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Nov. 12, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
November 12, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 247 Podcast.
Man, oh man, I'll tell you you talk about how the mighty have fallen, ladies and gentlemen.
You see where Bill Clinton has said that Obama needs to keep his word about keeping our insurance plans if we like them.
If you're Obama, can you imagine being lectured to about honesty and integrity from a convicted perjur?
Bill Clinton.
My gosh, folks, I mean, literally, how far has one fallen when that is the case?
How are you, my friends?
Great to have you here.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, and three hours of broadcast excellence.
Here is Bill Clinton.
This was this morning on the website, Ozzy.com, and a well-known correspondent Carlos Watson.
The well-known correspondent Carlos Watson on Ozzy.
You ever heard of Ozzy.com, OZY.com.
Well, Clinton was there, and the uh having a discussion about problems with the Obamacare rollout, and here is slick Willie.
For young people, mostly, but not all young, who are in the individual market whose incomes are above 400% of the poverty low.
They were the ones who heard the promise, if you like what you got, you can keep it.
I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.
There is a big move on, folks.
A big move on.
First off, slick Willie.
President Obama should fulfill the promise he made that Americans could keep the health insurance they have, even if it means changing the law.
I personally believe if it takes change to the law, the president should honor the commitment of Federal Government made those people let them keep what they got.
And then Clinton told the story of a of a young man who he said he had his insurance policy canceled and replaced with a new one with premiums twice as high.
But because his copays and deductibles are lower, Clinton said the man might still save money if he and his family actually use their insurance.
Clinton suggested, though, that the man should have been able to keep his old policy based on Obama's promise.
Now, folks, when Der Schleichmeister comes out and undercuts the president of the United States on a promise the president made.
Yeah, I think uh I think he should honor that uh that commitment.
I think he should uh this there's always a motive.
There are no coincidences with the Clintons.
Nothing just happens.
So you sit here and say, what's in it for Bill Clinton to enter this fray?
What's in it for him here?
Well, obviously one of the answers is well, you got Hillary, but Hillary's not going to be running against Obama.
As far as we know.
So what's in it for Slick Willie here?
What's the purpose for Slick Willie to head in there and insert himself in this and basically acknowledge that the president, Barack Obama, lied to people, and now it's up to the president to honor his commutant and change the lie.
I personally find this uh fascinating.
And then uh, ladies and gentlemen, there's a there's a story here.
We have the these these uh what is it, uh 13 123, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 7, 12 senators, 12 Democrats that are in tight elections next year, trooped up to the White House, and they begged Obama to do something here, change this.
What they really want is to delay the individual mandate till after the election of 2014.
And of course, this is uh this is a a pitfall for the Republicans if they don't handle this right.
If they go along with that, they are allowing Obama to slip out of their grasp and everybody else's grasp, but these 12 senators went up there, and they're begging Obama to delay the individual mandate, thereby allowing people to keep their policies.
But here's the problem with this, folks.
There have now been more than 4.8 million U.S. policyholders who've had their insurance canceled, and the number climbs every day.
Let's round that off to 5 million, because it probably is by now.
Now, meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the number of people who've signed up for insurance under Obamacare is 40,000 to 50,000 via the federal exchange and 49,000 for all the state exchanges.
There's some states, of course, that didn't do federal exchange.
So all toll what you have there is a hundred thousand people who have signed up, according to the journal, versus five million who have had their policies canceled.
However, in a little sleight of hand here, the federal and state plans are counting people who have just put an insurance plan in their shopping cart on the website.
They have not closed the deal, all of them.
You know, when you go shop on an internet website, you buy what you want, you click you on it, and it goes in your shopping cart.
And when you finish shopping, then you go to the checkout, where you give them a credit card and hope nobody steals the data.
Well, that's what's happened here.
I get the number is about 50% of this 100,000 that it's claimed that have signed up.
It's actually only 50% of those who've actually gone on and closed the deal.
Over half of them still have the plan that they've chosen in the shopping cart, but they haven't actually closed the deal.
They haven't made the purchase.
So the real numbers are five million cancellations compared to about 50,000 insurance plans bought, which means that there have been 10 cancellations for every sign-up for Obamacare.
You know, I take this news is so bad, I turned on CNN today and they were talking about Syria.
That's what Obama and his boys are calling the good old days.
News out of Syria.
Now, lest we forget here, folks, these insurance policies that are being canceled are usually for more than one person.
So when they say that 4.8 million plans have been canceled, we may be talking about families of two all the way up to four.
The number of people who've had their insurance canceled could be three times that amount.
Could be, don't know, because it's a wild guess.
But we know that most policies insure more than just one person, spouse and a child, for example.
So we could be talking about 15 million people here who have already lost their insurance thanks to Obamacare.
And these plans that have been canceled are gone.
I I don't know.
We talked about this yesterday.
I don't know how you turn back the hands of time and simply say, oh, that old plan you used to have here, here it is again.
How do you do that?
Those plans are gone.
By virtue of the law, they're gone.
And I don't I don't want to be repetitive here, but this is why this lie that he told is so profoundly fraudulent.
This is not just an average little political white lie saying, um, sorry, I can't cut your taxes.
I've worked harder than I ever have for the past two weeks, and there just isn't them.
It's not one of those kinds of lies.
This was a lie steeped in fraud with the specific intent of deceiving people into voting for Obama.
And now there's no way to go back.
Those plans are gone.
Those plans don't comply.
That's why they've been canceled.
They're not sitting out there in a lockbox waiting to be reinstituted.
They're gone.
Precisely because of Obamacare.
So it's easy for Slick Willie to come up here.
You know what, I think the President honors commitment.
And I think if he promised those people I get to keep their plan, you should let them keep their plans are gone.
I I don't know nobody is talking about this.
Now, these senators that went up to the White House and asked Obama for a delay in the individual mandate.
Remember the little trick we played on Friday.
You know, just to see what would happen with the establishment when I agree.
Because they weeks ago, months ago said, no, we don't need to do anything in Senator Cruz.
We don't need to defund this.
We don't need to delay it.
It's going to implode on its own.
We'll just sit around here and watch it.
Well, it started to implode now.
And so I guess the Republicans are going to just sit by and let it implode.
I saw Jonah Goldberg yesterday on TV.
No, no, no, the Republicans can't just sit by and let it implode because it's going to hurt people.
Obama hurts people.
Everything in this regime hurts people.
That is the point.
Even the beneficiaries of Obama's largesse.
I mean, even when Santa Claus plays Obama placed Santa Claus, he's hurting people.
He's denying them their dignity.
He's denying them their humanity.
So for the argument, well, we've got to do something to help people here.
The Republicans can't be seen as standing idly by while people get hurt.
It's Obama inflicting the pain, and it's not just with Obamacare.
So the argument sounds good, I'll admit.
Well, no rush.
You say that we just ought to sit by here and not let them delay the mandate.
Let Obama live with the pain that he's caused.
But that's going to hurt people.
The whole Obama administration has hurt people.
Where's that argument been for five years?
Obama's economic policies.
Obama's foreign policy.
I mean, that that's the net result of the Obama presidency.
People have been hurt.
Did you see what the number in the labor force?
They're now 91 and a half million people not working.
Just six months ago it was 90 million.
Ninety-one and a half million Americans are not working.
Now it is my contention that those people are being hurt.
They may have their they may have food stamps.
They may have their cell phones and their flat screens, and they may be driving around in in automobiles and so forth on welfare.
But they're being harmed by this.
Families are being torn apart, people's dignity is being stripped from them, even though they may not know it.
People are being converted into serfs and wards of the state.
The whole point of this administration is that it has hurt people, and it's hurt the country.
And it's not just Obama's lie.
That's a big one, of course.
Got to keep your plan and delaying the individual mandate.
So these senators, these Democrats, I've got no sympathy for them, is my point here.
So they've got these 12, 13, 14, whatever it is, Democrat senators, they went to the White House.
Please, please delay the individual mandate for our re-election.
If any one of these senators could have prevented this mess if they would have just voted no on Obamacare from the get-go.
So they want to have it both ways.
These Democrat senators want to be on records having voted for Obamacare, supporting their president, supporting universal health coverage, insuring the uninsured, and then when the real world hits and we find out that nobody gets to be satisfied, very few get to keep their plans, if any.
Now these Democrats want a delay in the results, the consequences of their votes.
They're called the Obamacare dozen.
And I'll tell you, you know, the the uh here they are, Mark Begage, Alaska, Mark Pryor, Arkansas, Mark Udall, Colorado, Mary Landrew, Louisiana, Al Franken, Minnesota, Gene Shaheen,
New Hampshire, Tom Udall, New Meiko, Kay Hagen, North Carolina, Jeff Merkley, Oregon, Tim Johnson, South Dakota, Mark Warner, Virginia, J. Rockefeller, West Virginia.
If they would have just voted no, we wouldn't be here.
But they didn't.
They could have, they could have prevented this.
And I think this is an important point as the Republicans seek to regain the Senate, which seems to be the main thing that the GOP donor and consultant class wants to do is to regain the Senate.
Okay, well, here's an argument for you.
Now these Democrats who voted for this mess, votes have consequences, elections, votes have consequences, and now they want to be protected from their actions.
They want to be granted a reprieve.
It needs to be hammered.
All they had to do to prevent this was vote against this.
That's all they had to do, all they had to do was join the Republicans.
Maybe don't even say that.
if that's too incendiary, but it's true.
This story is from the Wall Street Journal, Here's a pull quote.
The Obamacare dozen are receiving an overdue education and the damaging consequences of the bill they supported, all of which were predicted by critics in 2010, and that's right.
Every aspect of this has been predicted.
There are a lot of us not surprised by any of this.
And any of these senators, says the journal, any of these senators could have prevented the current madness by voting no.
And now the president they empowered to govern from the ideological left has rejected even their minimal fixes.
And it's promising to grind it out even if the problems get worse.
These senators deserve to be held accountable at the ballot box.
And what is Obama care?
As I said, as far as he's concerned, everything's right on schedule.
He's not up for re-election again.
The consequences of all this to him are practically non-existent.
Let's take a brief time out.
We'll come back, we'll continue.
Telephone number, by the way, you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882.
Folks, I need to correct myself on something.
I got something uh wrong, and it's rather significant.
There have been 100 cancellations for every person who's signed up for Obamacare, not 10 cancellations.
It's 100 cancellations for every person who's signed up.
And again, you figure that every person signing up is not just one, and every person being canceled is not just one, that you at least have a spouse and a child in there.
You might have family of four.
I'm going to use a family of three as an average number here to get to what we're really talking about.
We're talking about 15 million people who've had their policies canceled.
Well, yeah, 15 million people have their policies canceled.
If you figure three people for cancellation, because it's five million cancellations compared to 50,000 signups.
But I'm going to add three people to each of those categories.
Because we're talking at least families of two to four here, so I'm just going to use a figure of three.
That gives us 15 million people uninsured.
It gives us about anywhere from 200 to 300,000 newly insured people who've actually closed the deal in their shopping carts.
What this means is that when did this thing go live?
October 1st.
So here we are in November 12th.
So basically in six weeks, the regime has created almost 15 million uninsured to go along with the 30 million uninsured that we were going to fix.
We start this whole stupid process in order to provide insurance for the uninsured.
And there were, what was the number?
The regime threw out any 30 million, 15, 43 million.
We'll go with the 30 million number, but it was the most frequently used.
And so in six weeks, we have now added 15 million uninsured.
That's what cancellation means.
These people do not have policies.
Now what are they up against next?
When we get to January 1st is when they are required to have a policy.
And when that date comes and they're required to have a policy, and they can't get one because the website's a mess and because the whole thing's a mess, then what happens?
What a What a cluster this is.
But it's safe to say that that this has created, let's just say anywhere from 10 to 15 million brand new uninsured Americans by canceling their policies.
People who thought they would be able to keep what they had.
You imagine that you may be one of them.
You bought what Obama said.
If you keep your policy, you like it, get to keep it, doctors, same thing, and then you get your cancellation notice.
And then you find out your replacement is two and three times what you were paying.
You know there is an there's a way out of all this.
A minor partial way out of this.
And that is the concept of self-insurance.
Hang on.
Hi, folks, and welcome back.
It's great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
Let me tell a little bit about self-insurance.
When I moved to Florida, of course, one of the first things a newly arrived resident of Florida does is start worrying about hurricanes.
Because you're under the impression that they're going to happen every year.
And so you buy a house, if you happen to buy a house on the ocean, you get really, really, really worried about hurricanes.
So what you the first thing you do is you start examining insurance, and you find out that it makes no sense whatsoever to buy hurricane insurance.
My first quote, this is uh 1998, 1997.
It wasn't actually called hurricane, it's called wind and excessive force, and it was a bunch of crazy names to it.
But the bottom line was that the deductible was two million dollars.
And I quickly ran a calculation that two million dollars.
We're gonna need a series of category fives to destroy this brick thing I've got here.
Two million dollar deductible.
That means if there's any damage whatsoever, I'm gonna be paying for it anyway.
So then I explored the option of self-insurance.
Self-insurance is simply no insurance.
And when damage happens, you fix it.
You pay for it.
And of course, you're rolling the dice that there isn't going to be much, and that the hurricanes that do hit will be not very strong, and then maybe none will hit you, and so but by the and the two million dollar deductible, the premium for this was like $800,000, $900,000 a year.
And it quickly grew in in two or three years.
The premium was a million dollars a year, the deductible was two million.
So this doesn't make any sense.
So I made the calculated decision to self-insure.
And I would tell people, what do you mean?
And I'm by the way, I didn't invent it.
I mean, it's just it's just a name for fixing it yourself when something goes wrong.
Now you can go through the motions of setting aside some money in an account somewhere that you don't touch that's there for a rainy day, or you can just roll the dice that you can borrow what you need or what have you.
But the point is you do not buy an insurance policy, and you do not pay a premium and there isn't a deductible.
Well, you can do the same thing in health care.
And I do it in health care as well.
Now, George Pataki, the ex-governor of New York, who by the way really liked my neckties when I had my TV show and requested a bunch, and I sent them to him, never got a thank you note.
Well, I didn't.
He might have sent one, I never got it, and I get so much mail.
I don't want to don't anybody send him a note, please.
I because he probably did send a thank you, I just didn't see it.
Any big deal.
He's got a piece in the New York Post today, an escape hatch from Obamacare.
As Obamacare continues to crash, smaller businesses and their employees may have an escape hatch from many of Obamacare's worst Features, but the regime and its left-wing allies are trying to close the door.
When Congress passed Obamacare, Republicans manage to secure important protections for self-insurance that now provides a way for businesses to escape the most egregious parts of Obamacare.
Self-insured health plans are exempt from many of the taxes, many of the mandates that Obamacare otherwise imposes on businesses and individuals.
Now, what is a self-insured plan?
If you're if you work at a business or if you are a business, what is a self-insured plan?
A self-insured plan is quite simply a plan where the employer directly funds its own medical costs.
That is, rather than paying premiums to an insurance carrier to cover its employees, the business sets aside that money to cover anticipated expenses.
The businesses often hire insurance company to manage the claims that employees make, but the insurer isn't actually selling insurance, just the claims processing service.
So in a business, say, oh, let's just take a business of 100 people.
A company will not buy health insurance for them and will not offer insurance as a benefit.
But if the employee gets sick, has to go to the hospital, the business pays it.
That's the benefit.
The business pays the bill.
The business pays the doctor.
It's sort of like cash service in a sense.
I mean, just as a way of explaining this.
Yeah.
Self-insured plan is one where the employer directly pays its own medical costs for the employee, not an insurance.
There is no middleman.
And people in these plans right now are exempt from Obamacare because they don't require insurance.
There's no mandate, there's no penalty, there's no tax, and a lot of businesses, I could name some, but I'm not going to make targets out of them, because they are being targeted now by the regime.
The regime and the Democrat Party are going after these plans.
The regime and the Democrat Party are making tracks right now to go after every business that does self-insure.
Now, according to George Pataki, more than 60% of workers in large corporations and 80% of unions, and 15% of workers in small businesses, are covered by self-insured plans.
In fact, most of the 100 million workers now covered by self-insured plans, don't even know it.
Because the differences to them are minimal.
It's an employee benefit.
All they know is they've got health care.
They know they've got dental, they know they've got a deductible, they know they've got a copay, they know they've got this, but they don't know that the business is directly paying for it rather than getting an insurance policy that they're all part of.
Now, this exemption that self-insured plans have from many Obamacare rules will probably encourage more businesses to shift to self-insurance.
And because of this, there now is a nationwide drive to stop this.
The White House is leading the charge to close what it calls the self-insurance loophole.
It's got a laundry list of tactics that were spelled out in a paper published by the Center for American Progress titled The Threat of Self-insured Plans Among Small Businesses.
Now, why would they care?
Why would a left-wing website care?
As long as people have insurance, as long as the employees covered, why do they care how?
And there is again another answer that if people just open their eyes and understand what this is really all about, and it ain't health care.
It's about control.
It's about having power over people.
It's about being able to deny you or grant you health care.
You realize there are no death panels for people in self-insured plans.
The self-insured plans do not generally require you not to eat or drink this or that.
They just cover you.
Now, your deductible because there's no insurance policy in place.
What they do have again, the businesses that do this, if they're large, they hire an insurance company to manage the claims so that you're an employee at one of these self-insured plans, and you have to go to the doctor, you have to go to the hospital, you submit the claim to the to the business, the human resources people, they've got an insurance company managing that, but the insurance company has no say so in whether it's paid or not.
The business does that.
And that, of course, is wonderful because that's a direct relationship you have with the employer.
And it's cheaper because there is no third party.
There are no premiums, there are no insurance companies, there's no Obamacare mandates, and none of this.
And that is precisely why there is a huge move now on the part of the left to close these down because they call it a loophole.
And it's not a loophole.
The Republicans secured this exemption.
Don't know how, don't ask me how they did it, but they did.
Somebody wasn't thinking at the time.
Had to give the Republicans something.
So, in fact, Pataki says here that the regime has already had some success here.
A new California law greatly increases the cost to self-insure.
In New York, legislation effectively bans companies with fewer than 50 employees from self-insuring.
Republicans and some Democrats in Congress in the states need to stand firmly against these efforts.
It's the best way for businesses, small, medium, and large, to avoid many of the taxes and mandates that come with Obamacare.
Now, according to industry research, a typical self-insured group.
You ready for this?
According to industry research, research of actual real-life circumstances.
A typical self-insured group can expect to save more than 10% versus traditional health insurance without having to sacrifice quality of care.
Even uninsured individuals in many states can access self-insurance via trade associations and community groups instead of having to buy high-cost individual policies through an exchange.
But nobody knows this.
Very few people, you do a little test.
And the next time you run into a group of friends or yours, start talking about the concept of self-insurance and find out for yourself what they know about it.
Nobody knows about it.
And the reason nobody knows about it is because the whole concept is fought.
What?
Pay for it myself?
What do you mean?
That that's such a foreign concept.
But self-insurance in this case is not the employee paying for it per se.
The business is, and it's still offered as a benefit.
And some businesses offer more than others.
It's not universal.
Some businesses will offer dental, some don't.
Some offer uh very low copay, some don't.
It just depends on what kind of plan they have to offer to attract the kind of quality workers they need.
Like anything else.
What do you have to do to get the best?
And since health care is the number one demand of all employees, it becomes highly competitive.
But the main attraction to self-insurance, I in addition to uh obviating the need for an insurance company, is that you are exempt from all of these mandates and all these requirements and all the penalties and all the taxes.
Because you're covered.
Covered by your business.
And I'm telling you, the regime hates it.
And that's why they're struggling, they're working fast to try to close the loophole.
And the way they'll go about it is the way they do everything.
Well, this is not fair.
This isn't fair.
Why should some people work at places that have self-insurance health plans and some people can't?
It's not fair.
And of course, the way the left makes things fair is to make things worse for everybody.
And quality quality.
But I thought you might find it interesting.
Pataki's pieces in the New York Post today.
There's a little bit more to it, but that basically is the concept.
And again, I it is is how I made the decision long ago to deal with just ridiculous hurricane insurance.
Now, that's changed somewhat since then because it's become a little bit more affordable.
So there are aspects now of hurricane coverage that I do have.
But nowhere near do I have a $2 million deductible or any of that ridiculous.
I mean, when I heard that, what I heard was they don't want to sell this policy.
$2 million deductible, they don't want to sell it.
They don't want to insure houses on the beach against hurricanes.
They don't even want to mess with it.
And if you're silly enough to buy it, fine.
Free market, spend your money however you wish.
Self-insurance, uh, just the whole concept is foreign to so many people because so many people are not accustomed to paying the freight for health care.
It's something that everybody thinks somebody else is paying for.
But in this case, the business is paying for it.
They're just paying it directly.
So instead of paying an insurance company, they pay the hospital.
Instead of paying an insurance company, they pay the doctor.
Or the association that these hospitals and doctors are members of.
And it's simply a measure of control and a way to avoid all this stupid penalty garbage and minutiae requirements that are part of uh the federal government's demands in this area.
Gotta take a quick time out, my friends.
Much more when we get back.
Don't go away.
By the way, folks, I need to I need to tell you something else.
This this Wall Street Journal story that only about 50,000 people have signed up with Obamacare.
That story is being ignored.
That's strictly a Wall Street Journal story.
The rest of the media is ignoring that.
And you know what they're running instead?
For example, if you go to the uh, if you go to the Yahoo page, if you get your news from Twitter, by the way, the Pew Center for People to Press, somebody did a survey on where people get their news.
And Twitter is Twitter and Facebook are ranking real high.
I think it's one out of ten people right now get their news from Twitter.
And if you get your news from Twitter, you're getting it from Yahoo.
So if you go to the Yahoo News portal, the the top story there is an AP story talking about how Medicaid has signed up 444,000 people in just 10 states in just six weeks.
They're totally ignoring all the cancellations.
They are ignoring, for example, there are for every new policy that's people are buying on Obamacare, there are a hundred cancellations.
So there are 50,000 new policy, five million cancellations.
And each of those is more than one person, obviously, most of them are.
And the media is totally ignoring that.
And the AP lead story is Medicaid.
And how well that's going.
My gosh, 444,000 people in only 10 states in just six weeks.
And yeah, they're touting uh the Medicaid sign-up as a success story.
Where's the money coming to sustain that?
You're not supposed to ask that.
I know Medicaid was already broke.
But that's the that's the point.
The media is doing its level best to avoid reporting to low information people, the abject failure that is Obamacare.
And instead, they're touting this overwhelming success story of 444,000 people in just six weeks signing up to Medicaid.
And so they're trying to create the impression that Obamacare is this overwhelming success.
But you say, well, who's paying for these 444?
You're not supposed to ask that question.
The government is.
and it's not paying for Obamacare either, but the government is.
And that's the answer that satisfies the low information.
Oh, the government.
Oh, okay.
Okay, cool.
Well, let's go sign up there then.
And that's that's what's happening out there regarding.
Stephen Hayward is a blogger at Power Line.
He is a scholar.
He has written um semi-biographies of Ronaldus Magnus.
And he's uh basically a scholarly gadfly.
He has a piece in Forbes predicting that Obamacare will be repealed well in advance of the 2014 elections.
Repealed!
He says they won't call it that, but he says that's where this is headed.
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