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Dec. 2, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:50
December 2, 2013, Monday, Hour #1
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Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 podcast.
You know how in a lot of states when people plead not guilty to certain crimes, claiming that they are mentally incapacitated or mentally ill, and the jury has to decide.
You got a bunch of laymen up there trying to figure out, is this guy crazy or is he merely dangerous?
Is he warped or is he truly nuts?
That'd be a tough thing to do.
There's a fine line between being crazy crazy, where you literally don't know what you're doing, and being crazy as in depraved, sick, but you do know what you're doing.
One of the things that they always try to sell the jury on when you're trying to sell someone that they're criminally insane is well, this person's delusional.
He's delusional.
He's hearing voices, he's saying things that aren't reality.
You can't hold that person accountable for the decisions that they make when they are clearly delusional.
Now we throw that word delusional out all the time.
Liberals are delusional.
We engage in hyperbole.
What if they actually right now are delusional?
Watch an MSNBC.
They're flipping cartwheels.
They've got this banner that's been on like all morning.
The fix is in.
The website is fixed.
Huffington Post, RIP, Obamacare Repeal Movement, everything's fixed.
It's all working fine.
There are no more problems.
The Republicans can't gripe about Obamacare anymore.
Everything is fine, everything is wonderful.
The website's not fixed.
It's all screwed up.
But it isn't just the website.
And I've got to admit there are some people on our side.
They're concerned that they figure eventually these idiots have to get the website fixed, and people are going to be able to sign up, and that'll be the end of all of the complaining.
And the Democrats are trying to convince themselves of this.
Debbie Debbie Wasserman Schultz or whatever her name is, the is she's she's still the chair of the DNC or do they fire her?
I think she's still in charge.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the DNC, we're going to own Obamacare.
By next year it's going to be so popular, we're going to run out of it and we're going to win.
The website will be taken care of, people will sign up, and this thing's going to be wonderful.
No, it's not.
It's going to be worse.
Every month that goes by, Obamacare is going to get more fouled up.
Every month that goes by, it will become less popular.
This website thing that they've been having such trouble with, which by the way, isn't fixed, by their own acknowledgement, 30 to 40% of the thing isn't even built out, while people are now able to get on the site, evidently, and they're able to sign up, sort of, the insurers aren't able to process the applications.
The part of the website that allows the insurers to verify the identity that somebody is who they say they are, in other words, if my I Mark Belling sign up, they've got to be able to prove that I'm Mark Belling.
That isn't fixed.
And the part that allows them to process the application so that they're able to verify my income, that isn't fixed either.
So it's not fixed.
People may be enrolling, but they're not signing up and they don't have any insurance.
Nonetheless, this part, let's admit it, is the easy part.
Signing up for something.
Anything in life, the easiest thing to do is to sign up.
You can sign up for anything you want in our world.
The hard part is doing something.
We're not even into the doing yet.
We're two months into Obamacare, and we're only at the part where people sign up.
They're now claiming that they have the sign up fixed, which they don't.
And they now think that that means that everything is going to be happy ever after.
That's delusional.
It's not going to get better.
It's going to get worse.
Now the reason that they're out there today saying the website is fixed is they know that most Americans don't have to go on the website.
The only people who have to go to the website to sign up are those people who are going to sign up for the Obamacare exchanges.
Those several million people that were buying their insurance to the individual market don't have a plan to work, who choose to get their insurance from what they call the marketplace, the exchange.
That's a minority of the American public.
The rest of us who have group plans to work or on Medicaid or are on Medicare, we don't have to yet at least be part of this.
So Obama's playing to us.
The people who still have to go on this website and sign up, they know it's not fixed.
They're going to go on there, they're going to spend a couple of hours, they're going to enroll, and they're going to find out they don't yet have any coverage because the insurer is not able to process anything.
But most people don't know that because they don't go on the website because they're not part of Obamacare.
So Obama's telling us that this is fixed so that we believe it's fixed.
He's trying to make us delusional also.
Let's just tell everybody that it's fixed, claim that we've accomplished our goal of having the thing up and running by December 1st, even though it isn't.
Try to sign up, and you'll get a few people.
I signed up, and they're all excited.
Have you signed up?
Contact your insurer, see if they have your name, see if you're enrolled.
Now, as to my point that everything is going to get worse, the thing that the Democrats haven't processed is that the plan that they have created is the worst public policy initiative in America in decades.
This is basic stuff now.
But when something is really, really, really stupid, when it goes into effect, it doesn't work.
That's what's going to happen here.
Let's go beyond the website for a moment.
Even I acknowledge at some point they're probably going to have the website running.
I remember doing my local show in Milwaukee on October 1st.
Tried to sign up myself.
Same as everybody else, I went through the nightmare that they call glitches.
Didn't go anywhere.
I said to my audience, okay, fine, let's cut them some slack.
There are probably tens of thousands of people out here just checking it out to see what it's like.
Maybe you're going to have problems the first couple of days you try it.
It's probably going to get better by October 6th.
That's what I thought.
And I have as low an opinion of these people as anyone.
Maybe the 15th.
They don't have it right by October 18th, and we can really get on them.
Well, here we are, December 1st or December 2nd.
They're claiming that it's fixed when it isn't.
It's probably at some point going to work.
Even at the remarkable level of incompetence that they show, you assume maybe by January or February, maybe even by Christmas, they'll have the thing working.
It's time to move therefore beyond the website.
Here are the problems that are staring the United States in our face.
And the reason that this isn't going to get better, it's going to be worse for them.
One of the things that isn't up and running on the website yet, for the people that are signing up, are any details about the coverage that they're getting?
Oh, you can choose the bronze plan or the silver plan or the gold plan or the platinum plan.
And you can be quoted the rates, which by the way are way higher than any of these people suspect.
They're going to sign up and they're going to see, oh, okay, I'm finally gotten to this point of signing up.
Here are these prices.
Shazam, they're high.
But even then, what doesn't exist on the website is any real detail about the plan, including who your provider network is.
There's something going on right now in the United States with these insurers that are part of Obamacare that has gotten scant coverage.
I know it firsthand because I've looked into it in my own community of Milwaukee.
The insurers that are agreeing to provide insurance under Obamacare, in many instances, have very narrow provider networks.
Most people who have insurance right now, if you're part of a PPO or an HMO, lots and lots of doctors in hospitals from your communities are included.
You could pretty much go to just about anybody and expect that they're going to be part of the provider network for virtually all Insurers.
That's not the case in many of the states where Obamacare is in.
I could think of one particular insurer that's very active in Wisconsin on our Obamacare website.
It has limited all of its physicians to one physician group.
Wait till these people sign up for Obamacare, finally get their coverage, and realize that the doctor they've been going to for 10, 15, 20 years, isn't part of the provider network for the new insurance that they now have under Obamacare.
They're signed up for Obamacare, they have their silver plan for which they're paying through the nose.
They go to their doctor's office.
They hand over their little card, their Obamacare card.
Oh, our I'm sorry.
We're not part of that plan.
What do you mean you're not part of that plan?
I've been going to see Dr. So and so for 15 years.
These people are going to find out the second big Obama lie.
He told us for years.
If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance.
And what was the next thing he always said?
If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
Many of these people are going to lose their doctors because the doctors aren't part of the plan that they just signed up for under Obamacare.
That's going to be the next shoe to drop.
And there's a lot of shoes that are about to come down.
Who is it on Captain Kangaroo that would always mess with the captain by making the ping pong balls come down?
Was that Mr. Moose or was that Bunny Rabbit?
I'm reverting to my childhood to understand the Obama administration.
Anyway, on Captain Kangaroo.
One of his characters would come down and they'd always play a joke on the captain, and 500 ping pong balls would come crashing on top of the captain's head.
That's what Obamacare is going to be.
It's all of these ping pong balls are going to come down.
The shrinking of the physician network isn't going to be limited to the companies that are providing insurance under the exchange.
Here's why.
The sign-ups for Obamacare, even if they get the website fixed, are going to lag.
There are a lot of people who currently don't have insurance, who are told that they've got to pay this fine to the government if they don't go out and buy insurance.
They've calculated that the exorbitant cost of the insurance under Obamacare is way more than what the fine is.
Plus, they hear about what the hassle is.
If you don't want to do something in the first place, and then you hear that the sign up process is a hassle, it's another reason that you're not going to do it.
The people who are going to sign up and get through, who are going to wade through this horrid mess of this website, are going to be the people who really need insurance.
People in their 40s and their 50s.
People have two or three or four kids, maybe one of whom has had some medical problems.
In other words, sick people.
They're the ones that are going to sign up for Obamacare if they don't have insurance elsewhere because they need insurance.
The healthy people in their 20s and their early 30s.
They're going to avoid this thing like the plague.
What that is going to do is put real pressure on the insurers that are part of Obamacare.
They're going to have to cut their costs because they're in the nightmare scenario.
The designer of Obamacare himself called it the death spiral.
The only people signing up are sick people who are going to put in a lot of claims.
The people who aren't signing up are the people who are healthy who don't put in any claims.
So we're not going to get premiums from the people that are healthy.
We're only going to be getting premiums from people that were paying out more than they're paying in.
The insurers are going to be forced to do two things.
They're going to have to adjust their rates down the line, but in the interim, they're going to have to do everything in their power to control costs.
The provider networks will shrink even more.
Every insurer will tell you that it is cheaper to have a provider network that has a small number of doctors and physicians that you can manage rather than have all everybody under the sun included in your network.
In other words, even more doctors and hospitals will be dropped from the exchanges.
The Obama lie of you can keep your doctor will be therefore broken again.
Then there's going to be what happens when the employer mandate kicks in.
And remember, he delayed that for a year.
But employers are going to be planning for it this year.
Everybody says, well, we're going to be kidding a lot of the employers, you know, they're going to be denying coverage and forcing people to go on to Obamacare.
It's not the only place they're going to go.
I'm walking us through a national nightmare, as you can tell here.
And I'm not doing this to depress you.
I'm doing this to tell you that the Democrats who think that this is all going to get better and everybody's going to be happy in the United States are living in a serious delusion.
This thing is going to be way worse than they can imagine.
And the reason I know it's going to be way worse than they can imagine is it's way worse than the critics like me imagined.
I don't care how critical you were of Obamacare when it was passed, you got to admit it.
It's worse than we thought it was going to be.
Well, if it's worse than we think it's going to be, and we think it's going to be terrible, imagine how much worse it is than the Democrats than the left thinks it's going to be, given the fact that they were fans of this thing in the first place.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Rush is going to be back tomorrow.
Here's the phone number, 1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882.
We're talking about not only the present of Obamacare, the website that is still busted, the one in which the insurers can't process any enrollees, but the future and this belief on the part of the left and the supporters of the president that once Obamacare kicks in and people sign up, they're going to realize that the sky hasn't fallen and things are just fine.
In fact, things aren't going to be just fine.
They're going to be way worse than most people imagine.
George Will made an interesting point yesterday on Fox News, and I want to work on it here for about 60 seconds.
He's pointing out that when the employer mandate approaches, which is the end of this year, rather the end of next year, 2014, it goes into effect January 1st of 2015.
Indeed, because the cost of insurance is going up, there are going to be many employers who will simply drop coverage.
There's been a presumption on the part of many of us that that's going to result in lots of people being dumped into the Obamacare exchanges, which is true.
Those of us who have group health plans, if our company drops them, if we're not lower income people, we're going to be essentially compelled to either buy on our own in the individual market or go into the Obamacare exchanges.
But there are lots of Americans in the workforce right now who are relatively low income.
They're not going to go to the Obamacare exchanges.
They're going to end up on Medicaid.
Medicaid is health care for poor people.
It's called certain things in certain states, but the federal program is Medicaid.
Under Obamacare, the income levels for Medicaid eligibility were raised.
Most states, or at least about 25% of 25 of the 50 of them, chose to go along with that and take expanded federal money in exchange for raising the income level under Medicaid.
In other words, many people who are currently not eligible for Medicaid, which is essentially free health care for low-income people, they're going to be in the future.
If you can get free health care, obviously you're going to take it.
When these employers start dumping their own group health plans, a significant portion of the workforce, the lower income portion of the workforce, lower lower middle class people, people that have several kids, they're going to find themselves on Medicaid.
Already in the United States, there are many doctors who don't take Medicaid patients, or they limit the number that they will take.
The reason for this is that the government reimbursement under Medicaid is lower than what private insurers pay for the same type of treatment.
It's way lower.
There have been complaints about this for years.
If somebody goes in for a procedure and they're on Medicaid, the government pays far less than if someone comes in and pays for the it's getting the same procedure and they have private health insurance.
This is going to result in another major Shoe dropping.
When Medicaid is dramatically expanded, and a higher percentage of Americans are on Medicaid, this is going to create a crisis in the medical field.
You're going to have all of these people that are getting coverage, but being paid paying the doctors only at this reduced rate.
There are going to be many physicians and many physician practices that either drop Medicaid patients entirely or limit the number that they can take.
The same factor is going to be occurring with the individuals that are part of Obamacare in these insurance plans that have small provider networks.
There will be a crush to see the handful of doctors that still accept Medicaid.
There will be a crush to see the handful of doctors that are in these Obamacare Exchange covered plans that have the narrow provider networks.
That's the future.
Mark Bellingham for Rush.
I've been walking you through here in the first half hour of the show.
The reasons why I think that Obamacare is going to be way worse than people expect, and the political damage for the Democratic Party is going to be a lot worse than not only Democrats anticipate, but even some Republicans.
Now I made a couple of points in the first half hour of this discussion, and I talked about what's going to happen when employers are dumped out of the employers dump their employees out of group plans at work, which will certainly happen.
People are going to have to go into Obamacare, creating pressure on these very narrow physician networks that are being created.
The insurers are going to end up with big bigger losses than they expect.
They're going to have to control costs by having a small number of doctors available.
This is going to create a crush for people that are going to try to get into their doctors.
The same thing is going to happen with lower income people under Medicaid.
Remember, when your health care is free, you're tempted to go to the doctor a lot more frequently than people who pay deductibles.
Many people are now going to be on Medicaid.
Medicaid physicians are going to start shrinking.
They're going to go away.
Physician practices, hospitals, clinics are going to either limit or eliminate the number of Medicaid patients that they take.
This will result in tremendous weights for your physician.
It's going to happen among the private market and among people that are receiving their care through Medicaid.
So what's going to happen here is this.
You're going to see rates generally having to go up.
Private insurers are going to have to raise their rates because the cost the doctors charge to them will go up because they've got all these people on Medicaid.
For people who are on Medicaid and in the exchanges, long waits for their doctors.
The bottom line is this in the United States.
For many people, they're going to lose their doctors.
The doctors that they are stuck with having to go to, they're going to have long waits to be able to come in and see them.
And for people that are still in the private market getting plans from their work, they're going to find that their rates go way, way, way up as the cost that is assessed to these insurers increases as well.
We're going to have a country in which we pay way more for our health care and in which many Americans are going to have a hard time getting in to be able to see their doctor.
All of this is going to happen coming up in 2014.
That is not going to be good for the Democratic Party.
When people see that their health care coverage is worse, they've lost their doctor, they're paying more, and they're going to ask themselves, why did we do this?
And the explanations from the president are going to fall on deaf ears.
Already he's lost his credibility because of the problems they've had with the website and because he was exposed in the lie about being able to keep your insurance.
You're going to have an angrier and angrier group of people in the United States getting poorer health care coverage, waiting longer to see their doctor, and everybody's going to know what the reason for all of it is.
The reason will be Obamacare.
Let's go to the phones.
Let's start in Slate Hill, New York.
Dave, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Good afternoon, Mark.
Can you hear me?
Yes, I can.
Hi.
Yes, sir.
Good afternoon.
I uh was I heard your comments before in regards to the health care website.
Over the weekend, I uh uh had a chance to peruse the federal website, which of course you healthy New York.
Uh I'm an employee, obviously.
I'm also an elected official on a local town board in Orange County, New York.
And uh it's twofold.
Uh when I went to see if I could get some quotes on the New York website, of course, guess what happened?
It crashed.
So what you say is obviously true.
It's just uh, I guess smoke and mirrors, I guess is the way to put it.
Well, they talk about the federal website, which I think is 35 or 36 states that are people are that are part of the uh the federal Obamacare program.
We keep getting told that it's better in the States, but then I hear callers like yourself, New York is not part, New York is running its own set of exchanges where your system went out and crashed.
All of these things seem to be not functioning well.
We hear that some states the signups are doing better than they're doing under the federal plan, but in every instance it's way lower than is projected.
People aren't signing up in the numbers that were anticipated.
They're either going to go put what'd you say?
No, nothing.
Go ahead, I'm listening.
I met the Medicaid factor also, uh HR is uh advising me in addition to your call there, Dave.
So yeah, I I mean the the whole sign-up process that we're told is fit being fixed really isn't being fixed.
No, and I like I said, as an elected official in a local community in in Orange County, it's twofold because in that case, we as a uh a town councilman, I'm quote part of a group of five, which are the employers of over 30 or 40 people that live within a municipality, and they're genuinely worried as I am that in 2014, regardless of the employer uh mandate extension, that we're not going to be able to afford, or the taxpayers that I represent uh are not going to be able to afford any type of coverage.
And our uh insurance carrier said that the plan that we had for our employees this year, earlier this year would not be available.
Then all of a sudden, about a month or two, three months ago, came back and said, You're good for another year.
Now, you can't tell me that there's something in the works.
Well, but I think what you're driving at is, and I didn't get into all of the shoes that are going to drop, it's just like the ping-pong balls on Captain Kangaroo.
All of these plans that we were told on the people bought on the individual market that people are no longer eligible to get.
Many of these plans provided by employers come next year when the employer mandate kicks in.
Remember that was delayed for a year.
They're not going to be eligible either, and companies, employers, in your case, a governmental employer, are going to have to change their policies as well, and they may not have the money budgeted for it.
For it, just as many private businesses aren't going to have the money budgeted for it.
That's when the big dump occurs.
Companies drop their group coverage.
People either go into the exchanges or your lower income employees go in to Medicaid, and Medicaid is going to be overwhelmed.
Medicaid will not only be overwhelmed, all the people on Medicaid, the government is not paying the full cost of their payment, resulting in massive cost shifting over to the private employers in which they're going to be paying way more.
All of this is going to happen within the next twelve months.
When you've got doctors and medical practices getting less money than they anticipated for providing levels of care, it's going to requ require all sorts of cost cutting.
And that's going to mean delays for people to be able to see their doctor, delays for procedures, insurance policies that are being tightened and not approving all coverages.
The same thing that we see every other place that socialized medicine is in place.
All of those horror stories they've heard about the long waits in Canada and in Europe, all of that is coming here.
So this notion that once they get this stupid website fixed, everything's going to be hunky-dory, belies the fact that we've already seen with regard to Obamacare, the things that are in front of us.
Thank you for the call, Dave.
Appreciate it.
Let's try Jackson, Tennessee, and Jerry.
Jerry, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with the guest host, which is me, Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, I appreciate you taking my call.
And my question uh specifically is really directed more toward people that are in my situation of the low uh income category, which we were just above the poverty level.
Uh we're still required to carry health insurance, but for me, uh more specifically, my financial obligations are already stretched to the maximum budget.
Now the government is trying to force me to incur more expenses for health care.
So my my concern is that when this happens and the penalty takes place and I have to pay the penalty, uh I can't afford the penalty, therefore, the way I understand it is if I can't pay the penalty, I may actually have to go to jail uh for not paying the penalty.
And and so to me, and I may be wrong, Mark, and you may be able to correct me, and uh, but it it seems like they're putting me specifically in a position of where I may have to choose to quit my job in order to keep from going to jail.
Your situation, I hope everybody followed what Jerry said there.
Currently, you've got an income, but it's lower income.
You have an income from your job.
In order for you to get insurance, you're buying probably now either on an individual market or you're gonna go into Obamacare, but the cost for that policy have gone way, way, way up.
You can't afford to buy the policy, right?
Right.
And you also can't afford to pay the fine.
The one solution for you would be to get rid of your almost all of your income so you now can go on Medicaid.
Your income is now low enough that you can go on Medicaid and you get the health care for free.
In other words, you've calculated that the hell of Obamacare is so miserable that the only way you can get health care is to make yourself unemployed.
That's how you're calculating your personal real life situation.
Did I get it correct?
Yes, sir.
That's exactly from everything that I'm reading and all the information that I've consumed over the internet.
That's exactly the situation it seems that the government has forced me to be in.
Well, now that's the best point you've made, Jerry.
You don't understand the logic behind all of this.
There is no logic behind all of this.
The whole purpose we were told of Obamacare was to insure more people than we're insuring and to lower the cost of health care.
It's the reason they call the stupid thing the affordable care act.
Yet you, calculating your own real life situation, are finding out that not only is this not the affordable care act, it is so unaffordable that the only solution that you see in your own personal situation is to quit your job so that you can go on welfare and Medicaid.
And if you're wondering where the logic is in this, there is no logic in it.
The reason that so many of us have criticized Obamacare from the beginning is we felt that things like this would occur.
But I can I think I'm speaking for most rush listeners, most conservatives, most people adamantly opposed to Obamacare.
This is worse than we even feared.
I have a caller calling up here who's worked the numbers, thought about his own personal life.
He can't afford health care and the exchanges.
They caught it costs a fortune.
Okay, fine.
Maybe he can go without any health coverage at all.
Boy, that's a wonderful thing that Obamacare is doing.
It's driving this guy out of the ability to be able to even get health insurance.
He can't afford the fine.
His only solution is to go on the dole entirely, go on to Medicaid, get health care for free.
He's now an unemployed American.
Thank you for the that's a great call.
And I I I feel for his situation.
And I walk through all of these scenarios that are going to occur in the abstract.
That's a real deal.
He's lower income, but not low enough that he's able to buy the health insurance and be able to pay for it.
His costs for the health insurance have gone through the rough.
Well, okay, maybe I'll just go without health insurance.
Think about that.
We have Americans who are currently insured, who are thinking about le leaving their insurance policies.
Isn't that the exact opposite of what was supposed to happen under Obamacare?
Obamacare was supposed to result in more people being insured.
So Jerry thinking, well, maybe I just won't have insurance.
I'll just pay individually for my treatments, pay as I go along, not have a policy.
But then I got to pay that infernal fine to the government as well.
Can't afford that either.
I might just be better off not having a job and taking Medicaid.
Boy, this is great public policy.
The way he talked, he may well have to do it.
These things are going to happen in the United States.
And the left thinks that Obamacare is going to be popular when people are thinking about quitting their jobs because the only way they can afford health insurance is if they are so poor that they've got to give it to people for free.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Remember all the ridicule that W. Bush got for the big mission accomplished banner on the aircraft carrier, in which he high-fived and celebrated prematurely about the war in Iraq.
Wall Street Journal editorial is suggesting that's what the Obama people are doing about.
Fixing the Obamacare website, mission accomplished.
Of course, the website isn't fixed.
The people who are being forced into Obamacare because they can't afford individual policies or their individual policy that they had before was canceled on them.
They're going to go and race to the website now, healthcare.gov because they're told it's working, and they might fight through what's remaining of the glitches, only to get to the point in which they sign up for health insurance, but the insurer isn't able to process their application because the income verification software isn't working, and the identify identity verification software isn't working.
The clock is going to get kicked closer and closer to January 1st.
This person may be somebody who actually needs health insurance.
They may not have it, but oh yeah, this is all fixed.
Then we get real life stories like the caller from Tennessee, Jerry, who talks about what he's facing because he's seen what the quotes are.
You know, a lot of people have avoided going to healthcare.gov who are going to need to sign up for this thing because they heard that the website isn't working.
When do they get on there and they see what these prices are?
Even the bronze plan, the so-called cheapo plan, that's merely one in which you pay a lower premium, but then very, very high deductibles.
With these policies that cover everything under the sun that you don't need.
The single male buying an insurance policy that covers pregnancy, required to be priced into his plan.
Yeah, it's fixed, all right.
Let's try Sunrise Florida and Steve.
Steve, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
And I'd like to uh yeah, keep my plan.
I said I'd like to keep my job.
You know, I'm worried about you know being laid off because I get too expensive, or you know, they might minimize employees and get more employees to do more, and you know, keeping a few around and just getting rid of the others, you know, that cost them too much for the legacy cost of uh having insurance on employees with the insurance.
A lot of companies work on thin profit margins.
Or or no profit margins right now.
What you describe is real when you have more and more people moving into Medicaid, as I believe is going to occur, and the Medicaid reimbursement rates being so low, this is going to require doctors and hospitals and clinics to raise their prices on people who pay with traditional insurance like yourself.
You're an employee.
So therefore the cost of coverage to employers is going to go way up, probably in year number two.
Those prices will start being quoted next year.
Employers are going to be looking at one of two things dropping the coverage altogether, or deciding that a worker like you, Steve, is not worth all the cost.
You don't have to face Obamacare when you go overseas with your operations.
All of the natural consequences of driving up the cost of health care are going to play themselves out.
It's just so ironic that they dubbed this thing the Affordable Care Act, which is the name they now use.
They don't want to call it Obamacare because it's got a bad stigma.
Affordable Care Act doesn't help them.
It becomes a parody.
Calling this thing that's going to be more expensive for everyone, the Affordable Care Act, it's almost like they're ridiculing themselves.
But your concern about being able to keep your job, that's real.
Yeah, scary.
Thank you for the call.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling in for Rush, the lefties all think, just we'll get past this website, everything's going to be fine.
What makes you think anything's going to be fine when everything that's happened so far on Obamacare has been terrible?
Remember, he had to delay a few parts of it until next year it was so bad.
Let's try White Plains, New York.
And Rich Rich, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Can you hear me?
I can.
Okay, Mark.
Just about by every measure Obamacare has been a train wreck wreck, was predicted to be a train wreck, and will continue to be a train wreck.
The Democrats refuse to incorporate any Republican input for the new law.
So tell me how they get away with saying that part of the problem, which there are obviously problems now, is because Republicans want it to fail.
How exactly does that work?
Well, I mean, is that some kind of telekinesis that the Republicans have where their will can actually affect the language of a law?
Is this the Jedi mind trick or I or a Vulcan mind melt?
Well, I'll give you the answer.
I'll give you the answer to all of this, Rich.
They like to blame Republicans for everything, and they want to blame us for problems with the plan that they pass.
The of course the answer is that the argument is stupid and nobody's going to fall for it.
One of the mistakes of all Of the many that they made in passing this was that they didn't even reach out to a handful of moderate Republicans, moderate the plan down a little bit, get somebody like Susan Collins to vote for it.
By passing this with entirely Democrat votes, they have total ownership of this.
Furthermore, whether you agree with the Ted Cruz tactic or not of trying to, you know, on the government shutdown of trying to block Obamacare, that did accomplish a purpose.
The Republicans made it clear we tried to stop this.
We tried to prevent this terrible thing that's happening to our country.
The Democrats can claim all they want that the Republicans are willing this thing into failure.
If we had the ability to will it into failure, we would have been able to will this thing not to pass in the first place.
They own this thing entirely.
It's going to do nothing but get worse, and all of the problems that occur in this country are politically going to be laid on them.
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