RUSH: Here’s Kathy in Kansas City, as we go back to the phones on Open Line Friday. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Yes, good afternoon, Rush. I am so glad that the only way in which you are liberal is in your open mic Friday. That’s a good thing.
RUSH: Thank you.
RUSH: Well, now, I’m curious, what the hell happened?
CALLER: Well, I was referred there for bilateral carpal tunnel.
RUSH: Bilateral carpal tunnel?
CALLER: Sorry?
RUSH: Bilateral?
CALLER: Both sides.
RUSH: Both sides.
CALLER: Both hands, both arms, both wrists.
RUSH: Like our negotiations with the North Koreans.
CALLER: (laughing) Yes. Anyway, my primary doctor was sure that I had it, and I’m pretty sure, too, but you have to go to a neurologist to get an EMG, right?
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: So he referred me to this guy, and when I went in there, he began to talk about — he thought that I was a lawyer so he started asking about capital punishment and we were discussing it, and he shocked me by saying that he didn’t even understand why there was a fuss about capital punishment, because it had been clear to him for some years that there were any number of people, not just criminals, but people who have, in his words, clearly demonstrated that they’re not much of use or they don’t conform, you know. And he said they should just be put out of the way. And I was somewhat shocked, but that was nothing compared to what he went on to tell me.
RUSH: Wait a minute. I’m trying to maintain here the context because you first started out by saying you saw in advance Obamacare.
CALLER: I saw a doctor who loves it and that’s how he practices. And that’s how he tried to practice on me.
RUSH: He loves Obamacare, you’re saying?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Oh. Oh. I missed that.
CALLER: That’s pretty rare, you know, in the medical community.
RUSH: I know. Okay. So you were recommended to this guy, there you go. How do you know he likes it? Did he tell you point-blank he likes Obamacare?
CALLER: Oh, yeah, the minute I went in he started to discuss stuff like this with me.
RUSH: Okay, but how does a discussion of Obamacare go to capital punishment?
CALLER: Well, I’ll tell you outright exactly how it went because I immediately burst in and said, ‘Well, but, you know, there is the dignity of every individual human life.’ I said, ‘When somebody is sentenced to death we want to be really, really sure that they are guilty,’ and I said it’s like with, you know — I didn’t know he was for Obamacare, so I said it’s like with abortion, with individual babies, or with, you know, older people. He broke in and that’s where he said the thing about capital punishment and how we shouldn’t even really bother too much about it, there shouldn’t even be such a long appeal process because not only criminals, he said, but people who are useless in society, said it’s really clear to me for some time that they should just be, quote, put out of the way. I brought up the mammographies, none until you’re 50 years of age, at which point he told me it’s true that a lot of young women would probably die or have breast cancer and it would go undiagnosed, he said, but, you know what, I’m originally from Canada, so I really like that model because we really can’t give such great care as we give, we have too many MRIs floating all over the place. I said to him, ‘Look, I understand.’ I said, ‘I’m a lawyer for tort reform, I don’t want doctors practicing defensive medicine.’ He said, ‘But that’s not enough. We just have to realize that people cannot get this great care they think they’re entitled to.’
RUSH: And this guy’s for Obamacare because that is going to be the result?
CALLER: Well, I don’t know why he’s for it. He kept saying that he was from Canada and how great Canada was. I asked him, ‘Well, how come you’re practicing here?’ No answer.
CALLER: Exactly. He was perfectly clear, and he was totally cool with that. I can’t tell you what it feels like to be flat on your back, you know, they’ve got these different needles in you when you’re getting an EMG and you’re kind of a captive audience and I started to realize with such horror that that was how he was treating me. And he was true to his word. Because when I had come in he said, ‘I’m reading the thing from your doctor, I’m sure that you need to have the surgery, both sides,’ he said, but at the end he became very angry with me because I had shot his arguments all to pieces. I told him about Zeke Emanuel saying how the problem with our care system is that doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: He was cool with that. He was cool with that. He was cool with Zeke Emanuel saying when a doctor takes care of a patient they shouldn’t be going all out to take care of that individual patient. They should be thinking to themselves, ‘Hmm, how could this money be better spent? Perhaps my community needs an art museum.’
RUSH: Was this guy’s name by any chance Josef Mengele?
CALLER: No. But I bet he’s read all his stuff.
RUSH: Was it Jack Kevorkian?
CALLER: I said, ‘Can you stop treating me, Doctor? I don’t want to be treated by you.’
RUSH: I have never had a conversation like that with a doctor.
CALLER: In my life I never have either, sir, nor did I ever think I would.
RUSH: Well, this guy started it, though, right? I mean you walked in —
CALLER: Oh, totally.
RUSH: — there just to get examined?
CALLER: It wouldn’t matter anyhow. He did, but it wouldn’t make any difference anyhow. Then he got mad at me and wanted to punish me. When we finished, he told me, ‘Well, yeah, you do have carpal tunnel syndrome, but you know what? I just don’t have the numbers here which I need.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about, the numbers?’ I mean I’m a nurse besides a lawyer. He says, ‘Well, your primary care doctor told you all wrong. The surgery doesn’t have a very good success rate, and anyway, I don’t like people to be a candidate ’til the numbers are higher, ’til they have it really, really, really severely, and then there’s only a 60% chance.’ And I said, ‘But that’s the reason that you do it before it gets to be so severe that you can’t even use your arms or your hands.’
RUSH: This guy is already practicing, you nailed it at the very beginning of your call, you have seen Obamacare and you were treated by an Obamacare doctor. This guy is practicing Obamacare.
CALLER: That is correct, and that’s what is in store for every single one of us.
RUSH: And you hightailed it out of there without paying the guy?
CALLER: That is correct and I called them back when I recovered my composure, and I said, ‘I do not trust one thing he did for me. Do not bill me. Do not bill my insurer, and I am considering a formal claim against this man. He belongs nowhere near healing people.’ And you figure this. I’m a nurse, I’m an attorney, I’m a grown woman. I had the ability to challenge these things with a certain level of knowledge and I wasn’t in terrible pain or suffering from something which was potentially catastrophic.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Now, you imagine all these people who are gonna — this is what we will have and you’re going to go in and when you’re sick and when you’re in pain and when you’re afraid, you are extremely vulnerable. And people are going to die and die and die.
RUSH: Yeah, the only difference is that the doctors under Obamacare will be calling some bureaucrat somewhere at some health panel for instructions on procedure, and it will be the bureaucrat which will dictate to the doctor this kind of behavior. Your doctor just happens to come by it naturally.
CALLER: Apparently. I have to tell you, it was one of the most horrifying examples —
RUSH: I can imagine. And you’re right out there, Kathy. Can you imagine these people that are walking into doctors’ offices now saying, ‘Where’s my free health care?’ Can you imagine when they walk in and they’ve got what you’ve got, carpal tunnel, bilateral, and the doctor says, ‘It’s not bad enough to do anything about it yet.’ ‘But I can’t work!’
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: ‘The chart says it’s not bad enough. You don’t have it bad enough for us to do anything about it, get outta here.’
CALLER: Well, you know what, Rush, before this happened I had the horrible job of reading the previous health care bills because a couple of organizations asked me to so I could, as a lawyer and a nurse, present, you know, to them what the likely outcomes would be.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah.
CALLER: And it’s beyond horror. One of the things that nobody knows about is that, guess what the protocols are for treating cancer? Guess what, you don’t get to have surgical intervention until the cancer is invasive. And of course once cancer is invasive, Rush, you’re pretty much dead.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, let me ask you a question. Did this doctor — I have to go real quick here ’cause I’m way long.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: Did this doctor give you any pain medication? Did he say, ‘Take a pain pill?’
CALLER: No. I’m not in pain.
RUSH: Oh. Oh, because Obama said maybe we could give people like you a pain pill. That’s why I was just wondering if this doctor had that part down pat, too. Thank you, Kathy.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I got this note from a friend of mine, it dovetails with the last caller. ‘I had to go to the dentist this morning. It was unpleasant; the Novocain didn’t work; I was in pain and a bad mood. When I got done, the receptionist demanded $600. Usually they submit it to the insurance and bill me for whatever isn’t covered. Today they were insisting on a credit card immediately, which rubbed me the wrong way, so I refused. I said, ‘I thought Obama was going to pay for all this. Get your money from him,’ and I stormed out of the office. It felt really good, but I’ll probably have to find a new dentist.’ (laughing)