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Oct. 15, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:08
October 15, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Greetings, my friends, and welcome back.
Your guiding light, Rush Limbaugh, half my brain tied behind my back.
Just to make it fair, great to be with you.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882.
Email address, lrushbaugh at eibnet.com.
Well, guess what, folks?
John McCain, Senator John McCain of Arizona.
I mean, look at it here.
I just, I did want to make sure I got this right here first before I tell you what it is.
John McCain.
Yeah, McCain has finally had enough.
And he says, Democrats are now piling on.
Now it's really getting mean.
It's just unfair.
And I have that coming up here in due course.
I've been mentioning this for the whole program, and I wanted to get to it.
Mark Thiessen might be pronounced Thyssen.
I don't know.
I don't want to purposely get this thing wrong, so I'll pronounce it both ways.
He's a conservative somehow with a column in the Washington Post.
And the title of his piece, The Obamacare Implosion is Worse Than You Think.
Obamacare is imploding.
But thanks to the government shutdown, everyone is talking about the implosion of the GOP instead.
Can I interrupt myself here for a moment?
Yes, I can.
I want to go back to the lady on the phone.
This doesn't feel right.
What's happening here to the country?
It just doesn't feel right.
You know what's happened here?
You know what this feels like, folks?
I'll tell you exactly what it feels like to me.
You tell me if this isn't close.
It feels like we've lost a war to a communist country to me.
It's almost like there's been a coup.
There's been a peaceful coup.
The media has led this coup and the Democrats have taken over with popular support.
And we're getting policies and implementations and things that were never, ever part of this country's design and founding.
But it is.
It's almost like I know what she feels like.
I know what she's talking about.
It feels like we've lost the country.
And in some estimations, it's almost like we lost a babble for the country.
Some outside force has actually come in and taken over.
And they did it without firing a shot because there wasn't really a war going on that anybody saw.
It's sort of like a peaceful coup.
And it happens gradually.
And then all of a sudden everybody wakes up and gee, what in the name of Sam Hill has happened here?
I understand it.
If you're sitting out there wondering what happened to your country, what happened to the people?
All you got to do is take a look at pop culture media.
And all you have to do is look at mainstream news media or whatever you want to call them, drive-bys, and you'll see.
And all you have to do is listen to how the opposition to any of this is treated, and you'll understand it.
That's, again, that is really why I have so much appreciation for what Ted Cruz and his gang, if you will, are trying to do.
I really do.
I don't think they're the problem at all.
Barack Obama's the problem.
This is the thing that frosts me about the Republican Party establishment.
Run around Sarah Palin's the problem.
Ronald Reagan's the problem.
Rush Limbaugh is the problem.
Ted Cruz is the problem.
No, Barack Obama is the problem.
The modern-day Democrat Party is the problem.
The pop culture media is the problem.
But it just, at least as, I think that ought to be the thinking of the Republican Party.
But no, they want to try to blame all of this on fellow Republicans.
Mind-boggling when you think about it that way.
Anyway, back to Mark Thiessen's piece, Obamacare is imploding, but thanks to the government shutdown, everybody's talking about the implosion of the Republicans.
The shutdown drama has distracted from the fact that Obamacare's debut is worse than many realize, and it is so bad that it threatens the fundamental viability of the law itself.
The regime claims that Obamacare online exchanges crashed because the website got more than 8 million hits the first week.
Please.
You know how many people visit Amazon.com every week?
More than 70 million.
The difference is Amazon seldom crashes.
And on Amazon, people actually buy something.
Or pick your favorite retail website.
They handle many more than Obama.
The Obamacare site did.
It appears that virtually no one is buying Obamacare.
While administration officials brag about how many visitors the site's getting, they don't and they refuse to say how many people are actually signing up.
Kathleen Sebelius was asked that directly on the Daily Show, and she lied to him.
She said, fully enrolled?
I can't tell you that.
I really don't know.
Now, that is a frightening admission of incompetence.
If the regime can't even track how many people signed up on their own website, how on earth are they going to verify whether those people are eligible for subsidies?
How will they ever protect against fraud if they don't even know who signed up?
The Washington Post reported this weekend that the failure of the website is worse than previously known.
Even when consumers have been able to sign up, insurers sometimes can't tell who their new customers are because of a separate set of computer defects.
It turns out that in some 99% of applications, the Obamacare site did not provide insurers with enough verifiable information to enroll people in their plans.
Now, is that incompetence or is that by design?
I don't doubt that there is rolling incompetence here, but I think it's also by design.
When we learn what the regime's intentions are for healthy, middle-class, employed young people to find higher premiums and higher deductibles, that's what they're trying to keep secret right now.
That's not what they told people was heading for their way.
That's not how they sold this.
But that's how this program, even if it has a prayer of being funded on paper, that's how it happens.
Middle class, that's where the money is.
You get young, middle-class people, you make them sign up.
You do not delay the individual mandate.
You make them sign up, or they pay the tax, the fine for not for a while.
The idea is their premiums are going to skyrocket.
I think it's that that they programmed into the site so as to make it appear that nobody can sign up yet.
They're just trying to delay the realization of what this really is.
But if the site is also, if this is due to incompetence, if they can't manage a simple website, how on earth are they going to manage the health care for millions of Americans?
This rollout is far worse than anybody even realizes.
It means that Obama may have no choice but to delay the individual mandate.
Mr. Thiessen suggests here, and he quotes a colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Dr. Scott Gutlieb, who points out, how can Obama penalize people for not having health insurance if the government's website to provide that insurance doesn't work?
If you can't go there and buy a policy, how can they fine you or tax you for not having one?
Without the individual mandate, folks, Obamacare unravels.
Without the jack-booted thug on your neck demanding that you buy it, it unravels.
That's why, by the way, they're not going to get rid of the individual mandate because that's the guts of it.
And that's what the Republicans ought to be focusing on in any deal that that has to be delayed a year or two, just like the employer mandate.
They've got to in any deal that they're trying to strike.
The only way Obamacare works is if the government forces young, healthy people into it by threatening them with penalties for not carrying health insurance.
But if there's no penalty for not signing up, then fewer Americans will.
Now, even if the regime manages to fix the website and finally implement the individual mandate, many people still might not join because the plans being offered are so unattractive.
This gets to another evidence or bit of evidence where this implosion is worse than you think.
To entice people to join the exchanges, the regime forced insurers to offer low monthly premiums and cover people with pre-existing conditions.
Insurers have responded by increasing deductibles, the out-of-pocket costs that people have to pay before insurance benefits kick in.
And those deductibles are now at stratospheric levels.
You got $8,000 deductibles on the bronze plan.
$8,000 deductible, folks.
That's before your policy kicks in.
According to an analysis this weekend by the regime's hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, 21, now listen to me on this, 21 of the 22 lowest price plans offered on the Illinois Exchange for Cook County have annual deductibles of more than $4,000 for an individual and $8,000 for family coverage.
May I share that with you again?
21 of the 22 lowest priced plans offered the Illinois Exchange for Cook County have annual deductibles of more than $4,000 for an individual, $8,000 for family coverage.
Now, you rich people, you may not know what a deductible is.
That's what people have to pay in any claim.
If I go to the doctor and the procedure costs $7,500, they got to pay it.
No insurance kicks in.
That's just there.
I'm telling when this hits, this is one of the things I'm convinced they're trying to delay.
Now, plans with the least expensive monthly premiums highlighted by state and federal officials as proof that the new law will keep costs low for consumers, have deductibles as high as, are you ready now?
Plans with the least expensive monthly premiums have deductibles as high as $6,000 for individuals, $12,700 for families.
Even with federal subsidies, there are not very many Americans who are going to bother to buy insurance with a deductible anywhere from $4,000 to $12,700.
And millions aren't even going to be eligible for the subsidies.
So if enough Americans don't join the exchanges, Obamacare collapses.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the regime needs 7 million, at least 7 million people to join the exchanges for Obamacare to be financially viable.
You know what's wrong about, or what's weird about that number?
Obamacare mandates that everybody have it.
So what difference does it make how many they need to make it viable?
Okay, you run the math and you find out you need 7 million people to join to be financially viable.
What does that mean when the law is everybody has to?
That's what the individual mandate is.
So while the regime will not reveal sign-up rates, the Daily Mail in London reported that total signups in the first week were just 51,000 people.
If that's accurate, that would mean they have 6,949,000 more to go to break even.
In other words, they pretty much have to get New York enrolled.
So the bottom line is, it turns out that Obamacare is blowing itself up just fine without Republican help.
Far from a few glitches, Obama's program is in free fall after only a week.
And instead of focusing on this, instead of focusing on this absolute debacle, the news media is filled with stories about the government shutdown, what a rotten SOB Ted Cruz is, and all the Republicans are.
The irony is the shutdown was intended to stop Obamacare.
Instead, it is rescuing Obama from his own incompetence.
So Thiessen's ultimate point is if the thing would just start implementing, people would see what an absolute disaster it is.
They're going to see this soon enough unless they delay the individual mandate.
And if they do that, then they're delaying the guts of it.
They are taking it right out.
By the way, according to Bloomberg News, let me pile on here.
According to Bloomberg News, doctors and hospitals are now insisting that patients pay all of their deductibles upfront before they will treat or even see you.
It's a Bloomberg story.
Look it up if you doubt me.
Patients pay before seeing doctor as deductibles spread is the slug line.
Bloomberg News, doctors and hospitals are now insisting that patients pay all their deductibles up front.
Why do you think they're doing that?
Because they know these patients don't have that money.
And they're not going to give free treatment.
They're just not going to do it.
So they're saying, pay that deductible up front, or I don't treat you when the time comes.
I don't have that.
I don't have that.
That's exactly right.
You don't have it, and that's why I'm not going to sit there and treat you for free.
So it's a debacle, folks.
It's an implosion.
Another reason why the media doesn't want to talk about it.
It's an absolute disaster.
There's nothing to be proud of.
The truth is, Obama doesn't care about any of this.
Don't doubt me.
He doesn't care.
This is minutiae to him.
These are little details for other wonks and minions to figure.
He doesn't care.
All he knows is he got health care.
He got socialized medicine, nationalized health care.
He did it.
It's done.
He gets to control people.
That's all that matters to him.
Brief timeout.
We'll be back.
Much more straight ahead.
Don't go away.
Ladies and gentlemen, El Rushball behind the golden EIB microphone.
And just one thing about Thiessen's piece I just read to you that I take issue with.
I don't think people are missing what's happening with Obamacare just because the shutdown Republicans did what they're doing.
The Republicans are not distracting people from what happened is happening with Obamacare because they're living it.
It's happening to them.
They can't get in.
They're finding out what it's going to cost.
Wait till this Bloomberg news story reaches them.
And they get to pay the deductible up front to certain hospitals and doctors.
It doesn't matter what the Republicans are doing.
People are living this.
It's already being implemented.
You know, just sit around and let the whole...
I'm just tired of these excuses.
The Republicans, if they weren't doing a shutdown, and people really see how bad it is, they already do see how bad it is.
Okay, we're back.
I got your phone calls coming up.
But first, the audio soundbites.
Charlie Wrangell was on CNN today with Ashley Banfield, who, by the way, I saw is now dating Aaron Sorkin.
He of mushroom fame.
He's also the screenwriter for that news show on HBO.
Used to date Maureen Dowd.
Something happened there.
So now it's Ashley Banfield's turn.
And she was talking with Charlie Wrangell.
She said, Lori, look, I want to ask you about this deal that we've been talking about, the provisions that have just come out today from the House Republican leadership.
I want your reaction to these specific three provisions.
What do you think?
Can you deal with this, Charlie?
This is all about a handful of people who got elected as Republicans that want to bring down our government.
You can see it in the streets.
You can see where they're coming from.
And the same way they fought as Confederates, they want to bring down the government and reform it.
Wait a minute.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I'm sorry.
Are you likening, and I'm only assuming you're referring to the Tea Party members who are pretty intransigent on their views.
Are you liking them to Confederates?
Take a look at the states that they control.
Take a look at the Dixiecrats.
See how they went over to the Republican Party.
So, while the Democrats and the media have run an absolute coup and have taken over this country, Charlie Wrangell wants you to believe that it's the Republicans who are modern-day Confederates who want to bring down the government and reform it.
Bring down the government.
Charlie, you guys have already done it.
Anyway, that's Wrangell.
Here now on the House floor, Representative Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, talking about last weekend's veterans protests against a government shutdown.
Mr. Speaker, this shutdown is shining a light and showing the world some of the extreme members of the Tea Party.
The rally moved to the White House where Tea Partiers wave the Confederate flag in front of the president's home.
The picture is unnerving.
It's despicable.
And it's not the same flag that we just pledged allegiance to in this House.
Condemn this behavior.
If you don't and you let it go, you are condoning it.
Out of many, one, e pluribus unum.
As one America, let's denounce this.
It's time to come together.
I guess there was one guy with a Confederate flag and they got a picture of it, and now it's the whole Tea Party plus Confederate flag in front of the White House with Obama living there.
So Wrangell's upset.
Eric Swalwell is upset.
Here's Jay Carney.
During the press briefing this afternoon, the CNN correspondent, Brianna Keillor, does the president hold firm to the assertion that he'll not negotiate when it comes to Obamacare on the full faith and credit of the U.S. or on the government being shut down.
Some of the ideas that we've seen this morning when it comes to sort of demanding ransom to try to rally Tea Party members in exchange for opening the government or raising the debt ceiling, that's not acceptable, and it has not been through this whole process.
Is there nothing in the Boehner proposal that's acceptable to you?
Reopening the government and extending the debt ceiling, that's acceptable.
So, according to Carney, the only acceptable Boehner proposal would be surrender.
And if they hang in long enough, they'll get that.
And if they don't get that, they'll just start piling.
They'll be worse than Confederates.
I mean, what will they call them next?
But they'll come up with something.
Now, we've arrived here at the PS de resistance.
On the Senate floor, Senator John McCain has had enough.
He's just had it.
The Democrats are right.
Hey, piling on now.
Hey, really piling on.
This is over the top.
For the majority leader and the Democrats in the House and the White House to say absolutely categorically not, we will not consider what the Republicans in the House of Representatives are doing, in my view, is piling on.
It's piling on and it's not right.
Let's stop this.
Let's stop it, sit down, consider the Speaker's proposal, get our proposal done, and then get this resolved, which we could do in the next 24 hours.
I'm going to tell you, folks, I just, you, you, why would I bother to call?
You want to know if I come on, can we just be nice for a change?
Why are you guys being so mean to us?
Come on.
Now you're really piling on.
You're not even listening to what the speaker does.
This is not nice.
We've got to sit down.
You're piling on.
And it's not right.
Let's stop it.
Let's just stop this.
And Obama in the White House is quaking in his boots because the Maverick has said, this is it.
You've gone too far.
And Obama's quaking.
He calls Carney in, says, you know what?
We're piling on.
We're really being too mean to these guys.
We've got to back off a little bit.
What is what?
What?
What does he think is going to happen here?
This is what, see, if the Democrats said to McCain, you know, John, you guys are piling on.
You're going to have to, you got to at least listen to what we're saying.
McCain, you know what?
You have a point.
Okay, we'll backtrack a little bit.
Just different worlds.
These guys don't even know what they're up against.
Clearly, they have not the slightest idea what they're really, really up against.
By the way, for Charlie Wrangell, Congress and the Confederates were Democrats.
The Dixiecrats were Democrats.
They were militant Democrats.
It was the Republicans that fought the Confederate Democrats.
But what does a little truthful history matter?
Okay, back to the phones.
Pittsburgh, this is Kim.
Great to have you on the program.
Glad that you waited.
Hello.
Thanks, Brush.
Good to be here.
I just want to let you know that I really appreciate all your thoughts today because they are so spot right on.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
I'm calling because one of the thoughts I had for the Republicans as a strategy is to say, okay, you know what?
Let's go ahead and let you fund the Affordable Care Act.
But it's entirely as it's written.
No waivers, no exemptions, no delays.
It's too late.
Wait, wait, Kim, seriously, it's too late for that.
There are already too many waivers and too many exemptions and too many.
They can't.
It's actually a good point.
What's being implemented is not the law Obama signed.
Exactly.
And he doesn't have the right to give any of that to give you.
But he did it.
Who's stopping him?
But he doesn't have the money today for it unless it's funded.
That's true.
Yeah, you want your continuing resolution.
You want your money.
You want this.
Okay, but Obamacare has to be funded exactly as written by the Congress because only the Congress can make any changes.
And if you want to go ahead and exempt Congress, you want to put a delay in for businesses, well, guess what?
That comes through us.
You come, you ask us.
We're the ones that have to write that.
You should call John Boehner's office with that idea.
Can you get through to that?
I'm just yanking your chain.
Everybody expects me to do that.
Now, the point is that there are plenty of ways to fight this that do not include being part of the we can't win chorus.
There are plenty of ways to try to fight this.
But any way you choose, you're going to have to ignore the media.
It's fundamental.
If you don't ignore the media and their reaction to what you're doing, they're going to shut you off, shut you down.
It's the problem that we've got now.
Kim, I appreciate the call.
I really appreciate your patience.
Got to take a timeout.
Back with much more after this.
Couple of items here, folks.
The bureaucracies in the regime have thus far published approximately 12 million, actually 11.5 million words of final Obamacare regulations.
Now, there are only 381,000 words in the Obamacare law, and that's 2,200 pages.
There are 11.5 million words of regulations in addition to the 380,000 words of Obamacare.
That means that unelected federal officials have now written 30 words of regulations for each word in the law.
Which leads me to another point, back to Thiessen's piece.
He claims Obamacare is imploding.
If, when, now, whenever that happens, these bureaucrats are just going to get into further gear.
They're not going to sit around and just idly let their precious little baby be eliminated.
This is going to be a constant struggle.
But look at this.
381,000 words in the whole law, 11 million brand new words of regulations written by people unelected.
And now the American Indian leader spearheading the campaign to change the name of the Washington racists, Redskins.
Turns out he's not a legitimate member of the tribe that he leads.
The American Indian leader spearheading the campaign to change the name of the Redskins is not a legitimate member of the tribe that he leads, according to a New York State Assemblywoman.
He's rather an Obama crony who is raking in casino money and paying back only small stipends to his tribe members.
Oneida Nation Representative Ray Halbritter, who is also the CEO of Oneida Nation Enterprise, is not recognized in his position at a Grand Council of Chiefs governing the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy.
Halbritter is not a legitimate member of the Oneida tribe, according to Assemblywoman Claudia Tenney.
The guy's a fraud.
He's an Obama crony.
Was there ever any doubt that Obama's behind this?
Not in my mind.
And Phil Mushnik.
Oh!
I don't have time to go into this today.
New York Post wrote a piece on Sunday about Adrian Peterson, whose son was killed.
And Mushnik said he's constantly excoriating the media for errors, transgressions, lapses, malpractice, whatever.
And he wrote a piece, you know, just because Peterson lost his kid doesn't mean he's a great person.
And he started documenting some of the behavioral and other things of Peterson.
And he has become enemy number one throughout the sportswriter community.
I mean, the hate for Phil Mushnik is just all over.
He's got no right.
He had no right to call Peterson's mother, the kid's mother, the baby mama.
So far.
I don't have time to get into it in detail here right now.
Yeah, yeah, I've got it here in the stack.
I'll promise to get into it tomorrow.
Look at Mushnik is a throwback.
Mushnik is, he's trying everything he can do to restore standards, cultural standards.
And this is not a standalone piece.
This is sort of common to what kind of thing Mushnik writes.
He's constantly ripping Jay-Z.
He rips radio and TV announcers for incompetence.
Cultural rips teams for ripping people off in the ways they do.
And then some of these criticisms, look at Mushnik is too old to be writing this stuff.
It is too old.
Times have passed him by.
And it could be said that Mushnik's era of America is long ago gone.
It's an interesting piece.
The criticism is even more interesting.
The criticism will blow your mind.
How dare you?
What right do you have to say anything?
Don't you have any sensitivity?
At a time like this, we must all come together and so forth and so on.
I'll try to remember, Snerdly.
Put a reminder on my phone and remind myself.
My friends, that's it.
I unfortunately have to bring the program to a screeching halt today because we've run out of busy broadcast moments.
But remember, we're here all week, and we'll be back here tomorrow for more of the same.
And I set the Phil Mushnik column from Sunday's New York Post aside.
I read it on Sunday, and I didn't mention it on yesterday's program because I just, I don't know what I talked about yesterday, frankly, folks.
I don't remember.
But I put it aside and I'll share it with and some of the reaction to it.
It is all really illustrative things.
It've been great being with you today.
Thank you so much.
And by the way, medical device delay now out of the house bill per two sources.
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