The low-end of the right-wing, hate-talk AM dial has a socialized medicine supporter! OK, an inadvertent public option supporter. It all started in January, when Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a hospital in Hawaii with chest pains. At a press conference after his recovery, he crowed: “Based on what happened here to me, I don’t think there’s one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine, just dandy.”
What Limbaugh appears to not have known is that since 1974, Hawaii has had a state-wide employer mandate for health insurance. The employer mandate is one of the key points of health care reform that right-wingers like Limbaugh have railed against throughout the debate in Washington over the past year.
And then this week, a caller to his syndicated radio show asked Limbaugh what he would do if health care reform passed. Limbaugh’s response?
I don’t know. I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.
Not only is this a fantastic prospect — Limbaugh might leave his beloved U.S.A.! — but he has once again inadvertently (or not) given signs he supports socialized health care. Indeed, perhaps what he’s saying is that the kind of health care reform currently on the table in Washington is not socialized enough for him.
Why else would he pick out Costa Rica? It has universal, low-cost public health care (which the country can finance thanks to, among other things, having abolished their military) — they even offer it to undocumented immigrants. Thanks to this incredible system, Costa Ricans have a very high life expectancy, of 78.8 years. That’s higher than any autonomous nation in the Americas.
Now that’s what I call a developing nation.
