RUSH: Rebecca in Ormond Beach, Florida. I’m glad you waited, Rebecca. Thank you much.
CALLER: Rush, I agree with every syllable, every sentence you say, O’Great One. I called 17 years ago, and you encouraged me to go to medical school. My husband and I are both family physicians. We are pro-life doctors. We have five children. I could not agree with you more. It is a combination. The whole health care debacle is a combination of no personal responsibility.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: People who go to the doctor for everything. How many cases of swine flu did I see? Zero. How many patients came thinking they had the swine flu? A thousand. They come for toenail fungus. And then the other part that I’ve heard you talk on in the past is defensive medicine. You know, a guy comes in with a headache and I know it’s just a migraine. I could send him out with a pill but, no, I’ve gotta order an MRI, get them to a neurologist and that’s a chain. Every visit you do the math and you can see how billions of unnecessary tests are performed.
RUSH: Exactly right, because if this guy comes in with a headache and you don’t give him all the tests and he goes out and has a wreck in a car, he can sue you.
CALLER: Right, exactly. So that defensive medicine could be fixed by a simple reform of the tort system. Personal responsibility, reform of the tort system. We do not need more Medicare. We don’t even take Medicaid. Medicare is a mess. We do not need Obama-run health care.
RUSH: When did I suggest you become a doctor?
CALLER: I called you from Quincy, Illinois, in ’92. You said follow what you love. I always loved medicine, and I went to med school, and it’s the best thing I ever did.
RUSH: And is that where you met your husband?
CALLER: I met my husband in residency in Daytona Beach and we’re pro-life doctors. We don’t even write birth control. We have a lovely practice. We have eight employees. We’ve run the practice for eight years. I think we have a very good reputation in town, we love what we do.
RUSH: How many Medicare patients do you have?
CALLER: I have 5,000 patients. Probably more. I mean last count was… (call drops)
RUSH: But how many of them are Medicare?
CALLER: (silence)
RUSH: Testing, hello, did we lose her? Oh, the line dropped. Well, I wanted to ask her, how much does she get reimbursed? Because I think that’s the 81% figure, in some cases lower, for the Medicare cases, and 5,000 patients, I don’t think they’re all Medicare, but we’ll be able to ask another doctor at some point. See that, folks? Seventeen years ago I told this woman follow your passions, follow what you love and look: She did it. Yeah, I don’t think I advised her to get married, but I did suggest, follow your passions, go to med school, and she did it.
Robin in Martinsburg, West Virginia, hello, and welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Thank you so much for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, ma’am.
CALLER: I was born and raised in New Zealand and left there when I was 22 to come to the States which was the best thing I’m thinking of doing in my life.
RUSH: Really? I’m thinking of buying property there.
CALLER: Well, it’s a great country to buy property in, but —
RUSH: I saw a ranch there — you can get a huge, huge ranch, a lot of acreage — and it was remarkably inexpensive.
CALLER: It’s a beautiful country, but I was raised on socialized medicine.
RUSH: Yeah, that’s the only bad thing about it.
CALLER: I go back every year to visit my family, and what I wanted to mention about socialized medicine is that my mother was on a waiting list for three years before she could have cataract surgery done. There are waiting lists there for people who need hip replacements done, knee replacements done, where they have to wait five years to get that done. So a lot of times people pass away before they come up to have their surgery. People who get cancer and need chemotherapy, go all the way up, they’re not given chemotherapy. It’s saved for the younger ones to save the cost. So it’s not a good program. I just wanted to mention that.
RUSH: Yeah. We hear horror stories like that out of the UK, too.
CALLER: Yes. Yes.
RUSH: It’s gotten so bad there that there are still lines but they telling some people, ‘Look, if you get breast cancer stay at home. We can’t handle it.’
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Yeah. We hear the same things to a lesser degree from Canadians. (interruption) Well, yeah. That governor of Colorado, Richard Lamm. Richard Lamm said, ‘The elderly have a duty to die,’ get out of the way, and not put so cost pressure on the health care system — and, by the way, he was a Democrat that was urging that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: That’s an unbelievable story we had from the doctor from Ormond Beach — 17 years ago inspired by me to become a doctor — proving that I create jobs, proving that I save jobs. All she needed was a little encouragement and then she decided to go to medical school, and now she’s helping other people. What is Obama inspiring? What is Obama inspiring? What is he encouraging people to do? Nothing but sit on their butts. He’s encouraging people to give up, to sit on their butts and let the government redistribute wealth to them. He’s not inspiring anybody. In fact, his policies are depressing the whole spirit of achievement. He goes out there and talks about preventative medicine, preventive care. Somebody explain something to me. How is waiting in lines preventive of anything? How is rationing health care preventive of anything?
He’s out there selling bull again, folks. Cut costs, ration care, yet offer more care to more people; it’s all nuts. He just cannot be believed, and he really demonstrated this today, as he does every day. I have an idea. And it’s a very simple idea. Why don’t we wait to see how his promises on the economy work out before he takes over another 20% of the private sector? What’s the hurry here? The American people aren’t in a hurry. Slow down, Barack. You’ve already extended $12 trillion. We don’t have the money to do this anyway. Let’s sit back. Let’s wait and see if anything else he’s doing works before we jump into this. That’s what the Republicans ought to be saying instead of fooling around on the margins of this, accepting the premise.
Just put your hand up and say, ‘Stop! We’re going to wait until we see.’ You Republicans want a campaign slogan? I’ll give you one. It’s very simple. ‘We’re not Democrats. We are not Democrats.’ I’ll tell you why Obama wants to hurry. I’ll answer my own question. If he doesn’t get it done now he’s not going to get it done because everything he’s doing is falling apart. Everything he’s doing is crumbling. He’s in a state of panic out there. He wants it done because if he gets this — if he 
gets health care, folks, as Mona Charen wrote — it’s the ball game. It’s all she wrote. In socialized medicine, government health care — you heard him say, the overweight are to blame. Yeah, folks, I gotta tell you something.
I think those of you that regularly exercise — playing softball, baseball, basketball, soccer, mountain biking, running, rock climbing, skiing, skating, running — you’re the people getting injured. You’re the people showing up at the hospital with busted knees and tendons and skin cancer, ankle sprains, knee and hip replacements, broken bones, concussions, muscle, ligament, tendon, cartilage strains and tears, tendinitis, rotator cuff tears. All you exercise freaks, you’re the ones putting stress on the health care system. What happens when people don’t regularly exercise and keep their weight relatively under control? Nothing! They probably don’t even know their doctors’ names. So you’re urging to go out there do all of this stuff and you’re ending up in the hospital all the time with these injuries and some people think these injuries are badges of honor. A knee surgery scars a badge of honor shows toughness. Yeah. Toughness, somebody else has to pay for.