RUSH: Let’s go back to me yesterday on this program, audio sound bite number three. This is one of the many fluent things that I said yesterday.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Culling the herd. The whole point of getting control of health is to regulate everybody’s life and look at how they decide now whether somebody should get treated or not: age, how sick are you, how much it’s going to cost to invest in your recovery and are you going to recover. And when the government is in charge of making those decisions and not you and your doctor…
RUSH: You are in heap big doo-doo. So now we go to February 26, 2010. On the New York Times Freakonomics radio podcast, Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Rahm Emanuel, he’s head of the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health, and he’s a big medical advisor there, health advisor to Obama. And he said this about obesity in America.
EZEKIEL: I mean we all focus on health care and diabetes and heart disease but there’s all sorts of things like the simple fact that, you know, heavier people, transportation is more, so there’s more spent on gasoline, more on jet fuel, people have had to change, you know, the size of doorways, the size of chairs on airplanes and at sports stadiums, so there’s a lot of hidden costs as well to the increasing girth of Americans.
RUSH: Now, what’s the point of saying that? ‘Well, when we get this health care done, America, we’re going to be able to have regulations on how heavy you can be. And we’re going to be able to set up various tax penalties, for example, if you weigh more than we think you should or we just may not let you get on that airplane because your carbon footprint, you’re gonna waste so much jet fuel, we may not let you get on that bus, we may not let you drive your car, we may not build a bigger doorway for you to get through, may not give you a bigger toilet.’ This is the thing, and these are the arrogant, effete snobs that are running this, and everything is their business. Everything about your life is their business.
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RUSH: Eric in Jacksonville, Florida, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello. He’s gone. He probably got tired of the turtle story. It’s a risk that you run. This is Doug in Woodbine, Georgia. Nice to have you on the program, Doug.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. Anyway, Rush, I need some help with some logic in terms of the health care and I’m going to try and keep it as simple as I possibly can for the benefit of some of the friends of Rahm Emanuel. We’re demonizing health insurance companies and allegedly going to lower premiums with this health care bill. When in fact if you look at the concept behind health care, it’s one of the pooling of risks so that we all have to pay our own medical bills individually, and our premium dollars are then used to pay the actual claims. How is changing the price of the premiums going to change the price of health care?
RUSH: That is an excellent question.
CALLER: It seems to me that we’ve got doctors, we’ve got lawyers, we have hospitalized, and the last time I looked the health insurance companies don’t own the hospitals and don’t employ doctors.
RUSH: No.
CALLER: Including those guys in the equation, we’re not going to bend any cost curve.
RUSH: No, of course we’re not gonna bend the cost curve down. Obama is going to own the doctors, effectively. The government is going to own the doctors. The government is going to own the hospitals. The government is going to be in charge of telling everybody involved here what they can get, what they’re going to be treated, who they’re going to treat, how much they’re going to treat them. That’s where all this is headed. It’s all going to be based on cost containment, and with the Obama people probably a political calculation will also exist. ‘Do we really want to save that Republican versus do we really to want save that Democrat? We might.’ I’m not joking.