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Nov. 14, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
30:19
November 14, 2013, Thursday, Hour #3
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Yes, sir, back we are, my friends, El Rushbow and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Happy to have you with us.
The telephone number is 800-282-2882, the email address, lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
I remember what I was trying to remember what Obama said during his press conference today when he said he was going to allow you to keep your cancel plan.
He's going to allow you to try to get back your cancel plan if you could.
He then added, but you still, I'm paraphrasing, this is not an exact quote, but he said, but you still could be just one illness away from bankruptcy or ruin.
I mean, he said that.
I'm at a loss to explain the psychology of the guy, which is what I'm frustrated here trying to do.
That's just a psychosis of some kind.
I mean, the whole purpose today was to go up and tell you that if you like your plan, you keep it.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean this to happen.
And if you want it back, I'm going to let you get it back for one more year.
That would have been simple to say.
But he had to add, but you're still going to just be.
And I think it's rooted in the fact that no matter what in this little man's mind, he is incapable of making a mistake.
He is incapable of telling a lie.
He is incapable of being wrong.
That's how he's been raised.
That's how he's been educated.
It's how he's been treated.
It's why he's got this messianic complex.
And so even, you know, all he had to do, it was real simple.
They've got a political problem in the Democrat Party.
Nobody's signing up for their stupid plan.
Nobody's signing up for Obamacare.
The exchanges and the websites, an absolute disaster.
And the polls indicate that people really like their old plans.
And they thought that they'd be able to keep them because Obama told him for three years.
Period.
You like your plan.
You're doctor.
You get to keep it.
Period.
There wasn't any qualifier.
There wasn't any, unless there's a change at the insurance cutter.
There wasn't any qualifier at all.
And people believed him.
So he lied.
He lied about one of the most fundamentally important personal things to people.
So all he had to do to go out there today was and say, look, I understand that a lot of you like your plans and you thought you're going to be able to keep them.
And that's on me.
And you can for the next year.
That's he can't.
This guy can't even bring himself to say sorry because that would acknowledge error.
But that's, you know, any normal person in this circumstance, look, I'm sorry, I told you to keep your plan and you can't, but I'm going to, you can for another year.
I'm going to, I'm going to make that change.
You can.
But he didn't stop there.
After he said, but you're still just going to be, you know, a heartbeat away from bankruptcy.
Just I don't know how to describe it, folks.
I really don't.
Now, let's, I'm going to move on to something else here.
Because yesterday we had at length discussions about a piece of legislation in the House that was going to be voted on tomorrow.
And for all I know, it may still be.
It's called the Upton Bill.
Fred, I'm all for the newfangled worthless light bulbs, Upton.
He's from Michigan.
He's a Republican.
And Upton had a bill, has a bill that basically Was going to let you keep your plan.
Now, it may be that Obama upstaged Upton today.
I haven't had a chance during the program to find out what the status of the Upton bill is.
I don't know if it's going to still be voted on.
And this is what I mean earlier when I said the Republicans don't need their fingerprints on this fix because it's a phony fix.
It isn't a fix.
And as Eric Erickson at RedState.com pointed out yesterday, this is a trap because what the Upton bill is going to become is the Landrew Bill.
If the Upton Bill would, if Obama hadn't spoken today, the Republicans and some Democrats would vote in the House tomorrow to keep your plan.
Big deal.
Republicans are going to save the day.
You get to keep your plan.
Screw the president.
And then that bill goes to the Senate where Harry Reid would throw it out and replace it with the Mary Landrieux Plan, which is far worse and much more detailed than the Upton plan.
It contains further mandates.
It puts the Republicans in the crosshairs for blame.
It puts the Republicans on record as trying to fix and save this disaster.
It's an absolute disaster waiting to happen.
So everybody said, well, what's the Landrew bill?
What is the Landrew plan?
Mary Landru, Louisiana.
Well, here are the high points of the plan.
Only individual plans prior to the start of Obamacare get grandfathered in.
They cannot accept any new numbers, members.
The insurance companies have to continue these grandfathered plans until no subscriber renews.
And that's different from the Obama plan because Obama is just letting you keep your plan for one more year.
Landrew would let you keep it until there aren't anybody, there isn't anybody left in the plan.
Could be 10 years, could be two months, could be whatever, but it doesn't arbitrarily end anytime soon.
The insurance companies would have to continue these grandfathered plans until no subscriber renews it.
Currently covered individuals on newly grandfathered plans are still eligible for subsidies, meaning if you've been shafted and you gave up your plan and you wish you didn't have to, you can't get it back, but they're going to pay you the difference, i.e., buy you off.
They're going to bribe you.
The annual renewal notices have to warn customers that they are lousy plans that they're being allowed to keep.
How about that?
The federal government mandating the insurance companies tell their customers that the plan the law is making them sell you is deficient.
This is absurd.
It's outrageous.
And it is in the Landrew bill, get this, that the insurance companies can't blame any cancellation on Obamacare.
Folks, I have to really blow my nose here, second.
Would you hang on just a second?
That's how this affects me.
So that's the Landry Plan.
Those are the highlights.
Now, not just, no, you can't.
The insurance companies cannot blame cancellation on Obamacare.
The annual renewal notices, now the Landru Plan lets you keep your plan, but every year your plan you like and you get to keep gets renewed.
The insurance companies have to warn you that the plan is not good.
So even, here's the point.
I don't know how to say, it's just pure politics.
There's nothing about your health care that they really care about here.
They just want your vote.
So they think that you like your plan, but they are hell-bent on telling you you're a fool for wanting to keep it because it's substandard.
It doesn't have contraception in it.
If you want to keep it, you idiot, go ahead.
But we're going to mandate the insurance companies tell you every year when it renews that it's a lousy plan.
I'm using my own verbiage here for what the Landry Bill says.
It doesn't say together.
They have to tell you it's a substandard plan.
They have to tell you it's a deficient plan.
They have to tell you there are better plans out there.
So they're going to shame you out of your plan that you like one way or the other.
That's the point.
But the thing about the Landrew Bill is that there's no end to it.
You get to keep your plan forever if you want, which again flies in the face on the other side of the street with Obamacare, which doesn't permit it.
The insurance, this is going to start a war with the insurance companies and the Democrat Party, and it should have three years ago.
The insurance company should have never bought into this.
They should have never signed onto it, but they saw these magic 30 million brand new customers and so forth.
And they saw the lure of being close to power and so forth, but they should have seen that they were the targets all along.
Look at the Democrat Party enemies list.
Big oil, big retail, big insurance.
And all of a sudden, the Democrats love them.
What a crock.
So anyway, that's the Landrew plan.
Now, let's go to the wonder kid at the Washington Post.
The young and super smart Ezra Klein.
What are you?
You don't like Ezra?
Well, Ezra's like, that's right.
He's 27 years old.
He knows it all.
He's right there with Nate Silver, who left the New York Times, by the way, so he's kind of lost some cachet.
He went over to ESP, and the liberals think he's a traitor.
But Ezra, who started that journal list, if you recall, he's the guy that started it, the Association of Liberal Journalists collaborating on news bias.
Anyway, he was one of the founders of it.
Ezra is really worried about all of this, and he's terribly concerned about the Landria bill.
The Affordable Care Act's political position has deteriorated dramatically over the last week.
This is Ezra's realization.
President Clinton's statement that the law should be reopened to ensure everybody who likes their health plans could keep them was a signal event.
It gives congressional Democrats cover to begin breaking with Obama.
And he's right about that.
And why did Clinton do that?
I think President honors commitment.
That's what I think.
And I'm the one to talk.
I lied for the grand jury about Monica and the condom and the blue dress, but everybody stands out.
But I think he ought to honor his commitment.
And of course, that's to set Hillary up, obviously.
So point number two from old Ezra here is the most serious manifestation of the break, Democrats from Obama, is Senator Mary Landrew's Keeping the Affordable Care Act Promise Act.
By the way, that's the name of her bill.
How about the Keeping the Affordable Care Act Promise Act?
So the title of the bill admits that Obama's been lying to people.
Title of her bill is the Keep the Promise Act.
It is co-sponsored not just by the usual moderate Democrats, I maintain there aren't any of those, but Ezra thinks there are Mary Landrieu, Dianne Feinstein, Mark Pryor, and Kay Hagan, the glittering jewel from North Carolina.
Also has Oregon liberal Jeff Merkley.
Now, the argument Landrew is making on behalf of the bill will appeal to a lot of Senate Democrats.
She said, Landry did on the Senate floor, when we passed the Affordable Care Act, we did so with the intention, if you liked your health plan, you could keep it.
What she's saying, we believed Obama too.
And she was one of 10 Democrats running all over the country, promising people they could keep their plan if they liked it.
So she's on the floor of the Senate.
She said, when we passed Obamacare, we did so with the intention that if you liked your health plan, you could keep it.
They are trying to say in a disguised way that they too believed Obama and got hoodwinked.
Then it's totally gutless because they knew, folks, every Democrat who voted for Obamacare knew you were not going to be able to keep your plan.
They knew it.
You were never going to be able to keep it.
Number four: the bill that Landria is offering could really harm Obamacare.
It would mean millions of people who would have left the individual insurance market and gone to the exchanges are going to stay right where they are.
And that's true.
You keep your plan, you don't go to the exchange.
So even if they fix the website, nobody's going to go there.
That's not good for the law.
Assuming that the people who hold on to the plans they like are younger and healthier and richer, Obamacare's premiums will rise.
Why?
Because the younger, healthier, richer will keep the plan they like, because it's cheaper than going to the exchange and having their premium double and their deductible triple.
So what that means for those of you who don't keep your plans and who have to go to the exchange, your premiums are going to skyrocket even more than they are now.
And this is why the Democrats are concerned that the Landrew bill is going to ultimately harm Obamacare at large while it serves this mix of people that get to keep their plan who had it taken away from them.
Put simply, the Landrew bill solves one of Obamacare's political problems, the lie, at the cost of worsening its most serious policy problem, and that is adverse selection.
Right now, the difficulty of signing up is deterring all but the most grimly determined enrollees, and they happen to be the elderly and the sick.
The elderly and the sick are the ones beating down the doors of the website to try to figure it out and sign up.
And that is leading to an older, sicker, riskier, more expensive pool of customers.
The people signing up for Obamacare, even though it isn't very many, are the last people an insurance company would normally insure.
And this again means that everybody else's premiums are going to skyrocket because of the Landrew bill.
Landrew's bill would lead to a sicker, older risk pool.
Obamacare has provisions meant to stop an out-of-control death spiral, but higher premiums are a real danger.
How much higher will premiums rise if Landrew's bill passes?
Nobody knows, but it's going to be massive, folks.
And because of all this, insurers would freak out.
Some insurers would end up pulling out of the exchanges for 2014 because they would say that their premiums are now inadequate and the rules have changed.
And that's from Larry Levitt, the vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
And they'd be right, of course.
So this is why I said earlier, if you keep your plan, that your premiums are going to skyrocket.
Because it is such a shock to the insurance companies who have been planning for three years to cancel you and replace you with something else that complies with the law.
Now they have to accommodate you for another year.
And the thought is that that, in combination with LandRux, will force some insurers just to pull out of the exchanges because they can't insure the old and the sick.
They just, it doesn't make any sense to do it.
And that would require another Obamacare mandate to come in there waving the dictator magic wand and telling them they have to.
Nor is it clear, if the Landrieu Bill passes, that that's the end of it.
Once Congress reopens Obamacare, and that's what this does, then where does it stop?
This is like reopening Social Security, reopening the Constitution.
Once you do that, it could be a disaster.
Now, one more thing about this Landrew bill.
And again, I don't know what the status of the Upton bill is, but I still maintain, despite pushback from the GOP, the Upton Bill is a trap because it allows the Landrew Bill to become the law of the land.
The Republicans don't want their fingerprints on this, I don't think.
Anyway, Mary Landrew, ladies and gentlemen, is trying her own version of the limbaugh theorem.
Mary Landrew voted for all of this.
She voted for Obamacare.
Mary Landrew knew that people were going to lose their current policies.
And now here comes Mary Landrew in the midst of a reelection campaign where she has lost her lead, all of a sudden acting like she didn't know.
And she's trying to ride in on this white horse and save everybody their plan.
But she voted for this law.
She voted against every effort to change this law before October 1st.
She is as phony as every other Democrat is on the, and I'm sorry if that sounds partisan, but I don't intend it sound partisan.
I'm telling you the truth.
Every Democrat who voted for this knew exactly what this bill contained, as did Obama.
Back in September of 2010, every Senate Democrat, including Mary Landrew, voted to reject a plan that would have killed Obama administration regulations that now have resulted in the cancellation of insurance policies.
Mike Enzi from Wyoming introduced a bill that would essentially kill Obama regulations that result in you losing your policy.
She and every Senate Democrat voted against that.
She had a chance back in 2010 to save your policy.
Every Democrat did.
She voted against it.
She voted for you losing your plan.
Now she's doing her own limbaugh theorem by coming here and saying, oh my God, I didn't know that Obama was lying and starting to save the day.
She's as culpable as Obama on this.
Ha.
Her you, El Rushbaugh talent on loan from God and another epic broadcast, an excursion into broadcast excellence.
Lodi, California next.
Hi, Dave.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, thank you, sir, for taking my call.
I'm flattered you're here.
I would plead to the heart and soul of Rush Revere to allow me three to four minutes max to make my statement, and I will not interrupt after that.
I can't make that pledge.
Three to four minutes, you could end up boring half the audience.
You're not a seasoned, highly trained professional.
I'll try.
Give it a shot.
I'll start with a quote from an Irish statesman in the 1700s, Edmund Burke.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
And I say that this is 120% applicable to the first mixed-race president, Barack Obama.
And I'll go further and draw a comparison to Reverend Jones and his cult followers, where Obama is Reverend Jones, and the followers are his administration, the Democrats in Congress, and 98% of the mainstream media.
And you better not say that 2F by T is the Kool-Aid.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Not a chance.
They're all drinking the Kool-Aid to the point of being intoxicated by lies, cover-ups, and no accountability.
And this is all a result of a scandal finally sticking to the Teflon president.
Well, that's the thing.
Will anything stick?
I have to tell you, the drive-bys have reviewed the press conference.
Some of them have.
And I have to, Luke Russert at NBC called it a disaster.
Somebody at MSNBC said the president is obviously in pain.
It is being called incoherent and rambling.
The president in his press conference apparently blamed the media for not telling anybody any of the good news.
But somebody in the media said, well, he didn't tell us any good news either.
Honestly, I haven't seen, I've just seen those two or three reviews.
Luke Russert, I think it was somebody, I don't even mention the name of somebody at ESPN, or rather MSNBC, there's no point.
But it was some anchorette infobabe there.
It's a disaster, incoherent, rambling hour.
And they made note of the fact that Obama really blamed the media for not reporting any of the good news, any of the good things happening.
And whoever wrote this review said, yeah, well, he didn't either.
He didn't tell us anything good was happening in the rollout of Obamacare or any of that.
So whether or not this, I'm going to call it a scandal sticks, we'll see.
Grab something number three.
Ladies and gentlemen, old buddy Andy McCarthy was on with Megan Kelly last night on Fox.
Andy wrote a fabulous piece at National Review Online making the case that all of this is a very impeachable offense, that Obama has committed real fraud, criminal type fraud, with his lie about you being able to keep your plan and keep your doctor.
I made the point that if you compare Obama to Madoff, Obama is far worse.
Madoff lied to a select few dupes.
Obama lied to the country.
And even in terms of money, Obama's fraud and deceit is costing this country far more money than what Madoff lost and cheated out of people.
So let's listen a little bit to Andy here.
Megan said to him last night, you wrote a column for National Review Online that says Obama's guilty of fraud, serial fraud.
Far more serious than people who routinely get prosecuted by the Justice Department.
Just the lie about if you like your plan, you can keep your plan, which basically just scratches the surface of the fraud here, was repeated systematically and numerous times years after we can prove that he knew what he was saying was not true.
We have millions of victims.
There'll be untold billions of losses here.
If ever there has been a fraud on the entire American people, it's this one.
We're talking about serial fraud on multiple levels.
So then Megan Kelly said you can prosecute for somebody for material misstatement, material omission, if there was something he should have disclosed but didn't.
But this is an exercise in theoretical discussion because nobody's going to indict the president.
So what's the remedy, Andy?
If people believe, as the polls suggest they do, that they have been intentionally lied to by the president, what is the remedy?
The remedy the framers gave us for reining in executive excess, especially if it gets this abusive, is impeachment.
Now, impeachment is a political remedy.
It's not a legal remedy.
So even if you can prove high crimes and misdemeanors, and I don't think there'd be any problem actually proving them, it doesn't even make sense to have that discussion until there's a political appetite in the country to actually remove the president.
I don't think we're anywhere close to there at this point.
However, this is a big, scandalous scheme.
It is.
And it remains to be seen if it actually attaches to Obama and if his Teflon doesn't work.
That's right.
They just, not a weight loss guy.
It was this guy, this guy that, not just weight loss, what was his name?
Kevin, what's his name?
Somebody.
He's always doing fake Larry King-looking shows and stuff and selling all kinds of it.
This guy got put in jail for defrauding people on a weight loss scam.
Kevin, I can't remember his last name is well known to the Vegematic audience, the Ronko Bamboo Steamer crowd and the, what's the other big thing?
The Vamboo Steamer, the Vegematic.
Kevin Trudeau, that's the guy's name.
Put in jail.
It's exactly right.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back.
We got much more on the other side.
We get back.
I'll tell you it.
The insurance companies are not going to be happy.
The insurance companies are fit.
They are fit to be tied, ladies and gentlemen.
Because a lot of them got out of markets.
A lot of them left states, all kinds of things.
This is an absolute mess for these guys.
So, in the old days, like three years ago, you'd think everybody would just snap to whatever Obama wanted, they would do it, and they would have back then.
But it's a different day.
And I think we've, I don't want to speak too soon.
I think some threshold has been crossed now, particularly with his media analysis of his press conference today.
It was rambling.
It was incoherent.
It was a disaster.
That's just three reviews.
And then others are an insurance company saying, hell, no way.
I mean, that's relatively new.
I mean, the guy pretending to be dictator waving his wand, and then people are saying, well, no.
And he's not used to that.
Other than from his wife, which that's why it goes to five guys to burger up.
Well, he does.
He has to leave the White House instead of eating, you know, what, roots and berries and twigs and stuff.
That could be half the problem.
Anyway, Tom in Brooksville, Florida.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Rush, great to talk to you.
Two things.
It's great to hear all this talk against Obamacare, but nobody ever talks about the cause of the problem, which is the high cost of medicine.
We ought to have tort reform, which, of course, will never pass because half the people in Congress are lawyers.
They aren't going to cut their own throats.
Insurance companies, they always pay off more than they should.
I remember 35 years ago, one of my kids was in the hospital, and we got the bill for it.
I asked for the bill.
He was in there for three weeks.
They charged him for two days.
He wasn't even there.
And this kind of stuff goes on all the time.
I know.
I know.
And it happens because the third party's paying the bill.
Paying the bill ups costs.
Look, I know what you mean.
In the context of Obamacare, nobody does talk about the high cost other than under the false impression that Obamacare is going to reduce costs.
But in terms of the root cause, the real problem with it.
We've tried to talk about that at great length on this program, and that is if you simply get health care back priced in such a way that customers can afford it, you'd solve the problem.
And there are ways to do it.
And we do talk about that here, but that's down the road.
I understand that's the biggie.
Well, that's it, my friends.
Another epic excursion into broadcast excellence is in the can.
We have to take a 21-hour break.
We'll be back for Open Line Friday.
Thank you so much for being with us, folks.
Always great to have you here.
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