On the way to work Friday afternoon I caught this exchange* between Rush and “Kathy in Kansas City”. She described an encounter between herself and a specialist she was referred to about her carpal tunnel syndrome. Kathy is a nurse and lawyer and she was referred to this guy by her primary care physician. Somehow they got to talking about capital punishment and the conversation went downhill from there. She was so put off by the comments the doctor was making she asked for her treatment to be stopped and told him she was filing a complaint. The key part of Kathy’s call was this:

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.”

Let me emphasize:

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.“

Now this doctor was originally from Canada, you know, that country to the north of us that has such a great health care system. The country whose health care system is held up as a model for what ours should be. The country whose health care system was rejected by one of their own provincial premieres who came to the United States for his heart surgery.

The conversation went on:

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.

RUSH: Wait. If he’s talking about how great Canada is then goes on to cite, yeah, we don’t waste care on people that don’t need it, we don’t give mammograms, I mean people aren’t entitled to all the coverage they want, they just think they’re going to get it for nothing, but they’re not. That’s exactly what happens in Canada.

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.

Kathy left without paying the guy and later called his office requesting they not bill her or her insurance company. It’s a good thing she did that now because if ObamaCare™ isn’t repealed she probably wouldn’t be able to do that.

Ed Morrissey has a collaborative piece at Hot Air. Read the NYT article he links to. Saying no is what the elites want. If this plan will somehow magically reduce the deficit, then saying no, and often, will of course be the way in which they will try to make it happen. Kathy’s specialist seemed to want to wait until she was nearly crippled with carpal tunnel, saying he just didn’t see the “numbers” he needed to treat her, especially after she challenged him.

If Kathy’s experience with this Canadian doctor is indeed the future of ObamaCare™, I say no thanks. But if this health care deform doesn’t get repealed, it well may be a bureaucrat saying no, or “I just don’t see the numbers I need” rather than a transplanted specialist who, even though he seems to love Canada’s system, chose to come to the U.S. to practice medicine. By the way, he never did answer Kathy when she asked him why he came here, if he thought Canada’s system was so great. Maybe Canada’s health care bureaucracy wouldn’t let him make the money he thought he should be making, hmmm?

Stick around, Doc. If ObamaCare™ isn’t repealed, you’ll soon be in the same boat. Or worse.

*Please note links to transcripts from Rush’s show on the guest page become inactive a week from the date they are posted.