All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 18, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:56
February 18, 2013, Monday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Uh breaking news here, ladies and gentlemen.
The owner of the Los Angeles Lakers has passed away, Jerry Buss, Dr. Jerry Bus, age 80.
He had been battling cancer.
He has passed away.
And I would I would normally make a prediction about media coverage, but I don't know.
So few reporters get satire.
They're not nearly as smart as I give them credit for being.
And they certainly don't get humor.
I'm kind of a little queasy.
I'll tell you why.
Grab audio soundbite number five.
Yesterday on reliable sources, CNN, this is Howie Kurtz show, where they examine the media and how the media has been behaving in the previous week.
And they had a political correspondent named Kelly Goff from something called the root.com on.
And they were talking about the state of the Union.
Obama's speech.
And Kurtz said, you know, if you look at the laundry list the president went through, $9 minimum wage, universal pre-screw, uh, pre-kindergarten creating infrastructure jobs to help rebuild crumbling highways, reducing the nuclear stockpile.
With a few exceptions, some New York Times stories, there was almost no serious media coverage of his proposals once 24 hours was up.
And this is what Kelly Goff said.
Look, I think the easiest way to answer the question of whether or not the coverage of the fairly positive coverage of the State of the United States is this.
Rush Limbaugh gave it two thumbs up.
Now, last time I checked, he's not a huge fan of the president, but he said, look, it was a good speech.
I don't agree with a lot of the policy.
Um I I look, I know you were all listening that day.
What I was doing was pretending to be a low information voter and analyzed.
It was a great speech.
I don't agree with much of the policy, but he's a great president.
I don't agree much with his policies.
But I think the country's headed in the wrong direction, but I don't think his policies having to do with it.
It was during that riff.
But nevertheless, she thought I was actually praising the speech.
So that's anyway.
I was the barometer.
The reason why there wasn't a whole lot of analysis of the speech.
Well, even Rush Limbaugh liked it, so there wasn't much to talk about, is what she was saying.
What I was thinking when I listened to the by reading the question to you, I mean, here's Howard Kurtz.
He's he's he's going to the laundry list that was the speech, and he gets to the part about creating infrastructure jobs to help rebuild crumbling highways.
And say, Howie, have you not heard that before like five years ago?
How many times has this president promised to fix crumbling highways?
How much money have we quote unquote invested in infrastructure?
And here comes a State of the Union show speech five years later from the first time, and it's as though he's never proposed it before.
So even with the drive-bys, Obama is never attached to his policies.
Obama and his policies, at least their impact on the country, is non-existent.
But anyway, there you have it.
Rush Limbaugh two thumbs up.
Says I don't agree with a lot of the policy, but it was a good speech.
I did say that.
I did say that, but then of course, my own brand of unique satire and put on, but they don't get it.
Anyway, I said before the top of the hour break that it's not looking good out there for those of you with pre-existing conditions in Obamacare.
This comes from the Associated Press, citing financial concerns, comma.
The regime has begun quietly winding down one of the earliest programs Created by the president's health care overhaul, a plan that helps people with medical problems who can't get private insurance.
I mean, the plan hasn't even been fully implemented, and they're already quietly winding down.
Coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.
This is one of the primary aspects of this bill that garnered support from all of the low information voters.
And a lot of people are single issue people, abortion or immigration or what have you.
And on health care, there are a lot of single-issue people, pre-existing condition.
And what those people want is actually not insurance.
They want a welfare benefit.
It's not insurance if you can buy the insurance after you get the disease.
It's not insurance if you can buy insurance after you wreck the car.
It's not insurance if you buy insurance and get coverage after you burned your house down.
Well, it's not insurance if you get the disease and then they sell you a policy because they have to.
It's something else.
But that didn't matter.
That distinction didn't matter.
All that was heard was that Obama was going to make those mean, insensitive, unfeeling insurance companies insure people with pre-existing conditions.
Because those mean insurance companies are not going to insure somebody that already has a disease that's costly and perhaps terminal.
And then in fear, they didn't write.
Everybody else's insurance and coverage is being paid for.
Why not mine?
Just because I have the disease.
So Obama and the Democrats, they rose to the occasion, and they promised there would be coverage and treatment for people with pre-existing conditions.
And here's this headline, and this this is from it's either uh well, it was a Saturday, in fact, is when I printed this out.
Saturday of the President's Day weekend when Obama's playing golf.
Obama administration winds down plan for uninsurables.
Here again the story citing financial concerns.
For you low information voters, that means they're out of money.
The regime has begun quietly winding down one of the earliest programs created by Obamacare, a plan that helps people with medical problems who can't get private insurance.
In an afternoon teleconference with state counterparts, regime officials said Friday the pre-existing condition insurance plan will stop taking new applications.
Now, if you're already in the plan, you will not lose coverage, supposedly.
But if you haven't signed up, you are SOL.
Designed as a stopgap solution until the law's full consumer protections are in effect next year.
The PCIP has served more than 135,000 people, a lifeline for patients with serious medical problems like cancer and heart failure, but Congress allocated a limited amount of money, and the regime's technical experts want to make sure it doesn't run out.
Health and Human Services Department spokesbabe Aaron Shields Britt said that the program, the PCIP pre-existing condition insurance plan, has provided needed security to some of our nation's sickest people.
Plan covers people who have had problems getting private insurance because of a medical condition and have been uninsured for at least six months.
Premiums are keyed to average rates charged in each state, which means they're not necessarily cheap, but at least you can get it.
The premiums often amount several hundred dollars a month for middle-aged individuals.
Anyway, the money's gone.
Now, this is not to say that when Obamacare is fully implemented in the next year or two that it won't be back.
But what good does that do you now?
Because I guarantee you, everybody with a pre existing condition thought they were going to be covered now.
If you haven't signed up, you're SOL.
But once again, don't expect this to be tied to Obama.
Once again, this is this is some bureaucracy.
Remember, Obama does not govern.
He campaigns.
So this is some government bureaucracy which has decided to torpedo the president's brave plan.
And Obama will be, if he wants to, he can go out and campaign against this.
Even though it's his plan that has run out of money, it's his plan freezing people out.
His name's not in the story.
This is made to order.
He's out there campaigning as though we still don't have Obamacare.
You go out there and talk about people still being shafted by the insurance companies.
Insurance companies still won't cover, despite all this effort that he and his administration have committed to.
So they're going to have to double down and do even more.
Dastardly Republicans, who knows who else, denying these people what they were assured they were going to get.
That's how this works.
And yet it's his plan that is out of money.
It's his Department of Health and Human Services which is winding down the program.
It's his department which is saying, sorry, we're filled up here, uh, not taking any more applicants.
Here's another version of the story.
Tens of thousands of Americans who cannot get health insurance due to preexisting medical problems will be blocked from a program designed to help them because funding for the measure is running low.
Administration officials said Friday that the state-based high-risk pools set up under the 2010 health care law will be closed to new applicants as soon as Saturday, this past Saturday.
And no later than March 2nd, depending on the state.
However, they stressed that coverage for about 100,000 people who are currently enrolled in the high-risk pools will not be affected.
I remember when they opened up this program, we made a big deal here out of how few people actually did sign up at first.
Because all during the run-up to this, pre-existing conditions, people who had them were thought to represent a majority of the sick.
That was part of the sales job on this program.
A majority of people already have a disease and they can't get covered, and that's why we need Obamacare.
There's a lot of people being screwed by the insurance industry.
Because the insurance industry doesn't care about people.
Not like Obama does.
They're just a bunch of conservative Republicans.
All they care about is profit.
And they won't insure these people who are going to die.
Well, they hadn't right.
And they made a big hullabaloo deal about it.
And then when it opened up, this high-risk pool plan, the number of applicants was tiny at first.
And they had to go out and sell it.
Like they sell the food stamp program.
So now they've got it filled up with 100,000 people.
Now they've shut it down.
Out of money.
And yet they made it sound like the vast majority of people in this country being screwed were people who had preexisting conditions.
So out of what?
How many 300 million people?
Hundred thousand in the high-risk pool or uninsured pre existing condition pool.
In related health care news, Obama's health exchange deadline is passed.
The backbone of Obama's health care law taking shape.
Twenty-six states have chosen to let the federal government run the online insurance markets mandated by Obamacare instead of keeping the job in-house or partnering with the feds.
Department of Health and Human Services had encouraged the states to run their own markets or exchanges.
In fact, they were required to.
They had to sign up by a certain date.
If they didn't, then, oh no, what are we going to do?
Because the law at the time was written, it did not give the federal government the right, the power, the ability to set up a state run exchange.
This is where you're going to have to go to give insurance at some point once they succeed in closing down the private health insurance market, these state exchanges were gonna have to go.
But there are states that said no.
Twenty-six states have said yes, the others have said no.
The states that said no to this have now forced the federal government to do the job that they were trying to get the states to do.
And one of this part of this was was was passing costs on to state governments.
And the and this was done on paper so as to keep the original so called cost of Obamacare down and under a trillion dollars.
So they shifted new Medicare spending to the states, new Medicaid spending to the states, and these exchanges.
It was gonna be federal health insurance, but the states were gonna have to run the offices where people signed up.
Well, not every state opted in.
So now the feds have to do it.
And the feds, the regime does not have the money.
They do not have the infrastructure, and they don't have the personnel to do it.
And I'm gonna tell you right now that this Obamacare business is I'm I'm telling you, it was written as a as a utopian wet dream years ago, and it was stashed away in some drawer.
Copies of it were all over Washington, but that this has been their dream.
The left has had this dream of of single payer national health care forever, and they wrote it and they added to it, and it kept growing, ends up twenty, seven hundred pages.
I guarantee you this bill was not written after Obama was elected.
This bill's been gathering dust, so Obama gets elected, and this bill finally gets signed into law, and it's had so many people contributing to it that nobody fully knows what this bill does.
This bill is going to collapse on itself.
If it doesn't have full-fledged resources of the states, and it's not going to have.
This bill mandates things that the federal government has no idea yet that are mandated.
Because not everybody has studied this thing.
It's going to require expenditures that nobody's aware of yet.
We don't have the money for any of this.
This thing is a time bomb waiting to blow up out there.
And it's going to blow up.
I'll tell you when it's going to blow up.
I just know it's going to blow up when there are very few, if any, options left in the private insurance market.
And by then, it's going to be too late.
I've got to take a break.
Don't go away.
Back with much more.
We have somebody in the high-risk pool program, the pre-existing condition pool.
Brendan in Seattle, great to have you on the EIB Network.
Hello.
Thanks for talking with me, Rosh.
As soon as I heard you say that, I knew I had to call.
Yes, I'm in the TCIP program two years ago, shortly before it started.
Uh shortly after it started, um, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and uh serious medical bills ensued, of course.
Um I was an uninsured, self-employed landscaper, which uh so I took up uh the Obamacare offer because it was my only option at the time.
My insurance started at 498 dollars.
That's what it was a month.
That's what it was last year, this year at the beginning of the year, it went up to six hundred and twenty-five dollars.
What are you getting for this?
You're getting full treatment, everything you need to battle the disease.
No, not full treatment.
It's more it's it's it's it's it's I have a high deductible, and then I have so much I can pay out of pocket.
Um the deductible is is twenty, nine hundred and uh out of pocket total uh recently is around five thousand four hundred, and then after that, they cover everything.
Uh wait a second.
What now I just want to be clear because I remember during the sales period, the sales effort for Obamacare, and particularly the run up to the pre existing condition, the impression that was left was that a people like you were being given the shaft by an unfair and insensitive insurance industry,
but that this was gonna fix it, and that you were finally going to get your insurance and you were going to be covered, and the implication was that you were not gonna be out of pocket much, if anything at all, but now you are, so your your treatment is limited to how much you are able to afford yourself even with the federal program.
Is that right?
Do I understand you correctly?
Well, it's limited up to, like I say, a maximum out of pocket up to 5,400.
Then they will cover everything else.
And everything else is, of course, expensive.
Um ironically, I was not in favor of this program.
I did not know I had a disease, but I was not in favor of the program.
But obviously enough, I had to swallow my pride a little bit and go in because it saved my vacant.
And then I heard you, and that uh frightened me.
And uh, I don't like the government a whole lot anyway.
So I just wanted to make it clear that it isn't necessarily uh free as it is, and if they're running out of money, it's they're only going to be charging me more if they don't get me out of here.
That's what I think.
True.
True.
And we are back.
Great to have you with us, Rushlin boy having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Now, this this uninsured uh pre-existing condition, uninsured program, is not, I want to be clear here, this is not the full-fledged Katie Bardador program in Obamacare.
This was a bridge program to get everybody covered until the full implementation of Obamacare.
And the salesmanship on this, you know, I distinctly recall, focused on uninsured people because of pre-existing conditions, and clearly left the impression that that was a majority of the uninsured.
And that was evidence of the insensitive, unfeeling, mean people in the private sector health insurance industry.
And so naturally, people with big hearts and compassion, i.e., Democrats, didn't come to the rescue and save the day.
But in truth, and look, I know this is a losing argument, but I'm I'm sorry, I'm a stickler for truth.
You know, I'm the mayor of Reaville.
We're not even talking insurance here.
I know that doesn't matter to people with pre-existing conditions, and I know it's not a winning argument.
I'm not even trying to make it to change people's minds.
I know that it's not going to, but it still rubs me to just this is this is how we end up losing people.
It's how we end up losing touch with the with the traditions, institutions, the founding, the things that are going to preserve this country.
We lose the language, you know, we lose everything.
And this is not insurance.
It's it's a welfare plan.
And it had it been presented that way, it might not have passed.
The only way this was gonna really see the light of day is if it had an enemy, if it had a demon, and of course, that was gonna be the private sector insurance business.
But I'm telling you, I want you to put yourself in their shoes.
You start an insurance business.
And what is that?
It's nothing more than people betting that what they're doing is gonna survive, but they're taking out insurance in case it doesn't, be it their house burning up or stuff being stolen, or their car being damaged in a wreck or whatever.
But you buy the insurance, and there are a lot of factors, nobody knows this.
Are you high risk?
Are you low risk?
Have you never filed a claim?
All those things go into the into the mix.
The one thing you've never been able to do is go get insurance after you wreck the car.
You've never been able to get insurance after the house is burned down.
You don't get to play the game that way.
You have to pay for the eventuality in advance.
You have to take the risk.
That's part of the game.
Well, young people particularly think I'm never gonna get sick, I'm not gonna have a catastrophic disease, I'm young.
So they opt out of any insurance, and all of a sudden, disaster hits and they're diagnosed with something and don't have any insurance.
And then that automatically becomes somebody else's fault.
And it's an easy sell for the libs and anybody else to come along and start demonizing whoever it is that's not providing money for those people to be treated.
And because we are a compassionate people, we understand that nobody's got the money themselves to pay for health care costs of this nature.
And so we all agree that somebody should do it.
We just don't ever stop to think that it's us.
But it always is us.
So I know it's a losing argument to say that this isn't insurance.
It's a welfare program.
I understand that.
And I'm not I'm not trying to accomplish anything other than remain true to my oft-held truism that words mean things.
But in this case, the pre-existing condition aspect was sold as a panacea.
It was sold as finally a savior is coming along and getting even with these mean people, whoever they are, mostly Republicans in the insurance industry, who don't have any heart, they don't have any compassion, and they don't care about you.
So we're gonna have to make them pay, even though they don't care.
That's how it was sold, and everybody applauded it.
And what we were told was that this bridge, see, Obamacare was signed into law in 2010, but it was not impactful, never was going to be fully implemented until 2014 or 2015 for a bunch of reasons that I've also gone through.
I don't want to waste time being redundant here, but 10-year plan.
The tax increases start immediately, but the benefits don't start for four years because if they started the benefits immediately, it would have cost much more than what they said it was going to cost, and it would have never passed, so they had to play accounting games.
So they had promised coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, but that's not gonna happen until 2014.
Not good.
So they came up with this bridge plan that allocated money for people to go to what were called high-risk pools.
That was what became the euphemism for uh people with pre-existing conditions.
This bridge program was set up in 2010, and it was supposed to last until 2014 when Obamacare fully implements, and it didn't even make it halfway there.
It's already out of money, and there's still a year and a half to go before this aspect of Obamacare fully implements or close to it.
Now let's take this guy who called.
He said until he had the condition, he understood what I was saying and didn't support it, but he he didn't have insurance when he was diagnosed prostate cancer, and so he was happy to have access to the program.
And that's how they make it work, and I totally understand it.
I'm not trying to talk him out of giving up the coverage.
I'm not doing anything of the sort.
Don't want anybody understand because I know this is what's getting us here is that we are a compassionate country.
You know, and we will all agree that somebody ought to pay for people when they can't pay.
We just but if somebody came to us and demanded we write the check for it, it'd never happen.
Like if our last caller, same thing happened, but somebody from the government called me and said, we need 250 dollars from you for so-and-so's treatment for prostate.
What are you talking about?
Government's paying for it.
Well, who do you need government is?
It's all of you, and we need 250 from you.
They don't obviously do that.
They just take it from you when you're not looking, and you think all the while that somebody else is paying for it.
And you feel good about yourself for supporting it for being compassionate.
But still, look at what it ended up being.
The guy was paying, he had deductibles that I think he said five or six thousand dollars a year just to get the full treatment.
And he had paying his $600 a month.
So if if I heard him right, this was costing him something like $13,000 a year, costing him.
Now I guarantee you most people that signed up for this program didn't think they were going to be paying that much.
So now we see how good the federal government is at running insurance programs.
They were going to show big business how it should be done.
They were going to go show private insurance how it should be done.
This is how you do it with compassion.
This is how you do it with a big heart.
And this money's now gone.
This program is now winding down.
There's no room for anybody else.
So there's some people out there now with pre existing conditions who cannot get coverage and cannot get treatment until Obamacare fully implements.
And I don't want to be a naysayer, but the bureaucracy of this is gonna be such that.
Man, I just I I can't say I feel for those of you who are gonna have to sign up at an exchange or some bureaucratic department.
Well, because Snerdley just said if they don't have the money now, how are they gonna have it when Obama here fully kicks in?
They've only they only allocated a certain amount of money for the bridge in the law.
Now I guess they could go back and pass us uh, you know, uh a new writer to the bill which would add money to the plan, but a different funding mechanism takes place when full implementation.
We don't have the money for anything we're doing now.
That means for question, I mean the the right answer we don't have the money for anything.
Now we haven't had the money for ten years, we're not gonna have the money next year.
We are sixteen, seventeen trillion dollars in debt.
So that's a it's almost a trick question.
But the program ended Saturday, and they say it's winding down in the AP.
But it ended.
So the guy had six thousand dollars out of pocket plus six hundred dollars times twelve, his premium, seventy-two hundred dollars, that's thirteen thousand two hundred dollars if I heard him right.
And that that's there are other things he's not paying for, but that's his his share of it.
And I don't and now he's worried because he's heard that the bridge program's out of money.
He's cool because he's still in the program, but there's no new applicants being taken.
But he's right to be concerned what's gonna happen to him at full implementation.
And there's nobody who knows right now.
That's the thing.
There's uh there's nobody who knows.
And you know, I could be really.
And it would serve no purpose, to be honest.
It would serve no purpose for me to say what I want to say next.
I probably shouldn't say it.
Let's take a brief time out.
We'll be back after this.
Don't go away.
Don't go away.
Back to the phones.
Who's next?
This is Pam in Cincinnati.
Hi, Pam, great to have you on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hello.
Hi, Raj, thanks for have taken my call.
You bet.
I am um a self-employed hairdresser, salon owner in Cincinnati, been um a self-employed for about 14 years.
Just after um the 2008 elections, I had a client come in to the must to the salon, and uh she was born and raised in Italy and said that she had come to the United States in 1990s and uh how she loved the United States and that she was self employed here.
And um I asked her, I said, Well, uh can you not be self employed in Italy?
And she said, Oh no, no one is self employed in in Europe because the taxes are so high.
And I said, and she had quickly become an American citizen.
Well, she um I asked her, uh, how do you love Barack Obama?
I mean, you know, and all that he's doing, and she said, Well, I love Barack Obama.
I'm very, very liberal.
And I knew right then that she truly did not Understand how capitalism worked.
Because she didn't understand where the money came from.
Well, how could she?
If she's from Italy.
But she yet right.
But she had been here since the nineties.
Long enough to understand.
Long enough to be worked.
Long enough to be during the Clinton years where the government was the big granddaddy, where the government was the big savior, where the government was the answer, where the Republicans wanted to shut down the government, where the Republicans wanted to starve kids.
Oh, during the 90s, well, that's what she would have heard.
Well, you're right.
You're absolutely right about that.
And I have got my sh I've got my share of Republican clients, but I've also got uh my share of Democrats as well.
I had a couple that just moved here from Chicago, flaming liberals.
I mean, they are as liberal as they get.
Just after this election, um Bill, his name is Billy comes in and he says, you know, my my health care with my employer just went up 4.6%.
And I only got a 2.3% raise.
And I said, Bill, that's Obamacare.
And he said, Well, I just don't understand how that whole thing got through.
So they don't connect the dots.
They just don't.
I am hearing from more and more people.
We had a guy call last week who told me that he's smart people.
These are not the low information voters that he that he hears me talk about.
That they simply they don't think things are gonna collapse.
They don't think anything's particularly wrong.
It's just politics as usual.
That they're especially if they're okay financially, then they don't think anything's wrong.
They're not worried about high taxes.
Of course, I told him that everybody I know is scared to death that they're gonna lose everything one way or the other.
Uh-huh.
Either by the economy collapsing or by the government taking it from them and uh in new taxes and what have you.
And he said, now these are these are people with their heads in the sand.
Now you're telling me that you've got these arrivals from Chicago who who see all this stuff happen while they vote for the guy, and it's like they don't understand how.
Right.
Exactly.
Well, that's exactly not the way Obama is pulling that off is they don't see him as the reason it's happening.
If anything, I would wager, and there's no way of knowing because you probably didn't ask, but this Bill guy from Chicago, if you had inquired further, you probably could have gotten him to tell you that Obama was fighting the people who are raising these prices and these rates, and he's doing everything he can, but he's up against these these untenable forces that are opposing him.
They would not associate the small raise, the vast increase in health care with Obama, with anything he did.
They would look at Obama as the guy fighting to make sure that didn't happen to him.
I just may pose that question to him the next time I see him.
Do.
I think you'll be amazed.
I will.
Well, thanks for fighting the good fight.
Pam, I'm um I'm glad you're out there, and I uh I appreciate the call.
Thank you so much.
We're gonna have to redefine low information voter.
They're not just people watching TMZ.
In fact, I I would venture to say that over half of the average ordinary Democrats voting for Obama have no clue what they're really doing.
They're j they're just being loyal to the latest Democrat president and the fact that he's black and historical.
That makes it even more important, and even a bigger deal.
But they have no idea what they are actually complicit in.
I'm convinced of it.
I'm convinced it's not so much intelligence that we lack.
It's just we are surrounded by so much ignorance, lack of knowledge, lack of understanding.
I'm gonna tell you, I've been watching CNN ever since Jeff Zucker took over.
They got rid of uh Jim Walton.
And I think I know what they're doing at CNN.
I think CNN has decided to fill a market niche that they think is unfilled.
You got Fox ostensibly owns conservatives, MSNBC ostensibly owns liberals.
I think I think the CNN is going upscale celebrity trash.
I think Piers Morgan is the role model for everything they want that network to be.
By trash, I mean supermarket magazines with flair.
Supermarket magazines with noted bylines.
I I think they're gonna target politically oriented celebrity news as their niche.
Could be wrong.
We'll see.
It won't take long to find out.
Hey, Pam in Cincinnati, here's another thing for your Italian friend and all that.
I mean, the media is telling everybody right now that everything's okay.
During the Bush eight years, everything was terrible, but everything's okay now.
All they know about this country is the media.
And look, I'm not saying what CNN is doing is gonna work.
I'm just thinking that's what I think they're targeting.
▲
Export Selection