RUSH: To Bayonne, New Jersey. Margaret, I’m glad you called. Nice to have you on Open Line Friday.
CALLER: Thanks for taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: Yes, madam.
CALLER: It’s a real pleasure to talk with you today.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you we have the best health care in the world, and if we go down the road of socialized medicine, we are going to lose the most brightest and talented doctors. We’re going to see pay caps on doctors.
RUSH: That’s right.
CALLER: We’re going to have the government dictating patient care.
RUSH: That’s exactly right.
CALLER: Not the doctor.
RUSH: You’re exactly right about everything, and it’s going to end up costing more —
CALLER: You’re not —
RUSH: — and people are not going to be as healthy. I want you to listen to a sound bite I have here, Margaret.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: Last night on PBS, Charlie Rose, talking to Andy Stern, Union Leader, Service Employees International Union. They had this exchange.
ROSE: I think this president wants to do this, A, because on the merits he believes it’s essential and necessary. But he also wants to do this as a tribute to Senator Kennedy and get it DONE.
STERN: Senator Kennedy’s (pause) waited his whole life, fought his whole life to see this moment, and not just the president. I think Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, many people who know him like me just think, ‘What a better tribute could there be to the greatest Senator we’ve had in decades?’ which is a universal health care plan.
RUSH: Every time I predict this, I catch hell from the Drive-By Media, but they’re going to name health care after Kennedy, and that’s going to guarantee its passage because nobody’s going to have the guts to oppose it.
CALLER: You’re going to see drug companies and medical device companies stop with type one drugs and devices. This is gonna be the mess that the government is gonna create. Look at Medicare and Medicaid. It’s horrible.
RUSH: I know. Medicaid’s already going bankrupt seven years, and that’s what we’re going to model national health care — Kennedy care. That’s what we need to start calling it: Kennedy Care
CALLER: No! It’s socialized care.
RUSH: All right, ‘socialized’ Kennedy Care.
CALLER: (laughs)
RUSH: Whatever.
CALLER: I go to symposiums all over, and I speak to doctors from Canada and England. They keep addresses in the United States so their family can get better health care.
RUSH: I know. I know. You know, politicians are telling us, ‘Don’t do it.’ Politicians from Europe, Great Britain, they’re telling us not to do it. All right, thank you, Margaret. I appreciate it.
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RUSH: Joanne in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, great to have you on Open Line Friday. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. Thanks for taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: Yes, ma’am.
CALLER: I just wanted to I guess sound the alarm to anyone out there who may still think that universal health care is going to save this country. We have, as you know, in Massachusetts, we have no choice. Everybody has been on the insurance.
RUSH: Right, right, right, right, right.
CALLER: And if they don’t have the insurance, then they’re fined. So there’s a monthly fine assessed if you do not sign up for the insurance.
RUSH: State insurance?
CALLER: For any health insurance, if you don’t have —
RUSH: You can go private?
CALLER: You can go private, but even if you don’t have the private insurance, they send you a form that you have to include with your state taxes now —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — that shows that you were covered each month —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — of the year.
RUSH: Right, right, right, right, right.
CALLER: — and the months that you weren’t covered you’re fined, and if you’re expecting any kind of a tax refund from the state, they will seize your refund to cover the fine. The other thing is, and what really bothers me about —
RUSH: Well, now, wait just a second. This is Mitt Romney’s idea, right, he worked on this.
CALLER: Yes, it was.
RUSH: Now, what was the thinking behind this? The thinking behind this was that this was a way to make sure everybody took care of themselves and got insurance, right?
CALLER: Exactly. Which I have no problem with that. The problem is that they’re mandating it, and I had insurance. I work for a small law firm, and he does not have a group health insurance plan. I have an individual plan like a lot of people on Cape Cod because a lot of people are self-employed here, so they don’t have group plans. So individual plans were always more expensive anyway.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: So now, what they’ve done is, is they made it mandatory that everybody have it, so that’s fine. And now what they have done is the different insurance companies will offer you different plans and they’ve made it look as though that the rates have come down, but they really haven’t because now what they’re doing is they’re covering less of a percentage of your copays. Depending on which plan you pick, so that you can try to make it an affordable monthly payment, it varies, so you may have to pay 35% if you have an operation, if you pick plan A, but if you pick plan B, they’ll pay, you know, 80%, whatever, and it’s reflected. So it’s a crapshoot. But my problem is I’m not on any prescription plan. They have now made it so that it’s mandatory — the first year it wasn’t. You just had to have insurance. The second year kicked in, I got a notice from my insurance company saying that my insurance did not comport with the new state requirements, which really surprised me. Well, prescription coverage is now mandatory, and I don’t have any prescriptions, so I called, I was talking to the —
RUSH: Well, now, now, now, now, now, this is absurd. You know what, try to understand this, folks. Pardon me for interrupting here, Joanne.
CALLER: Uh-huh.
RUSH: But I want you to pretend she’s talking about getting a hotel room and copay, mandatory, have to have insurance, all of these bureaucratic nightmares that Joanne has described, imagine she’s talking about just renting a hotel room or buying a ticket or a trip on an airplane, or a cruise ship. How in the world has this happened to health care? Copays, mandatory prescription coverage, mandatory insurance. It’s happened because the government has taken us, bureaucracy has taken us to this situation, and the same people who have goofed it up are now claiming they have the fix by making this system national. And so basically what Joanne is saying here, what was really good intentions on paper, everybody be insured, is not working, and guess what else she’s lost in all this? Freedom.