RUSH: A woman shows up at Arlen Specter’s town hall today. (Now we’re back to sound bite 
number 19, Mike.) This is in Lebanon County in Pennsylvania. An audience member had this exchange with Senator Specter.
SPECTER: Twenty-two?
WOMAN: Senator Specter.
SPECTER: Yes, ma’am. Number 22.
WOMAN: Section 1233 of the proposed health care plan, I thought, ‘What could I possibly ask you to make you read this plan?’ What it says is, as a 74-year-old man, if you develop cancer, we’re pretty much going to write you off because you’re no longer a working citizen who will be paying taxes. What are you going to do about it? You’re here because of the plan we have now.
SPECTER: Well, you’re just not right. Nobody 74 is going to be written off because they have cancer. That’s a vicious, malicious, untrue rumor! Who’s got the next number?
RUSH: Now, she had the bill, and she had read it. The bill doesn’t specifically say, ‘If you’re 74 you get cancer you’re toast.’ It describes the scenario by which the government can decide whether or not it’s worth the investment to treat you, and the woman is trying to say, ‘Why do I want to give up this kind of control over my life? Why do I want to give up this responsibility?’ Senator Specter says that the example she gave isn’t true. But she’s reading from the bill. She’s got it there, and he says it’s a ‘malicious rumor,’ and it’s not. Everybody that’s read this knows about Section 1233 now, and as I pointed out yesterday, even Charles Lane of the Washington Post read Section 1233 and said, ‘You don’t have to be a right-wing wacko’ to find this one totally uncomfortable. Because it mandates all of these end-of-life meetings and counseling sessions with government officials and your doctor to plan your end of care — which, if you’re 74 and have cancer, that means the end of life. People are not stupid. So you’ve got this going on — and, by the way, at that town hall there was no raucous behavior. There were no outrageous people standing up behaving in an impolite way. These people were more informed than Senator Specter was. I have all kinds of sound bites from this and other town meetings.
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RUSH: A couple sound bites here illustrate for you the euthanasia, the infamous now Section 1233. We played the sound bite of Specter being asked about it today. It’s a malicious lie, and there’s nothing true in that. Yesterday (again on MSNBC), Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a member of Congress from down here in South Florida, was asked the following question: ‘A disproportionate amount of costs spent by people in the final years and final months of their lives, and whether or not how you want to think about that. Your thoughts on whether or not those conversations should be addressed head on by President Obama and other Democrats.’
SCHULTZ: As far as euthanasia, that is the most ridiculous, uh, accusation that opponents like Rush Limbaugh of this — of this plan are trying to stoke the fires to get people worked up. I represent a — a huge senior citizen population, and obviously any health care plan that — that I’d be supportive of is going to make sure that we are sensitive about people’s health care needs all the way through their lives.
RUSH: Well, you can be sensitive all you want when you tell them, ‘Sorry, you don’t get any.’ I wonder if she’s read it. Okay, let’s go back to the horse’s mouth. On tap, on hand, is the discussion of euthanasia. And of course nobody has said that. This is what the Democrats are taking this one word, the Obama supporters, and saying, ‘Euthanasia (grumbling).’ No, it’s just it’s rationing and it’s right there in the bill: Section 1233. It’s all there. Well, let’s go back to President Obama himself, June 24th, ABC, infomercial for Obama in primetime. Audience member Jane Sturm stands up: ‘My mother is now over 105. But at 100, the doctor said to her, ‘I can’t do anything more unless you have a pacemaker.’ I said go for it, she said go for it, but the specialist said no, she’s too old. When the other specialist saw her, saw her joy of life, so on, he said, ‘I’m going for it,’ that was over five years ago.
‘My question to you is, outside the medical criteria for prolonging life for somebody who’s elderly, is there any consideration that can be given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, a quality of life, or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?’ Now, let me… Before I play Obama’s answer which you’ve heard, stop and think of what’s happening here. We have an American citizen showing up in the White House at an ABC infomercial, asking the president of the United States, ‘Sir, are you going to take into account my mother’s desire and will to live when doling out health care to her if she’s a hundred years old?’ Now, I can see somebody asking Fidel Castro that question or Hugo Chavez. But in America a citizen shows up and is informed enough to know to ask a question, ‘Mr. President, my mother! What about her will to live?’ The question itself is scary enough. But listen to the answer.
OBAMA: I don’t think that we can make judgments based on people’s spirit. That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good, quality care for all people. End-of-life care is one of the most difficult sets of decisions that we’re going to have to make. But understand that those decisions are already being made in one way or another. If they’re not being made under Medicare and Medicaid, they’re being made by private insurers. At least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhhh, not having the surgery but taking, uh, the painkiller.
RUSH: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, how do you interpret that answer? And who, by the way, is Barack Obama to be making these judgments anyway? Who is he? The Constitution doesn’t empower the president of the United States to decide who lives and dies. The Constitution doesn’t allow the president to determine who gets health care coverage and who doesn’t, or treatment. (interruption) What? I’m stoking fears by explaining what he means? That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. You know what? You may have a point, Snerdley, because according to Mort Kondracke I should just play this and say, ‘I respectfully disagree with the president’ and move on, and be civil about it. Well, I’m sorry, the president of the United States just told this woman, ‘Ahhhhh, you know, baby, we — whoever we are — will just give your mom the pain pill.’
Do you know what ‘Give your mom the pain pill’ means, folks. It means loop her out, let her die, basically unconscious or unaware, ’cause it just isn’t going to make sense, maybe. But we’re going to decide that. We’re already deciding it now. You may be deciding it yourself about your grandmother or your mother. You may be deciding it with your doctor. But the United States government, the president of the United States is not issuing the guidelines yet. So I don’t know, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, what’s the deal here? The whole thing about euthanasia is crazy when we just had the president of the United States back in June tell a woman that it might be better off for her 100-year-old mother to just take a pain pill?
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RUSH: Caroline, Cincinnati, you’re next, EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello. Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, madam.
CALLER: My point is that all these liberal politicians are claiming that all these provisions are just sort of innocent, benevolent provisions. They don’t mean what we think they might mean. And apparently we’re supposed to put on blinders and ignore the reality of what these mean and all these other countries that have socialized medicine. It is inevitable there is going to be rationing. That little innocent mandatory counseling is going to turn into euthanasia, and the fact that they’re claiming this? They think we’re a bunch of idiots.
RUSH: You know, I’m going to take the occasion of your call to make another point about this. Let’s say that I am a member of Congress. Let’s say I’m Arlen Specter or Dingell, and you’re in a town hall and you come and you say this to me and you tell me that in this bill, there is rationing and it’s going to lead to euthanasia. Now, if you are wrong, I am going to spend as much time as I can, and I’m going to point to the bill and say, ‘No, here’s where you think you’re reading it, but it doesn’t say that. We are not going to be engaged in any euthanasia.’ I’m going to try to disabuse you of the notion, if I think it’s really good. Instead what happens to people like you who show up who ask these questions or make these statements, you’re told, ‘That’s a vicious rumor,’ and, ‘Next question, please!’ There is no attempt to change your mind. All there is is an effort to convince everybody else watching and listening that you’re wrong and that you don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no salesmanship of this whatsoever. But if this euthanasia business as you call it — Section 1233, mandatory end-of-life counseling — and Obama said give them a pain pill instead of surgery. If we’re all wrong about this, then it is time for us to be told why in a persuasive way and that isn’t happening, is it?
CALLER: No, and it may not happen right away. I mean, God help us all if this thing ever passed there might be money there for a while. There might be some money. But the bottom line is it’s going to run out and sooner or later they’re going to start having their little commissions and committees telling old people what treatments they can get.
RUSH: We don’t have the money now.
CALLER: Well, I know. But there will be the honeymoon period where everybody thinks this is all so great and ‘I have free health care,’ et cetera. But sooner or later — I don’t know how long. Sooner or later it’s going to happen, though — and it’s all in there. It’s all in there and all it has to do is come to life when the money runs out which is what’s going to happen.
RUSH: I appreciate the call.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: Thank you, Caroline, Cincinnati. Somebody just told me… I gotta check this out. I just got an e-mail. Somebody said that during the section of the town meeting Obama is doing right now while he was engaged in this program that he was talking and a standing O erupted with a long applause that segued into, ‘Yes, we can.’ If that happened… (laughing) Well, now, I just don’t think that sentiment for Obama exists. The last time we saw, ‘Yes, we can’ was during the campaign which they’ve revived. I think that’s a sign they’ve overproduced this. They’ve overproduced it. This is not addressing any of the concerns out there. They’re still going out, sending Obama out using this powerful, cult-like leader personality he has to get them over the hump here.