As the Senate prepares to vote on its paired down version of the recovery package, Rush Limbaugh is still inventing reasons to oppose its passage. Today on his radio show, Limbaugh zeroed in on a $20 billion portion of the bill devoted to increasing the use of health care IT. Limbaugh warned, “Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system” and declared that this and similar health care provisions have “nothing to do with stimulus but have everything to do with advancing the liberal agenda”:
LIMBAUGH: Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Now there are arguments back and forth about whether or not this is a good thing. The opportunity for the loss of privacy is huge here by digitizing and making everybody’s health care records computerized. Especially having a major federal database where everybody’s health records are.
To illustrate his flawed argument about the “loss of privacy,” Limbaugh noted today’s revelations that Alex Rodriquez used performance enhancing drugs in the early part of this decade. “[A]sk Alex Rodriguez about privacy,” he remarked. Watch it:
Limbaugh can rest assured that his drug records (that have already been disclosed) and Americans’ health care records will be protected by “stringent privacy and security controls” even if they are digitized. In fact, President Bush’s former Coordinator for Health IT, Dr. David Brailer, explained that he is even concerned that “the House bill [goes] so overboard on privacy that it may inhibit the flow of information.”
In addition, Limbaugh is wrong to suggest that the recovery package would create a “major federal database” of every citizen’s health records. Rather, most summaries of the legislation explain that physicians will be offered financial incentives in the form of direct grants and increased Medicare reimbursement rates for adopting “certified electronic health records” and proving that they utilize them “effectively.” Indeed, while the government will be subsidizing the creation of this “nationwide system to exchange health data electronically” — it will not be running it.
Finally, Limbaugh’s claim that investment in health care has “nothing to do with stimulus” — a common right-wing canard — is false. The funding related to health care IT alone is projected to create over 200,000 jobs. As Igor Volsky recently noted, “Investing in Health IT not only saves money, creates jobs and reduces medical errors, but it also helps primary care physicians afford the infrastructure for expansion.”
Limbaugh, Fox's Angle repeated misleading claim that NSA program targeted only terror suspects
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During the February 15 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program monitored Americans that "have to be getting or placing phone calls to terrorists overseas," while Fox News chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle similarly described the NSA program as "listen[ing] in on terrorists" during the next day's edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume. But as Media Matters for America has previously noted, media reports cite administration officials who characterize the wiretapping program as having cast a broad net, monitoring the communications of thousands of people with no terrorist connection.
Limbaugh criticized Washington Post staff writer Charles Babington while reading portions of Babington's February 15 article on the Senate Intelligence Committee's deliberations into whether to investigate the program, suggesting that Babington and the Post were not "accurately presenting the facts to the readers" in stating that the NSA program "eavesdrops on an undisclosed number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining warrants from a secret court." In doing so, he repeated, along with Angle, the defense of the program advanced by members of the administration that it targets suspected terrorists and not ordinary Americans.
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Of course, we all know the truth of it now - and yet, where have been Rush Limbaugh's privacy worries concerning such factual revelations?
Oh, ri-ight ... this occurred on Bush's watch, now didn't it? Old Rush surely can't be expected to dump on his beloved Decider, eh?
No - so instead, he happily satisfies himself with gratuitous fearmongering about scary but groundless speculations in order to have something to gripe at Democrats.
Oh, ri-ight ... this occurred on Bush's watch, now didn't it? Old Rush surely can't be expected to dump on his beloved Decider, eh?
No - so instead, he happily satisfies himself with gratuitous fearmongering about scary but groundless speculations in order to have something to gripe at Democrats.
Ah yes, those primitive minds and their hypocritical fearmongering ...
Q.E.D. - yet again.
But do not worry, Rush - your "new pal" is way ahead of you on this.
(sigh)