RUSH: Here is Kenneth in Houston, Texas. It’s great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hey. Thank you for letting me be on your show, sir.
RUSH: Yeah, you bet.
CALLER: I’m a Democrat and proud of it. What I was really calling about… I don’t listen to your show that much because I’m not really around the radio, but I have not really heard you preaching your solution to the medical crisis. I’ve heard you bash what the Democrats want to do, but have not really heard what you all want.
RUSH: Well, it’s not all that complicated. It really isn’t all that complicated. The first thing I think that needs to happen is this has to be stopped, and that’s why I oppose it. I don’t accept the premise, Kenneth, that ‘We gotta do something! We gotta do something! We gotta do something!’ I don’t accept the premise. The Democrats are always telling us everything is a crisis. ‘We gotta do this, we gotta do that. We gotta bail out the banks. We gotta have a stimulus. We gotta do it now or we’re dead!’ I don’t buy their premise. What has to happen is this has to be stopped. Now, for health care to be reformed, you got three things: You got cost, you’ve got access, and quality. Those are the three things, Kenneth.
Cost needs to come down. How do you do that? You increase the relationship between the patient (the customer) and the provider. Get the insurance companies out of the way as much as you can. Get the government out of as much of it as you can and get costs down to where people can afford them, just like anything else you buy. You want to go to a motel? You choose the one you can afford. You want to buy a car? You choose the one you can afford. Health care? Go where you can afford it. Shop it. Get competition back in it. That will lower the price. That will increase access. You increase competition among insurance companies and doctors, and you’ll improve the quality.
And you don’t regulate the drug companies and you don’t punish doctors and you don’t tell them what they can treat and who they can treat and when they can treat ’em. You let doctors be doctors. You start health savings accounts. Let people take what portion of their taxes are being thrown into Washington to spend on who knows what, put those in bank accounts that they get to spend on their own health care. Shop around for it. Whatever they don’t spend they get to keep at the end of the year. All kinds of incentives, Kenneth, to make it a private sector concern and get the public sector bureaucracies out of it. But that’s for… Oh! Get rid of tort reform. You have some tort reform. Get rid these malpractice suits. Sell insurance across state lines and increase competition. But first: Stop! This! Disaster!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The sad thing is this is not complicated. What’s complicated is what we have to go through and deal with now in health care. The fix would necessarily be complicated to unravel all this stuff, but it’s real simple. We go back to what our health care system was like before the government got involved. I don’t know about you, but I’m old enough to remember going to the doctor, the dentist or whatever, and at the end of the month my parents got a bill. We paid it. The hospital, yeah. You needed insurance for that if it was catastrophic, but we could go to the doctor and it was fine and dandy, and it was priced so you could afford it. That’s not the case anymore. Why is that, I wonder?