RUSH: One more thing here about all this health care stuff that we have learned today about what could be done in terms of government policy to expand the use of health savings accounts, which are tax-free savings to be used for health care and tax credits that allow taxpayers to keep, say $10,000 a year, to be used to purchase private policies. We have the government giving people $4,500 a year to trade in used cars, that’s a direct payment, why not give them some monies for their own health savings accounts? A health savings account is very simple. They give you the money, basically returning yours to you in the first place because they don’t have any money other than printing it without taxing you. So they give you five, $10,000 a year. You buy the health insurance you want, you get to keep that which you don’t spend. It incentivizes shopping, it incentivize cost analysis, and it puts a patient back in charge of the payment system. We’re going to give people $4,500 a year to trade in their clunkers and go out and buy Obamamobiles. We are giving people direct payments for all kinds of things.
Look at it this way. If we move more toward individual policies, meaning you have your own policy that you buy, where the government lets taxpayers keep more of their money if they purchase their own policies, or put it say in an expanded health savings account, just think of it as a 401(k) for health coverage, then employers would have more money to increase pay, compensation, salaries, and you would have more money to purchase a health plan that’s more conducive to your particular situation rather than have to find a group plan that somewhat fits but maybe not all that you want. Now, Obama opposes all of this because he wants to build a massive monument to himself. That is what Washington is all about, monuments, not individual liberty. Obama is building a massive monument to himself with this disaster of a plan. There are so many smart ways to do this, but they don’t involve the government, and that won’t do, because then they can’t regulate your behavior and tax you for it.
Stop and think of this. Let’s just go back to the sixties, and let’s start with the war on poverty and the Great Society. Every one of these massive government social programs were authored by liberal Democrats. In fact, do you know who invented the whole concept of the HMO, the health maintenance organization? That would be one Senator Ted Kennedy. One of the first things he did back in the sixties, Ted Kennedy devised as a government plan the HMO. Twenty-five years later, 30 years later, there’s Ted Kennedy on the floor of the Senate ripping the hell out of HMOs, demonizing HMOs, making them out to be the bad guy. He created them. Now, my point here is virtually every program the liberals create — I don’t want to hear about their great intentions, I want to look at results — every one of them that they create needs reform. They pass laws. They establish things. And then they come around when they’re falling apart and blame whoever is in this plan or program for not making it work when it was devised and put together in a flawed way in the first place.
So every one of these plans, every one of these ideas needs reform and then reform and then reform, and we get candidates saying, ‘I’m a reformer and we’re going to reform this, we’re going to reform that.’ No. You’re just going to break it more. Take something that wasn’t working all that well or wasn’t broken and say we gotta fix it. This is the one group of people that comes along, breaks things when they fix ’em, gets mad at somebody else for supposedly doing the breaking, and now we need to reform. Everything they do. Every plan they put in never works. It never costs what they say it’s going to cost. It always needs to be reformed. It’s just like Katrina, Congress getting to sit by like spectators like they had nothing to do with the levee repair program in New Orleans? It just gets extremely frustrating. And now we’ve got this egomaniac building monuments to himself in Washington, DC, which is what this is all this. He’s a radical, he’s a leftist. I mean he wants to control your life. You are just chump change, you’re an idiot. He’s the smart guy. He knows what’s better for you and for everybody else. It’s insulting.
Here’s another thing. We’ve had a homeless problem for who knows how long, and who’s been in charge of dealing with it? All it’s done is gotten worse and worse and worse.
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RUSH: Mike in Bethesda, Maryland, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush. Obamacare would be such a disaster. I’m a doctor and I wanted to tell you about — you had a question of what kind of doctors would join HMOs. And they were doctors who couldn’t get patients. That’s why they were getting someone else to send them to them. So it would be a disaster to continue that and that’s why it doesn’t happen anymore.
RUSH: Wait, wait. I want to understand this. There are doctors who couldn’t get patients for whatever reason because they weren’t any good or they just…?
CALLER: Well, initially it was a great way to get patients. I didn’t do it, but a lot of people did and they found out there was no money in it. You were losing money so all the good docs who could get patients got out. So you were just left with people with patients who weren’t very good.
RUSH: So this is why Ted Kennedy began lambasting the HMOs because the quality of care there declined?
CALLER: Correct. And then you have this ‘bundling,’ and what the bundling is is let’s say the doctor, you do three procedures. So they ‘bundle’ it until you actually only get paid for one so you’re doing all these procedures on a patient that might be necessary, but they’ll only pay for one. So that’s the way of them doing the same thing but instead of being an HMO, they’re just bundling your payments.
RUSH: Well, I still don’t understand why any doctor would do this?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: I can understand if at first you were going to get a whole lot of patients and it’s an easy way. You don’t have to advertise. Use word-of-mouth. But why is any quality doctor going to put up with this way of earning a living?
CALLER: And most docs are going to be — that’s why most docs are taking cash patients or they’re doing this new thing where you pay the doc $1,500 and they only take maybe 15 patients or whatever it is, and then that’s it. They close the door and they’re just taking cash.
RUSH: Yeah, I know that is a trend that has developed.
CALLER: And if Obama tries to force (cell garbling).
RUSH: Costs a little more than $1,500 to reserve a doctor to get one of those plans. Yeah, I’ve heard of that happening. That’s Mike in Bethesda, Maryland. Mike, thanks much for the call. All this going on… (drumming fingers) Well, maybe they are hearing about this in Congress, just ignoring it. But this is a disaster. It’s an utter disaster.