When you go to Congress, you’re automatically an expert on everythiny, be it the military, health care, anything — you know, name it, you’re an expert if you’re in Congress.
RUSH: Right. Well, they may be experts. A lot of people have come from other areas of government before. Now, they may be an expert in managing — government has its own requirements. You gotta know legislation, parliamentary procedure and legislative bodies, how to move legislation through. It’s when these clowns start taking on the private sector to protect us, of course, from the abuses of the private sector. We never get protected from the abuses of government. We have to turn the tables on ourselves, as in the Dingy Harry smear letter. Who was protecting me on that?