RUSH: “‘Supreme Court Misunderstanding on Health Overhaul?’ — A possible misunderstanding about President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul could cloud Supreme Court deliberations on its fate –” Yeah, do you realize the oral arguments are over and now these dummkopf judges are back there writing their opinions and passing them around, but they’re all writing their opinions on a misunderstanding, “– leaving the impression that the law’s insurance requirement is more onerous than it actually is.” The writer here for AP is Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar. I wonder if he knows George Zimmerman. I wonder if Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar is a white Hispanic. By the way, speaking of, I’ve got a sound bite where somebody refers to Zimmerman as just plain white, not even white Hispanic. We’ve got all this. In fact, I have to pick up the pace here.

The point is that Mr. Alonso-Zaldivar is very, very concerned the court may not really know what they’re talking about as they deliberate Obamacare. They think that it requires people to buy expensive insurance. The mandate requires people to buy expensive insurance when it also offers a bronze insurance plan which won’t be quite as expensive since it only provides catastrophic coverage. But catastrophic coverage plans are already available today. You don’t need a mandate for people to have them. If you want one you can go buy it, and therein resides the primary, number one problem we have with health care. I just say if you want a catastrophic plan, go buy it. Do you realize how many people think they can’t? “Well, what do you mean buy health care? That’s something I get at work.”

The notion of providing your own health care is as foreign as any other concept. So embedded is it in our culture that somebody else should pay for your health care that the very idea that you can go out and buy your own is met with, “What? What do you mean, buy my own? I never bought my own health insurance. Why should I start now?” If health care were priced according to market forces, like hotel rooms are, if health care were priced like everything else is, according to people’s ability to pay for it, yeah, there would be different levels of health care. There would have to be, just like there are different levels of hotel rooms. There are different degrees, levels of cars, houses, everything. But somehow health care, everybody’s gotta have the same and it’s gotta be the best. (interruption) Wouldn’t people die in the streets if it’s left up to who? Have you ever heard of the emergency room? Snerdley, what has happened to you? For crying out loud.

The Official Program Observer is asking me: “Wouldn’t people die in the streets if they had to buy their own health care?” Why, because it’s too expensive? Well, it is! There’s no question. It’s too expensive because there aren’t any market forces involved. No, people at the bottom wouldn’t die. We’re a compassionate country. What, do the 30 million who don’t have health insurance die? Do some of them die every day? Thirty million people don’t have health insurance and yet they don’t die. How is that? How is it? (laughing) “Some of them steal other people’s insurance cards.” Most people — most of them — are not getting catastrophically sick, for one thing!

For crying out loud, if you believe the news, everybody is one trip to the doctor away from a terminal disease diagnosis. We’re all gonna die tomorrow unless we all have health care. We’re not that sick, physically. Now, Snerdley’s goading me here, folks, because he’s acknowledging we have a lot of new listeners here. He’s saying, “Rush, they may not be understanding you when you’re basically telling them go buy their own health insurance when we know and they know they can’t afford it.” Right now they can’t afford it, but there’s a way to make that possible. It can’t happen overnight, but it’s very simple.

For those of you new to the program, let me quickly explain the voucher plan. The way it works is, is that we calculate how much money is being spent in the health care system per person — and we average it out. We would have separate categories for catastrophic (you’re in an accident; you’ve got an emergency that happened) and just normal, everyday hangnail-type stuff that you really shouldn’t go to the doctor for in the first place but people do. We of thought what the per capita average annual expense is, and rather than just give it to Medicare or Medicaid, we give it to you in the form of a voucher.

And let’s say it’s $5,000 a year. And then what happens is you are allowed to spend that $5,000 however you want, on health care only. Then whatever is left over at the end of the year you get to keep to do whatever you want with it, and thereby we incentivize people to go shop for deals and health care. If you need a mammogram, shop around for the cheapest place to get it. And in the process, the people that do mammograms would start competing for your business and be price competitive, and this is how it would ultimately be. It’s too simple to work, because everything in this field must be complicated or people think it won’t work. But you simply introduce market forces to it.

Now, wouldn’t happen overnight. It would take a requirement, a commitment to stick with it. You could do the same thing with education. “You’re tired of public schools? Fine. Here’s the money that is being spent on you — it’s your taxes, actually, and everybody else’s — on public education. You want your kid to go to a private school? Here’s the money. You find one that you can afford with this amount, and if you can’t, public school. If you can, you go there — and whatever is left over, you get to keep. But you have to spend it on education.”

Same thing with health care. We’ve complicated this stuff so much. “But, Rush! But, Rush! A Band-Aid in a hospital or rubber band or whatever, is $600.” Well, it’s not really $600, but it’s way too high. But at some point it wouldn’t be if it were all priced according to people’s ability to pay for it. The reason this stuff is out of control is because the consumer’s not paying for it, directly. Nameless, faceless, invisible people are paying for it: Insurance companies, government, what have you. I still want to explain, I was right on my way of doing it when I was interrupted by Snerdley, on the court being confused about Obamacare.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The Supreme Court doesn’t understand Obamacare. Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar. I wonder if he knows where George Zimmerman is, not just if he knows Zimmerman. I wonder if he knows where he is. At any rate, what Mr. Zaldivar is saying is that the justices are laboring under a misunderstanding here. They don’t know that there is a cheaper alternative in Obamacare — which misses the entire point. It doesn’t matter what it cost. Broccoli’s cheap compared to health insurance. The government still cannot mandate that we all buy it. This is such a pathetic, cheap attempt. And it’s, again, aimed at the Obama demographic of The Stupid. “Oh, you mean it would be constitutional to mandate health insurance if it’s a cheap policy?” Is what they try to make people believe.