Parents Petrified to Wait for Daughter's Surgery (Rush Limbaugh's Radio Show)

     This online transcript is from the Rush Limbaugh radio show that aired November 13, 2013.  A woman named Dawn and her husband, both from Chattanooga, Tennessee, called in to the show to make what sounded like the fact claim that in the future they were going to have significant challenges with the health system and their ability to treat their young daughter’s medical problems. The six-year-old girl was born with multiple birth defects that required costly surgery. However although the couple asserted that they have been forced to move forward on complicated procedures they had planned to request at a much later date; in actuality that had not yet happened. Instead they were actually making   value claims based on their perception that Obamacare would cause certain surgeries to be financially unattainable for the child. Although the callers were filled with passion about the subject, the pathos argument appealing to people’s fears of the unknown but did not support its premise with actual factual evidence. At core the claim was also a policy argument because it advocated implicitly that the new health care option orchestrated under Obama’s administration was inherently socialized medicine and should be thwarted by public objection. During the discussion Limbaugh does most of the talking as the show's host, and astutely transitions his speakers and audience into supporting his own conclusion that the system is bad for America. Although Rush sounds authoritative and credible his observations lack transparent sources and substance that can be objectively verified. Instead he uses conjecture and speaks rhetorically of third party complications and government incompetence saying that the “… new game in town, is Leviathan.” The talk show host engages two more callers, a gentleman from Las Vegas and another from Florida: each of these men echo Rush’s opinions, but again without substantive evidence of their assertions. There are no counter-claims and or rebuttals offered during the course of the interviews, which arguably further compromises the perceived credibility of the callers to objective members of the audience.

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/11/14/parents_petrified_to_wait_for_daughter_s_surgery