RUSH: Gretchen in Long Beach, Mississippi. I’m glad you called. You’re on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hey. Hi, Rush. Listen my point is I’m a nurse — and from my experience, and I’ve worked in hospitals, and I know doctors’ offices. Besides technology, just setting that aside — and Americans love technology; I love it — health care is expensive because the government makes it expensive.
RUSH: That’s right.
CALLER: They are burdensome. If you go to any doctors office, any internist and see the amount of stuff — I don’t mean to say ‘stuff’ — training, paperwork, filing that just maybe one staff member that man’s or woman’s office has to contribute to Medicare or to Medicaid that are taking those cases, it’s outrageous. It’s a burdensome cost. It ties their hands. The overhead goes through the roof. That’s why doctors, some of them, started restricting their Medicare patients because they can’t afford to take it because it’s a loss. All Medicare patients are always a loss to any office, and a doctor’s office is a small business. They have to give their employees a raise. They are required — they are mandated — for continuing education for themselves and their staff, their nurses that they have.
These are all mandates. They also want to keep their employees, so they want to give their good employees a raise. Most small businesses, most doctors’ offices want to take good care of their employees. But when you’re constantly taking a loss over time, and you’re not getting any kind of a break or any kind of a nothing — and believe me, if you mess up on any of these documents, they will be there. Not only to go over your books, to go over your filing, you will have your fines and your penalties and everything else that you have to deal with the federal government. I mean, think of what happened in New York and in California a couple of times. Doctors absolutely just in some places were shutting down for the day, as a protest. But this is a major cost. You have bureaucrats who know nothing about health care, know nothing about medicine works, how nursing works, how physical therapy works, what needs to be done, telling people how to do things and it’s ridiculous.
RUSH: Exactly. Exactly, Gretchen. Because what’s going to happen here is people are just going to be become budget items. Your story about doctors refusing more and more to see Medicare patients is exactly illustrative of that and that is happening all over the place. Doctors are looking at patients as budget items. ‘I can’t afford to see this budget item. This budget item, I can’t afford it. This budget item isn’t going to pay me enough to compensate me to pay my employees so I’m going to opt out,’ and you talk about these bureaucrats and the way they look at this? It’s all just going to become budget items. The whole relationship that Americans have with their doctors and so forth is going to change forever under this. It’s going to become entirely impersonal. So it’s an excellent point that you make. I’m glad you called. I really appreciate your holding on, too. People have been very patient today.
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RUSH: Jonathan in Peoria, Illinois, thank you for calling. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi Rushie, all right. Good to talk to you. Quick question, since there’s not much time left. If we pay for our health care ourselves, would it bring costs down?
RUSH: Yeah. It would. If you get some other players out of the game, yeah, of course.
CALLER: What do you mean by other players? I’m sorry.
CALLER: Okay. I just broke my wrist and it’s costing me $6,000. I can’t afford that.
RUSH: Well, you shouldn’t have broken your wrist.
CALLER: (laughing) That’s true.
RUSH: You know why it costs $6,000? Because you technically aren’t paying for it. An insurance policy is paying for it backed up by some government insurance policy or what have you. Do you travel? Do you stay in hotels?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: All right, what if you checked into — I assume you got pretty good coverage here on your wrist, the surgeon was pretty good doing what he did —
CALLER: Yeah, but I can’t afford to pay for it.
RUSH: Well, imagine you walk into the nearest Radisson Hotel, and they say, ‘Okay, the room is $5,000 bucks tonight,’ and you say, ‘Okay, no problem, because I’ve got hotel insurance, my insurance company is going to pay for it.’ The reason that motels, hotels, airplane tickets, cars, whatever, cost what they cost is because they’re priced on the ability of the consumer to pay it. That’s not the case in health care and the only way to get costs down is to introduce genuine competition, and the way you do that is called a health savings account, and this is a very broad explanation of it, but the way the health savings account works is you take the money that you were already being taxed and the money that you were already being given by your employer, being paid by your employer to fund your health insurance, they give you that in the form of a voucher, and when you have a standard, ordinary procedure, you want to get a checkup, you go to the doctor that you trust the most, that charges the least, and you pay for it, and at the end of the year you get to keep whatever you haven’t spent on your health care. You incentivize people to go spend as little as they can for the best they can get, which is the standard operating procedure of American capitalism. And then when you have major catastrophic stuff, that’s what the insurance ought to be for.