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March 27, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:45
March 27, 2013, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Yeah, greetings.
Great to have you back, Rush Linbaugh, cutting edge societal evolution.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882, if you want to send an email, and we do check those.
The email address lrushbow at EIB net.com.
Okay, I folks, let this health care business.
Um we're talking about Schadenfreud.
You know what Schadenfreud is.
That is loving, that is enjoying the discomfort of others.
In a in a in a certain set of circumstances that's enjoying when people get theirs.
Like when people who are dead wrong about something but don't know it find out that they're dead wrong and they uh they suffer from a shaden Freud is enjoying that.
Well, there's some people that are hoping to experience Shaden Freud over health care realizations down the road.
Now keep in mind about that that uh a clear majority of people don't want Obamacare.
So it's not as though this, you know, the the majority in this country didn't want it.
It was forced on us.
We are being ruled and governed against.
The will of people is being governed against by this regime.
But we've got Obamacare now, but there are some people who facilitated this thing being passed, average citizens who have no clue what's headed their way.
And they are the people who think it ain't gonna cost them anything.
And they are in for a rude awakening, and there are three stories about this today.
Uh another observation about this, all of this was known during the debate on health care.
All of it was known.
It could have been reported before the vote.
Now, some people might say, Oh, Rush, that bill was pretty extensive.
It could well be that this stuff wasn't known before.
No, no, no.
All of this, none of this is a surprise to me.
I knew all this before the vote, and therefore you did too.
Those of you who are regular listeners, the media chose not to report these things.
Now, for some reason, they are.
I don't even care why they're reporting it now.
That's not of any interest to me, just the the the what their motivations are.
But the fact is this stuff is being reported, and I just I want to go through these three things because they are fascinating.
The first, and just repeat this from the Hill.com, this is Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, is very worried, because he has discovered what is being called a family glitch.
And the headline to the storythehill.com is gonna leave dependents without coverage.
Well, we have to remember we are in a low information universe.
People may not know what a dependent is.
Don't smirk at that.
Well, you might think that they would know it, but some of them will not.
The headline should say health care's family glitch leaves children without coverage.
And if it were a Republican law, and if it were a Republican plan, that's what the headline would say.
But instead it says dependence.
A dependent is somebody in a family who doesn't earn anything, and therefore totally dependent on the breadwinner.
And Ron Wyden had an announcement yesterday which he said without action, millions of hardworking Americans are going to be squeezed by the family glitch.
Many people will be left with a false choice of taking family coverage through work that they can't afford, or struggling to find a better plan in the exchange without a subsidy.
Now, all anybody wants to do is go to the doctor.
That's all anybody wants to do.
You don't want to go to an exchange, you don't have to worry about subsidies.
You don't have to worry about 9.5% of your family income.
And these people don't know what's coming Their way, and and Ron Wyden is worried because politically the impact here on the Democrats could be bad.
And there is a family glitch.
Now listen to this.
There is a family glitch because employees will be ineligible for federal tax credits to help them buy into the health insurance exchanges starting in 2014.
Now, what that means is it's going to cost so much that people aren't going to be able to afford it on their own.
So they're going to have to get federal tax credits.
Now I will guarantee you that the average low information voter doesn't have the slightest clue what a tax credit is versus a tax deduction versus a subsidy.
Now they're going to be ineligible for the federal tax credits to help them buy into the exchange.
Don't forget they have to buy an exchange or pay a fine.
They will be eligible for the federal tax credits to help them buy into the exchanges if the cost of their individual employer-based health coverage premium exceeds 9.5% of their household income.
Well, can you imagine somebody showing up at the exchange window and being told this?
They have to do this before they go to the doc.
By the way, I had in the stack yesterday that I didn't get to it because of our prolonged discussion on the Supreme Court oral arguments on homosexual marriage.
But in the form that you have to fill out now to apply for health care coverage insurance or whatever, there is a section on registering to vote.
And it is worded in such a way that you might think you have to register to vote before you can do this.
Before you can fill out the form and submit the form for health insurance coverage.
And it is.
It's a neat little trick.
It's a disguised Democrat voter registration effort as part of health care, designed to make people think they have to register to vote before they can get health care.
That's how it's worded.
And of course, the registration obviously is targeted and aimed at registering for Democrats.
So they got to do that first.
They Then they show up to the window at the exchange.
All they want to do is go to the doctor, but they got to go do this before they can do that.
Wyden said the glitch ignores the fact that family coverage is much more expensive than individual coverage and could leave some middle class workers in a tough spot.
I just, I can't believe we're talking about going to the doctor has become this in America.
From the article, the Obama administration acknowledged Tuesday that some people could see their premiums rise under the health care reform law.
Kathleen Sibelius, health and human services secretary, told reporters there may be a higher cost associated with getting into that market where folks will be moving into a really fully insured product for the first time.
The comment was among the first from the regime to reveal a degree of uncertainty about the impact of the law on insurance premiums.
So now even the administration is admitting that they don't know what the impact of their own law is going to be on health insurance premiums.
And it's 2,700 pages.
And John Q and Susie, low information head to the exchange window to have all this sorted out.
And all they want to do is go to the doctor.
Second story, little hope scene for millions priced out of U.S. health overhaul by Obamacare.
This is Reuters.
Millions of Americans will be priced out of health insurance under Obama's health care overhaul because of a glitch in the law.
that adversely affects people with modest incomes who can't afford family coverage offered by their employers.
Well, now wait.
I thought family coverage was cheaper than individual coverage because I know it's insuring more people, but it's group coverage versus individual.
But no, it's it's a family coverage is going to cost more.
And there's a glitch here that's going to adversely affect people with modest incomes who can't afford coverage.
Now, isn't the purpose of the law to provide coverage to people with modest incomes or those who can't afford it?
I guarantee you, the low information modest income crowd thinks their health insurance is going to be provided for them.
They are not going to believe, nor are they going to understand that they can't afford it.
That they can't afford it now.
They think the purpose of the law was to make it so that they're either going to be given it or it's going to become cheaper.
Now they're being told by Reuters that a glitch, a glitch, is going to be make health insurance more expensive for modest income people, the poor.
And by the way, Warren Buffett and his secretary aren't going to have to mess with any of this, just FYI.
And now from the AP.
Medical claims costs, the biggest driver of health insurance premiums, will jump.
What is a medical claims cost?
Let's put the put ourselves in the average kitchen here of a well do low information people read papers in the kitchen.
Let's just pretend that they do.
Put them in the kitchen.
Average low information voter in America, medical claims cost.
Did they think you any idea what that is?
If I were to ask you, Mr. Snerdley, official program observer, what is uh what are medical claims costs?
Okay, that was the cost that insurance companies incur to pay for your claim or your coverage.
Meaning it's a it's a well, it's not just a processing fee, it's actually it's actually the nut, too.
I mean, you you you you go to the doctor, you you're sick and you want to go to the doctor, but your insurance is going to pay for it.
That is the same thing as you wrecking your car and calling the insurance company to pay to get it fixed.
Except what's broken is you, not the car.
So you're gonna have to have an insurance claim on you.
And that and the insurance company that costs them money when you make a claim.
You know how they cancel you if your kid wrecks the car?
Well, this is you wrecking yourself by going to the doctor.
They have to pay your claim.
They don't like that.
So the costs of the insurance company paying for your treatment is essentially what this is.
The costs of the insurance company paying for your doctor visit, which is the biggest driver of health insurance premiums is going to go up 32% for Americans' individual policies under the Obamacare law.
So, translation here, every time you go to the doctor and make a claim on your insurance, i.e.
you wreck yourself and they pay the doctor to fix you, the cost is going to go up 32%.
Buy-buy.
Your premium going down 2,500 bucks.
While some states see medical claims costs per person decline, the report prepared by the Society of Actuaries concluded that the overwhelming majority of people will see double digit increases in their individual health insurance markets.
At a briefing at the White House Tuesday, Kathleen Sibelius said talk about rates is speculative at this point, but she acknowledged that some people will see their costs go up.
For example, she said, in the past, women typically had to pay more for insurance just because they were women.
Well, they've fixed that now.
Men's costs will go up, too.
Not women's costs will come down, because nothing ever comes down.
Since women's costs are higher, it's unfair, so men's costs will go up.
And that's how everything will be made equal.
And so you see, ladies and gentlemen.
That's three stories just today on health care.
And they're coming out every day.
Every day there are these stories now from drive-by mainstream media sources.
By 2017, four years from now, the estimated increase in medical claims costs will be sixty-two percent in California, eighty percent in Ohio, more than twenty percent for Florida, and sixty-seven percent in Maryland.
Every one of those states voted to re-elect Obama.
This information was known before the election.
Every one of those states voted for Obama.
If you would have told people, I don't know about California, but 80% cost increase on medical costs and premiums in Ohio, you think that would not have been a factor.
Twenty percent Florida, 67% Maryland.
Every one of those states voted for Obama, re-elect Obama.
And now the study didn't come out until after the election, but this stuff was known then.
It just didn't get reported.
Okay, folks, time to go to the phones.
If we don't go to the phones now, I may not remember to go to the phones for the rest of the program because I have barely even gotten started with stack of stuff.
So we're gonna start Denver.
This is Brian.
I'm glad you called.
I really appreciate your waiting, sir.
Hello.
Hey Ross, how are you?
Good.
Thank you, sir, very much.
I want to soothe a lot of people's nerves out there about this whole gay marriage situation.
And first of all, I want to go ahead and claim that I'm probably your biggest gay conservative listenerslash fan out there.
Well, welcome.
Great to have you here.
Thank you.
And there are tons of us who are out there, and I want to just settle some nerves.
Not all of us want to get married.
Next month's gonna be my 18th anniversary with my partner, and I don't need a piece of paper or ceremony to prove that we're in a committed relationship.
What about though the uh the financial uh benefits that people accrue by virtue of being married or hospital visitation, that kind of thing.
Are you are you in an official civil union?
We're not.
But here's this is the beautiful thing about our relationship.
I'm actually self-employed, and my partner is employed by somebody else.
So we it actually behooves us to file separately.
And I'm actually under his insurance right now, and as you know, um being being self-employed, I get so many more tax deductions.
We've multiplied it either doing it together or by ourselves, and that's filing uh by ourselves is the smartest thing that we can do.
Right.
Well, um I just want to make the point.
I think everybody Well, what do you mean you you you you want to soothe uh everybody's feelings?
Well, I think that they think that 100% of all gays are all for gay marriage, and that's not the truth.
There are so many of us gay conservatives out there, Rush, that think differently.
And I I think sometimes everyone gets in the dour mood thinking that, you know, a hundred percent of the popul and that's not the fact out there.
Well, I don't think that's what it is.
I mean, I I I know what your point is, and I I appreciate it.
The um the people I know who are opposed to this, and by the way, didn't very many m most of the people I know in my circle, Brian don't care.
They're so scared about what's happening in the economy that this social stuff they think is a distraction, and they really don't care.
They're just they're worried that there isn't going to be an economy for their grandkids to even have an opportunity to succeed in.
That's that's what most of the people I know are really, really scared about what is happening to this economy, what's going to happen to private sector, how much it is shrinking, how how little opportunity there's going to be there for not just their grandkids, but the their kids too, depending on their age.
Now, the people that I do know who are worried about this, I think the greatest misunderstanding out there among people on the left or even in the uh in the homosexual community is that people oppose this simply don't want gays to have a good time or to enjoy it's not that at all.
There's there's no animus toward homosexuals in this at all among the people who are opposed to it.
They're simply worried about words and what they mean and tradition and and and the purpose of marriage, and it's a real thing.
It's not a it's not a convenience.
You know, heterosexuals don't do it great, the divorce rate's high, but he knows that.
But but the the institution itself has a specific purpose.
It evolved for specific reasons and purposes.
It doesn't exist for people to score money or benefits or any of that thing, uh, kind of thing.
The people I know are not motivated or animated because they don't want to let people in the club.
It's nothing like that at all.
It's that they're worried about the overall moral and social decay that is happening throughout the culture, everywhere.
And that they also worry what kind of world are their kids going to grow up and inhabit.
Right.
And that's where I always lose the battle with liberals when they start pushing the social agendas.
I'm like, listen, I'm not the one that has kids that need to go through college.
I'm not the one who's gonna have grandkids.
Well, you might.
You might adopt some.
You never know.
And we are back, L Rush both serving humanity, half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
No, that to continue the uh uh the point I was making with uh with Brian in Denver.
Uh a lot of gay people think that opponents to homosexual marriage are bunch of fuddy duddies who are trying to deny them either a good time or their freedom or their rights or fun or access to benefits or what it's it's not that at all.
At least not among the people I know who are opposed to this.
The the people I know who are opposed to it have much larger concerns about the overall culture of the country and the country's ongoing survival, and not just survival, but thriving.
And they see traditions and institutions which have withstood the test of time under attack.
They see fewer and fewer people willing to stand up and defend them, and they say they simply worry.
You know, what is everything gonna be torn down and redone?
They're worried about this whole concept of freedom.
I had I had uh I had a guy say to me, talking about this.
He said, you know, I'd love to get into Augusta Nashville, but I'll never will.
He's acknowledging the fact that it's a closed club and only certain people get in there.
I said to him, yeah, but you don't have a human civil right to get into Augustine Ash.
He said, why not?
If I want to make the why not.
How come these guys can come together, build a golf course, have a club, and keep me out if I want in.
That would make me happy.
And I love golf.
And from the people I know who are members, I would love them.
Why can't I get in there?
I said, well, it's not the same thing.
So he says it certainly is marriage equals look at it, look it up in the dictionary.
Marriage is between a man and a woman, and nobody is denying anybody wants to get married the right to get married.
If you're a man, you get married by marrying a woman.
Well, this guy was getting all fired up.
And he kept coming up with with the examples like Augustine.
His point was that you don't get everything you want.
Even in a free society, that's not what freedom is, getting everything you want.
And I tried to tell him that, you know, I was playing devil's advocate with him.
I said, well, they say they have no choice in who they love.
And they want to make it official.
They want the world to know, and uh they want all the accoutrements that come with it.
They said, well, okay, then what happens next if somebody wants to marry their dog?
He said, I said, well, you make a law that says whatever arrangements are made are between people, human beings.
Okay.
Well, then what if the three people want to get married?
I look, I don't know.
I don't know.
But I understood what he was talking about.
There's a a lot of people have no personal animus against gay people at all.
It's instead a um, you know, a genuine I don't know, love, respect for the things they believe define this country as great.
And they get up every day and they see all this stuff under attack.
They see it all under assault.
And I think they're just worried about the survivability of the country, and to which the opponents would say, well, the country's changing, and you better get with it and understand it because this genie is not getting put back in a bottle.
And I think that's right.
I don't care what this court does with this particular ruling, Proposition 8.
Uh I think the inertia is clearly moving in the direction that there is going to be gay marriage at some point nationwide.
Now the political ramifications of that are yet to be known.
I mean, the Republican Party, for example, could be looking at its ultimate demise here, depending on how it deals with this.
Because they do have multiple millions of voters who are evangelical Christians who on religious grounds alone don't support homosexual marriage, and are not going to support a political party that does.
So then the Republicans in that circumstance would be faced if they're going to lose multiple millions of voters over this.
They're going to have to replace them somewhere.
How do they do it?
Do they try to siphon off most of the uh gay vote that's going to the Democrats?
Let me give you Dick Cheney as an example.
Dick Cheney, I think, in he's, in fact, on the cutting edge of this, Dick Cheney, as you know, has a gay daughter.
Dick Cheney went public in support of gay marriage, what, eight years ago?
And the last I looked, those people still have his guts.
They still despise Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney coming out for gay marriage did not soften the opposition or the hatred to him by people in the Democrat Party or on the left, a measurable iota.
So, in terms of the politics of it in the Republican Party, if they think that they can alienate their evangelical base and replace those voters by becoming more hip, modern, with it, what have you, that remains to be seen.
Nobody nobody really knows.
But the evidence is that they're not going to be able to do that.
Anything can change in politics.
I mean, you can say the same thing about immigration.
They're wanting to moderate at the Republican Party executive level on the whole notion of uh of amnesty, on the belief that they are they're not getting Hispanic votes they could get if they were more hip relevant, more with it, more modern on the whole notion of amnesty and immigration.
But if you go back to the 80s, when Ronaldus Magnus signed Amnesty into law, the Republicans got less, they got fewer, significantly fewer Hispanic votes in the next election after they signed on to Amnesty than they got beforehand.
So there are a whole lot of political ramifications with this, in addition to the uh the cultural aspects.
But the left has succeeded in characterizing everybody who opposes gay marriage as a bigot.
And they're what are bigots do.
Bigots hate.
And that is a way of making sure that the numbers of people who oppose it are not very large because nobody wants to be called a bigot.
Nobody wants to be called a racist.
Nobody wants to be called a hater.
So people acquiesce and they just go along with it and they figure things will take care of themselves down the road.
Other people don't want to leave it up to things taking care of themselves.
They want to try to hold on to what they think has defined the country's greatness that has kept it together.
Don't want it to fall apart.
It's really no more complicated than that.
At least it's a I think of explanation.
Now look at this.
Unrelated, but it's still along the lines here of one of the aspects of everything to do with liberal politics.
And that is government getting bigger so that more and more people don't have to work, but can survive and thrive even economically via income and wealth transfers.
National Public Radio, NPR, in the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed.
The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job.
New laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled every month.
14 million people now get a disability check from the government.
The federal government spends more money every year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined.
Did you know that?
The federal government spends more money every year on cash payments for disabled exemploye, former people not working, than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined.
Disability has become a new way to lull people into welfare.
And it's hidden from any reports on the economy or unemployment.
It's hidden in any breakdown of welfare costs.
The story prints out that I have prints out to ten pages.
I'm not going to go through anywhere near all ten pages.
But the point that it makes is simple and it is devastating.
Here are a couple of pull quotes.
Somewhere around 30 years ago, the economy started changing in some fundamental ways.
There are now millions of Americans who do not have the skills or education to make it in this country.
Politicians pay lip service to this problem during election cycles, but American leaders have not sat down and come up with a comprehensive plan.
In the meantime, federal disability programs became our extremely expensive default plan.
The federal disability system is how we are paying people who don't know how to provide for themselves.
The two biggest disability programs, including health care for disabled workers, cost about 260 billion dollars a year.
People relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net.
People on federal disability do not, by definition, work, but they are fully compensated.
But because they are not technically part of the labor force, they're not counted among the unemployed.
Folks, when you add the fully compensated disabled in this country to the ranks of the unemployed, at 14 million people here could be, should be added to the totals of people unemployed, but they're not.
People on disability do not show up in any of the places that we usually look to see how the economy is doing.
In Hale County, Alabama, one out of every four working age adults is on disability.
Twenty-five percent in one county in Alabama, on the day government checks come in every month, the banks stay open late, main street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.
There is an entire well, it's an above ground but underground economy among the disabled.
And this story gets into how you qualify for being disabled.
And the bottom line is you don't have to be disabled to qualify.
All you have to do is be sick.
Sonny Ryan, a retired judge, didn't hear disability cases in his courtroom, but the subject came up often.
He described one exchange that he had with a man who was on disability but looked healthy to him.
The judge said, I'm just out of curiosity, what is your disability?
So I got high blood pressure.
Judge said, so do I. What else?
I have diabetes.
Judge said, so do I. What else?
And everything this guy listed, the judge said I do too, but I'm working.
Why aren't you?
Well, it's because the Americans are disability act.
There's no diagnosis called disability.
You don't go to the doctor, the doctor says we've run the test, looks like you have a disability.
It's squishy enough, you can end up with one person with high blood pressure labeled disabled and another who isn't.
It just depends on whether somebody wants to be disabled with high blood pressure and not work.
That's how easy it is.
Fourteen million and growing.
And this is another thing.
I guarantee you, people say the country cannot survive like this.
We simply can't survive with more and more people doing nothing, contributing nothing, but getting full compensation for it.
We can't survive.
We can't survive if the moral fiber is going to be dealt a fatal blow.
We can't survive if there's no backbone in the country.
We can't survive.
I mean, the country's always going to be here, but it ain't gonna be the America that we've always known.
Back to the phones.
This is uh Colin in Gagsborough, Delaware, I guess.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi there, Russ.
My name's Colleen.
Colleen, sorry about that.
That's okay.
Um, thanks for taking my call.
I just was calling because um this whole um gay marriage before the Supreme Court, my worry is that if they decide that it's uh right, then does that mean they're gonna force churches like the Catholic Church to perform weddings just like they forced Obamacare and abortion and birth control?
Well, I don't think anybody knows.
That's um that would be if if there is such a desire to um also attack the structure of the Catholic Church, then that would be something that would happen down the road.
Once once the uh concept of gay marriage, homosexual marriage is sanctioned and made legal, uh then if a religion or an individual church refuses to perform the ceremony, then there could well be a lawsuit, and then it would depend on how a judge felt about it.
So it's theoretically possible, yeah, that I mean, look if the Catholic Church can be forced to give away abort of fashions and birth control pills, why can't the church be forced to marry gay couples who want the sacrament?
Or any church really church would they be pro, you know, attacked because then it would be discrimination.
Exactly.
But I think it's a pretty safe bet that that that kind of thing will happen.
I mean, among um militant leftists attacking organized religion as part of the political agenda, whether they're gay or not.
I mean, there's an there's a the militant leftists, you know, organized religion is morality.
Organized religion is definite black and white and no gray areas, uh, other than churches who have uh decided, you know, to replicate the Republican Party and try to be all things to all people.
But some churches do not change to match the whims of a floating culture, and those churches are under assault.
And will continue to be.
Right.
Independent of gay marriage.
That's why I'm my I wonder about the motives of insisting on um demanding uh gay marriage and not civil union.
Well, we'll see.
We'll see.
If you had to roll the dice on it, you say, yeah, that'd be the next phase.
When some when it becomes legal and a church refuses to do it, don't go someplace that will sue the people that won't.
That's that's just a political philosophy of people on the left.
Back after this, folks.
That's it, my friends.
Another exciting hour of broadcast excellence in the can on the way over to Limbaugh Broadcast Museum.
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