Caller: “Give Medicare to Everybody”

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – I’m just going to let Bob from Pennsylvania speak for himself here, check out the rest in today’s audio and transcript, “Let me run something by you, Mike.  A kid graduates from college this year.  He’s going to pay Medicare for 40 years and not see an ounce of benefit from it.  Why not just bill him four percent now and give it to him now?  Give Medicare to everybody.  That would be the biggest boon in business in the history of our civilization.  How?  We would take the obscene cost of healthcare away from businesses.”

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Bob is in Pennsylvania.  Hello, Bob.

Caller Bob:  I don’t know what’s more absurd, those Medicare numbers or the fact that you actually believe them.  Here’s the real question.  Let’s just say Medicare is gone, wiped out.  Who pays for those numbers now?  In other words, who’s going to incur the cost or who’s going to cover that $300,000 for every man, woman and child.  You know what I suspect is going on?  I think the real progression of ObamaCare, the affordable healthcare, the real progression of that is Medicare for everybody.  You’ve got to start vilifying Medicare big time so that you have a preemptive strike against that.  That’s really what it’s going to boil down to.

Let me run something by you, Mike.  A kid graduates from college this year.  He’s going to pay Medicare for 40 years and not see an ounce of benefit from it.  Why not just bill him four percent now and give it to him now?  Give Medicare to everybody.  That would be the biggest boon in business in the history of our civilization.  How?  We would take the obscene cost of healthcare away from businesses.  My healthcare premium is $20,000 a year.

Mike:  You’re going to take the obscene cost of Medicare away from businesses and transfer it to who?

Caller Bob:  What I’m saying is you take the obscene cost of healthcare.  My healthcare premium is $20,000.  That’s what it costs.  It doesn’t cost me that.  My employer pays the lion’s share of that.  If I was on Medicare, he wouldn’t have any of those costs.  They would be done with.

Mike:  So no one is going to pay that then?  If the employer doesn’t pay it, no one pays it?  It just comes from where, the Medicare fairy?

Caller Bob:  No, what happens is you start increasing people’s Medicare — instead of one and a half percent, bill me three and a half percent.  Of course I’m going to incur higher Medicare costs every month in my paycheck, I understand that.  What happens is, since my business doesn’t have to pay $20,000 a year for my healthcare, he can kick part of that back to cover that Medicare increase.  He’s saving a fortune.  Every business in the country would save a fortune.  The biggest cost they have, not the biggest, but before they hire anybody, they have to run the numbers and say, “We’re going to pay this guy $30,000 a year.  We’ve got to give him a healthcare plan.  What’s that gonna cost us?  Jesus, $20,000 a year.”  That’s why businesses really aren’t hiring people.  They can’t afford the healthcare costs.  It’s ridiculous.  Medicare for everybody.  Take the obscene profits out of it and just put everybody on Medicare.

Mike:  So government-provided health insurance for everyone will fix the problem?

Caller Bob:  They’re not providing it for everyone, Mike.  I’m paying for it, just like we pay for Medicare.

Mike:  Bob, I don’t want to rain on your parade, sir.  You’re not paying for it.  You know why you’re not paying for it?  Ben Bernanke is paying for it.  Printed money is being materialized out of thin air to pay for it.  It is currently in arrears.  It is currently not balanced.  It’s not ever going to balance because there is no cost containment because you don’t have to pay for it.  You’re talking about robbing Peter to pay Paul.  You’re going to take it out of my left pocket and I’m going to pay for it out of my right.  That’s going to fix the problem.  What could possibly go wrong?  Well, exactly what’s going wrong right now.  The problem is that there is no cost containment in the process.  If you drop the laws and drop the compulsion and transfer the maintenance of the human body to the actual person that needs the maintenance and they actually have to pay for it, either they will shop for competitively priced services, or they will choose to not purchase them, just like you choose to not purchase new tires, just like you choose to not purchase anything else.

Much of what passes for healthcare today is this self-medicated delusion that we exist in that says we have to care for and treat all these maladies.  Says who?  You have to treat them?  Why?  Well, because they’ve got a new drug out for it.  That doesn’t mean you have to take it.  Somehow human beings manage to elongate their life expectancy from 50 years up into the 70s simply by learning how to boil water and cook food.  That’s just ridiculous, sir.  Good grief.  You’re going to fix it by making everyone a Medicare recipient?  You might as well just go with universal single payer.  Why don’t we just go throw our hands up in the air?  We can’t control it, so let’s turn it all over to Uncle Sam.  They’ll do a mighty job.  That’ll be a fantastic fix.  Steve in Minnesota next.  How are you?

Caller Steve:  Hey, Mike.  You gave that man a perfect answer.  I have heard people articulate his thoughts so many times.  You gave him the right answer.  God bless you for that.

Mike:  Thank you, sir.

Caller Steve:  The reason I called, I heard you talking about this one size fits all, the power of the central government, etc.  I wanted to just make this point: we really got off track in 1913.  They decided, in their infinite wisdom, that the senators had to be elected by popular vote.  Prior to that, the founding fathers understood that states’ rights needed to be protected by electing the senators from the statehouses.  The states decided who was going to be in the Senate.  Now we have a Senate that’s elected by popular vote and a House that’s elected by popular vote.  Where is the insight for that?  The two houses had a specific reason for existing the way they did.

Mike:  You’re right.  I think when the 17th Amendment was passed, it was because some legislatures had been bribed to nominate certain individuals to represent them in the Senate.  It was a reaction to that bribery, although I think it was exaggerated, like most things are.  You create a crisis, government swoops in to provide a solution, then when it’s done on a national or federal level you’re stuck with it.  I would say to you, though, after Lincoln’s war of aggression, the states are no longer insular, sovereign political entities, not like they once were.  There are some green shoots, if you will, sprouting up across the amber waves of fuel where some states are saying we want our autonomy and sovereignty back, see: Arizona, California, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, in some instances Louisiana, and Texas certainly.  They’re seeing now that because the debts and deficits that have been run up and all the stuff that goes along with it, they cannot be paid for with real people’s money, with real people actually doing the paying.  They’re seeing that the future is going to be a bleak one if something isn’t done.  States are reflexively reacting to this and choosing to exercise their own authority in some of these matters.  I think, by and large, that’s a healthy thing.

The whole operation is still out of scale.  If you don’t fix the scale and put it back into scale, it doesn’t matter.  That includes, too, with all due respect, repairing the House of Representatives.  I still believe the House of Representatives has to have its representation relinked to some form of original understanding, 30,000, 40,000.  [mocking] “But Mike, you’ll have 10,000 members of Congress.  They couldn’t possibly meet in one place.”  Exactly.  The numbers are telling you that the federal union is untenable.  It no longer works.  You can’t put it back into scale.  It’s too big.  Therefore, it has to be rethought and it has to be reworked, sorry.

End Mike Church Show Transcript