Caller: “How Can You Have $420k in Heart Procedures Without Obamacare?”

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – It’s involvement in a free market.  You’re getting in between the purchaser and the consumer.  Here’s another way to think about it, and this is not going to answer your question.  This will leave you with more questions, but it certainly is a way to think about it.  Another way to think about medical services and your $420,000 question, there’s no way we can prove this because we’re not going to get in the King Dude’s Way Back Machine and go undo those acts in the 1950’s and the Medicare and Medicaid Acts of the 1960’s.  We can’t undo it, but we can think about this out loud, and perhaps someday when we come to our senses and begin to establish new federations and states like yours begin to wise up and say, “Why do I need to be connected to the hip to a bunch of rabid socialists on the ocean coast?  What do I need from those people when we can just form Eastern Oregon or Eastern Washington or call it Jefferson or whatever you want and get our own senators if we’re still in the union and we’re not politically in bed or married to them?  They can’t screw our elections up anymore.” Check out the rest in today’s transcript…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Dave is in Seattle.  Hello, Dave, how are you?

Caller Dave:  Good morning, King Dude.  I am doing absolutely wonderful.  I have been listening to all of this conversation this morning.  I am not a regular listener.  I listen on Monday mornings at 4 a.m. when I get up to drive from Portland to Seattle to do my job.  Living on the liberal left coast here, I run into a lot of people and we, for the most part, have pretty intelligent discourse.  One of the things that I’m kind of stumped by is how do you fix the healthcare system?  Right now we’ve got one bureaucracy called the health insurance industry.  Obama would basically add another bureaucracy on top of that with ObamaCare to try to provide decent healthcare.

Your comment about Switzerland just a minute ago was very interesting because one of the things — I have a couple friends who lived over in Switzerland for a while.  Their healthcare system is pretty damn good, in comparison to the third-world countries and the United States, but they manage to take care of their population, for the most part, without any major issues.  I’ve got a friend of mine who can’t leave his current job because his son is looking at about $420,000 worth of heart repairs in the next two years.  I don’t know what the answer is here.  I know that our current system is broken, but I don’t know how you fix it.  I don’t know how you dismantle the health insurance companies and basically plug people back into I need doctors, I can pay for a reasonable level of care out of my own pocket.  Most of us can’t self-insure, like I’m sure Romney is.  I don’t know what the answer is.  You got any clues here?  Can you give me some direction in terms of conversation to hold with liberals?

Mike:  How was the medical services industry doing prior to the first seed that was planted, major medical insurance policies, and then corporations being able to deduct buying their employee this thing called a benefit, which is not a benefit?  Basically it is a company deciding to instead of paying you cash money, paying you less by making a deal with a third-party provider and paying them, again less of a sum than they would have paid you in cash, to do something on your behalf, such as to insure you medically.  The transfer of the payment and the transfer of cash between seller and buyer was interrupted in the 1950’s with the introduction of major medical health insurance and companies being able to take advantage of it.  Without the existence of an income tax code, you couldn’t have had that.  It wouldn’t have mattered.  Without the ability to tax a micromanage companies through the tax code, companies would never have gotten involved in this.

Caller Dave:  That was another form of social engineering then?

Mike:  It’s involvement in a free market.  You’re getting in between the purchaser and the consumer.  Here’s another way to think about it, and this is not going to answer your question.  This will leave you with more questions, but it certainly is a way to think about it.  Another way to think about medical services and your $420,000 question, there’s no way we can prove this because we’re not going to get in the King Dude’s Way Back Machine and go undo those acts in the 1950’s and the Medicare and Medicaid Acts of the 1960’s.  We can’t undo it, but we can think about this out loud, and perhaps someday when we come to our senses and begin to establish new federations and states like yours begin to wise up and say, “Why do I need to be connected to the hip to a bunch of rabid socialists on the ocean coast?  What do I need from those people when we can just form Eastern Oregon or Eastern Washington or call it Jefferson or whatever you want and get our own senators if we’re still in the union and we’re not politically in bed or married to them?  They can’t screw our elections up anymore.”  It’s very possible that guys like Clint Didier then would have been elected United States Senator from your neck of, I forget if he was from Washington or Oregon.

Caller Dave:  Washington.

Mike:  The way I would encourage you to look at this is, if there is a free market, an actual exchange of my capital that I have earned to a medical insurance or a medical service provider, such as a heart patient, is it possible that the cost for a heart procedure, or for even diagnosing the heart procedure, can ever happen.  If there is not the ability to pay, why would a market ever develop something, if there’s no ability to pay for it?  In other words, you can make all the Maseratis you want, there’s still only going to be 10,000 people in the country that are going to be able to afford to buy them.  I think your heart insurance question, and any other question like it for an expensive medical procedure, comes with another question.  Why has it become so expensive that someone that ultimately would be the consumer of this product can’t consume it?  It’s because, as you pointed out when you started, the bureaucracy of the health insurance companies, which is aided and abetted by the bureaucracy of the governments, whether they’re state or whether they’re federal.  I hope I at least gave you some food for thought.

Caller Dave:  Absolutely.  I’m still looking for an answer for how we dismantle it.  I look at it today and —

Mike:  Here’s how you dismantle it: your state is going to have to tell the general government no, we’re not taking your Medicaid, your SCHIP, your Medicare, none of your orders anymore.  We are going to work our own medical problems out in this state and they’re only going to go to citizens.  We’re not going to let you come in here and tell us we have to serve illegal aliens or citizens of other states either.  We’re going to work our own medical problems out amongst us, in our own community.  Being a good [r]epublican and decentralizing the power will accomplish some of what you just asked.

Caller Dave:  I’ll chew on that one.  Thank you, Mike.

Mike:  Most people don’t want that answer because it’s complicated and involves them getting their hands dirty, politically speaking.  You’re going to have to actually do it.  [mocking] “I don’t want to do that.  That’s what I elect people for.  Why would I want to do that?”

End Mike Church Show Transcript