All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 23, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:33
December 23, 2013, Monday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Y'all knew Rush wasn't gonna be here, right?
It's two days before Christmas, the day before Christmas Eve.
This is the day that people like me get a national forum.
And trust me, I'm gonna take advantage of this.
I'm gonna take full advantage of it.
This is the closest I'm ever going to come to doing a Rush Limbaugh Christmas program.
Tomorrow's Christmas Eve, today's December 23rd, but that doesn't mean it's Christmas.
No, no, no, no.
Today's the deadline.
This is beautiful stuff.
Today's the deadline to sign up for Obamacare if you want health care next year.
Unless you're in this group or that group or whatever other thing that he signs tomorrow, plus you can still sign up through March 31st of next year and get some health care.
The individual mandate sort of applies to you, and it sort of doesn't.
Admitted, nobody really knows what's going on.
They don't even know what's going on.
He keeps changing his own rules.
I'm willing to bet that other than this is only a maybe, those of you who work in the health care field, you're in the benefits area for some major medical company or some big clinic or some big doctor's office.
Take those few of you out of there.
I met nobody in the Rush audience, including me, including Bo Snerdly.
Nobody really knows who's supposed to have to sign up by today, do we?
And nobody really knows now who's exempted and who gets the claim that they're a hardship.
Obama doesn't know.
This is just full-scale scramble.
Here's where we're at right now in our country.
This is what happens when you get a bunch of lefty eggheads from the Ivy League plotting and scheming their perfect world.
They have all of their intellectual discussions.
If only we could do this, if we ever got power, we'd do that, and they draw all of this elaborate stuff up to create their perfect world, their utopia.
And then once, for the first time all time in all time, we actually did what they were drawing up.
So they drew all of this stuff up, and here we are now, December 23rd.
We're nine days away from the start of the new year.
Is that right, yeah?
Nine days away from the start of the new year.
Obamacare's about to be here.
And they're finding that all of this elaborate stuff that they drew up is a complete disaster.
None of it works.
So you've got Democrats freaking, and I'm telling you, Democrats are freaking.
This how many of these did you bring me?
Bo Snerdly brought me this stack of stuff of Democrats that are frustrated and scared about this, this, and this and this.
On and on and on and on.
The ranks are breaking, they're cracking.
The American public doesn't know what to make of Obamacare.
They know that it isn't working, yet they hear they're supposed to sign up.
The insurance industry, the ones who sold themselves out, they're in all out panic because he keeps changing the rules on them.
And today's the day you're supposed to sign up.
Well, guess what?
We're here to help.
I have made the executive decision in the absence of Rush that the Rush Limbaugh program today will be here to help all of you who are trying desperately at the last minute to sign up for Obamacare if you need it.
So all you need to do is call up some special lines that we've set up here at EIB.
1-800 You're screwed.
Now that should get you right through to one of these benefit consultants who will sign you up and take care of everything for you.
We've even put together a couple of websites.
I got one.
Where is it over here?
W dot WWW dot www.thewait will last forever.
WWW dot com.
So we're setting up all of those for you as well.
Before I get into anything in Obamacare, though, Vladimir Putin has released Pussy Riot.
Pussy Riots, this Russian punk band, women, feminists.
They've been in jail for two years because they've sang and said things you're not supposed to be able to say in Russia.
So they got let out this morning.
The rich guy who has been in jail for ten years was let out several days ago.
Now you may be wondering why Vladimir Putin is suddenly releasing all of his enemies from prison given the fact that he is a tyrant and like most tyrants tends to jail people who say things that he doesn't like.
Why is he letting them all out of jail?
I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the Olympics are coming up.
That's pretty close.
Two months away, Soshi.
So he doesn't want to have the world's media focusing on the most high profile dissidents that he's jailed.
So Mikhail Kodorovsky, that's his name, Kodakovsky.
He's let out.
He's the rich guy who owned the big Russian oil company, Yukos, committed the terrible sin ten years ago in 2003 of actually criticizing Putin.
They've had him locked up in some gulag for ten years.
Pussy Riot only had to do two years, but they're all being let out right now, or at least the ones we know about.
Those that nobody knows about, they're still in jail.
Like the Rush Limbaugh of Russia, he's letting them out now because people know about them.
But the other ones they're still in there.
Anyway, I was struck by this quote that Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who's the really, really rich Russian whose company they took away from him, his freedom they took away from him.
He's now out and he got off to Germany and he talked to the media.
And he offers this quote that's so good.
Quote, I think the Russian problem is not just the president as a person.
The problem is that our citizens, by a large majority, don't understand that their fate.
They have to be responsible for it themselves.
They are happy to delegate it, say to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and then they will entrust it to somebody else.
For such a big country as Russia, this is a dead end.
Wow.
Russian dissident saying, you know, the problem we have here in our nation.
We're willing to turn over the fate for our lives to Putin.
And when Putin's not in, we'll turn over the fate for our lives to somebody else.
You have to be responsible for your own fate, he's arguing.
Now his message, you've got to understand that's a tough sell in Russia.
They've never really had freedom.
You have generation after generation after generation that's done nothing but take orders.
Before Putin, you had the communists.
Before the communists, you had the czars.
There's no real history of self-determination in Russia at all.
There's no history of individuals being responsible for themselves at all.
You contrast that with the United States.
We're different.
Our country was premised on self-determination.
Our country was premised on freedom.
Our country was premised on self-reliance.
With Obamacare, the president and the left are trying to turn us into a nation in which, just like Kodakovsky talks about Russia, in which we are dependent upon someone else for our fate.
That was the whole grand plan of Obamacare.
Gradually, ever really since Roosevelt and then Lyndon Johnson, we've had more and more people dependent in our country on the government.
Social Security and Medicare, the two giant entitlement programs, food stamps, the welfare bureaucracy, the dominance of public schools in educating our kids.
We had all of those things in place in which people were getting so many important things from government.
But what they were missing is they didn't have the regular old middle class.
We were the ones that were paying the bills.
Private sector America, the people who aren't old and the people who aren't poor.
Create nationalized health care, force everyone into this system, and suddenly now we too, all of us, are dependent upon government.
We're dependent upon the man.
So what Obama has tried to do here is far more bodacious than anything that Vladimir Putin is doing.
Obama and his supporters are trying to take a country in which we fended for ourselves, lived our own lives, and were responsible for our own destiny, and made us now have to bow to the man.
And God forbid if you don't.
It ties into the other big story going on right now.
This whole flap over duck dynasty where these guys are now told they can't say what they think.
And I know it's not the government that's smacking them down.
Still it's the same thing.
We're a country now in which you're not allowed to say certain things.
You're a country we're a country in which our health care is going to be funneled through the government.
There's one big problem with all of it.
It doesn't work.
We've seen how well it works in every other country that is run by tyrants.
Nothing ever works.
Russia didn't subs didn't succeed under the Tsars, it didn't succeed under the Communists, and it's not succeeding all that well under Vladimir Putin.
He may have power and Russia may have influence, but it's still a pretty miserable place to live.
And that's what's happening here with Obamacare.
The reason you've got all this scrambling going on from the administration, this ignoring the Constitution by changing rules and changing the laws and changing the eligibility virtually every day, is the grand plan has actually come to the point in which it's starting to affect people.
You either have to sign up if you don't have health care or you don't.
If you want health insurance and you don't get it from your employer, January 1st, you're going to be on your own and you're in Obamacare.
And this is where it's all falling apart on them.
The problem that Obama had is that he sold this thing to the American public.
And remember, he had to get it through.
If he's going to create this great big giant entitlement that we're all part of, he did have to get it passed.
The problem is that he premised the whole thing on a series of lies, things that weren't true.
If you could summarize Obamacare and the promise in five seconds it would be, we're going to get everybody insured and all of us are going to pay less for our health care.
That's what he told people.
And he managed to get himself re-elected with that message.
We're going to get low-income people insured.
We're going to get those people with the pre-existing conditions insured.
And you know, those of you out there that are paying so much money for your health care, we're going to lower the cost.
That's what he told people.
Well, most of us who are dissenters knew that that couldn't ever happen.
He was describing the impossible.
He was describing the free lunch.
There is no free lunch.
But he said this is what we were going to do.
And they put in place this thing to make it work and make it happen.
So as we approach the start date for Obamacare, he finds, and his Democrats find, that it doesn't work at all.
People aren't signing up.
Never mind the fact that they created a dysfunctional website that makes it hard to sign up.
Even if that website was fully working, they weren't getting anywhere near the sign-ups they wanted.
The people who are signing up are by and large taking the bronze plan.
The bronze plan is the one that covers basically only your major medical.
The bronze plan on average has 4300 in out-of-pocket costs before your plan kicks in.
So the people that are signing up are finding that they didn't really have any insurance that they didn't have before.
They're still paying out of pocket.
The insurers who were so happy to be part of this, my goodness, we passed a law that requires the American public to buy our product.
They're now panicked because people aren't going to sign up.
The healthy aren't going to sign up.
Everybody's going to take the cheapo plan of the catastrophic plan.
They're going to be stuck with claim after claim after claim after claim, with nowhere near the number of premiums that are coming in, and the president who dragged them into all of this, he's now abandoning them.
He's telling them that they've got to accept people at any point.
He's telling them that they are going to have to take those people and give them only the catastrophic coverage, even though that was never part of the deal.
Every week that goes by, the scramble will get worse.
Every week that goes by, Obamacare will be worse because they've created a plan that cannot work.
And that's why I believe you see so many Democrats now starting to break away from the president.
Because while he doesn't have to run for election again, every member of the House and a third of the Senate, they've got to run next year.
And there's going to be a price to pay for what they've done.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
The telephone number when I'm here is the same as the telephone number when Rush is here.
1-800-282-2882.
2.
One of the problems that those of us who opposed Obamacare had during the run up to the vote in the Senate, and then even the presidential election, is that Obamacare has so many provisions that if you offer a criticism of one or two or three or four or five of them, they all blend together.
Even people who are critical of Obamacare and knew it wouldn't work, had a hard time keeping up on all of the elements of it.
That's why Nancy Pelosi made her infamous comment, you've got to pass the law to see what's in it.
We now see what's in it, and we see how much it really doesn't work and how nonsensical it is.
Like this.
On Friday of last week, Obama said that that five, six, seven million number Americans who had policies before that they bought on the individual market that were canceled.
They now are going to be automatically eligible for a hardship exemption from the individual mandate.
Remember the individual mandate is the law that says in the United States you have to have health insurance from someone.
Obama says that if your policy was canceled by him, by the government, because your insurance policy did not meet the minimum requirements of Obamacare, you now are exempted from the mandate.
In other words, if you don't sign up for Obamacare because you lost your old policy, you're no longer going to be required to pay that tax.
In addition to that, they created a special category of Obamacare insurance for people under age 30.
In other words, if your policy was canceled, one of the things that you can do is you can now be eligible for catastrophic coverage only.
You can go and get that.
So think about what we've accomplished here.
We had people who had perfectly good insurance plans that they were very happy with.
We've told them they can't have those plans anymore.
When this has created a panic in the country, when Democrat politicians around the United States are freaking about this, millions of people are without insurance, they're now being told that they have to sign up for Obamacare or get it from somewhere.
Obama now says, Oh, never mind.
You don't have to buy insurance at all.
Well, what was the point of what we done here?
I thought Obamacare's goal was to get people insured.
We had millions of people who had insurance.
He tells them they can't have that insurance anymore, and now says, Well, you have an automatic hardship exemption so you don't have to buy insurance.
If you look at this, it's almost as if he's trying to have fewer people insured, which of course will be the result.
So if I've got a plan on the individual market, and I'm canceled because my plan, according to him, isn't good enough, now he's telling me that I don't have to buy insurance after all.
So maybe I'll just sit it out.
Maybe I wanted to be one of these people who doesn't have any insurance.
My old plan is canceled.
I don't have to pay the tax because he canceled my old plan.
And now I'm a hardship case.
So here I've gone from being a person who had an insurance policy to somebody who doesn't have an insurance policy and is no longer required to buy an insurance policy.
Do you understand how stupid that is?
It's nonsensical.
It's crazy.
The insurance companies who bought into all of this, they thought that this was going to be a wonderful deal for them.
You'd have all these Americans, some of whom are buying the cheap old plans, the ones that were canceled, they're now going to be required to buy insurance.
And Obama's going to find them if they don't, and they'll even set up these exchanges where they can sell their plans.
Now the insurance companies are sitting back there thinking, well, what have we gotten ourselves into?
Six or seven million policies have been canceled.
The people whose policies are canceled are now being told they don't even have to buy any other insurance, or they can simply go out and buy a catastrophic plan.
If your goal was to lower the cost of insurance for everyone and get more of your fellow Americans insured, why are we now doing this?
And the answer is because the thing is all screwed up.
He had to come out and say something on Friday because Democrat politicians understood that you had millions of Americans whose policies were canceled, and they're now being looked at now being faced with having to go out and pay a fine if they don't buy something that they don't want.
They're telling the president that you've got to do something about this.
So one of the entire premises behind Obamacare, cancel all of these plans that they didn't want to have people on.
They now have to scramble and go and rewrite.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush.
Wall Street Journal over the weekend.
The number of Americans enrolling continues to fall short of the goals the Obama administration has laid out, which is a problem for the White House.
It also represents a problem for the insurance industry, which calculated that the prospect of millions of new customers brought their way by the Affordable Care Act and its coverage requirements would make up for any disruption that came along with the law.
The insurers are in panic right now.
Let's go to the phones.
Yes, Mark, thank you for taking my call.
Thanks.
Um I'm wondering now that since uh at the stroke of these pen or whatever, Obama, in effect, uh suspended the individual mandate for about a half a million people and told them they could buy bare bones policies, which are illegal under the law, really.
Right.
Or they didn't have to buy insurance at all.
Um he's giving cover to some vulnerable Senate Democrats.
How is he ever going to reinstate that?
I mean, you know, you have a campaign every two years.
It seems like every time we come up with a campaign, he has to suspend Obamacare.
You asked how is he gonna do this?
You ask a really good question.
Now why Lalette, you're you're right, and half a million is a guess.
Nobody's even sure how many people from the individual mandate's now been suspended for.
Why did he suspend the individual mandate for that five, six, seven, eight hundred thousand people?
Why do you think he did that?
Well, I think he's got uh several vulnerable Senate democrats who are running for the hill.
Who don't like the individual mandate, right?
Well, yeah, they're hearing from their constituents.
They're saying, why why is why am I do I have to buy this this Cadillac policy that's gonna double or triple my premium, double or triple my deductible?
And uh these these these people are hearing from their constituents, so Obama had to do something, so he said Because they don't like the individual mandate.
In other words, the people who are covered by the individual mandate, people who don't have insurance through their employer, they don't have a group plan or they're not on Medicaid or they're not on Medicare, they don't like the fact that they're being mandated to buy this thing.
They especially don't like that they're being uh mandated to buy something when they had something perfectly well before.
So now he's getting rid of this.
In other words, he's having to back off the individual mandate for this group of people because people don't like it.
That's very telling.
He's having to repeal piece by piece by piece his law, his thing that he's most proud of, because the American people can't stand it, and Democratic politicians don't want to take the blame for this thing they can't stand.
So your question is really good.
Since he's taking this group of people and saying that the individual mandate doesn't apply to them, he's extending deadlines for others, he's allowing people to buy catastrophic.
Is this permanent?
Does that mean that these people are out of the requirement forever?
And if the individual mandate's going to be suspended for them, why not suspend it for everyone?
The answer is I don't think he knows.
I think they're scrambling.
This is a quarterback that's running around out there with no offensive line.
The defensive line's coming and he's looking around trying to find somebody to throw the ball to.
I don't think they know what they're going to do.
They may announce a further suspension of this thing tomorrow.
There may be another one on Friday.
When January first comes out and their projections for the number of news sign-ups is way low, they may have to change some rules again.
I think you ask a very good question, and you know who doesn't know the answer to it, Bob?
They don't.
I don't think they know how they're ever going to be able to reinstate it.
I don't think they know what they're going to do tomorrow.
This thing is such a nightmare, which is beyond what they expected.
They actually, I think, thought this was going to work.
This thing is such a nightmare, and they're getting such pressure from Democrats in the Senate that they're just scrambling and changing things and making it up as they go along, which of course he doesn't even have the authority to do.
The law Says there's an individual mandate.
He can't just come out and say there's not an individual mandate for those whose policies I manage to cancel for you, but he's just doing it because he feels as though he has to.
Thank you for the call, Bob.
Let's go to Crofton, Maryland and John.
John, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Yeah.
Merry Christmas, Mark.
Merry Christmas.
Uh notice you uh used a football analogy.
I guess uh uh you and Greta Van Susterin uh like the Green Bay Packers, your cheese heads, I assume.
Yeah, it's uh it's not been a good season.
No.
Well, it's we're still we're still alive.
We win next week, we're in.
We're still alive.
We we lost seven straight down here in Washington, D.C. I'm not a uh a Redskins fan, but uh I think this is the worst season they've had since nineteen ninety-eight.
But the reason I called is I'm just wondering, you know, today is the deadline to sign up.
This uh uh signing up uh thing has been uh a real nightmare.
They didn't know what they were doing, they had to change the person that's in charge, uh Kathleen Sibelius.
Uh uh she admitted that uh the navigators don't even have to have security clearances.
Uh our uh uh our identification is uh compromised, or the government's taking shots at Target now because Target had some slip up, and uh well, what about all the uh uh uh identification uh uh slip ups uh with people trying to sign up for uh Obamacare?
Yeah, I love that that they're ripping on target because there is a security.
You had a bunch of leftists in the White House, they're all the same.
But uh getting back to Obamacare, he's got all these waivers, delays, subsidies, new deadlines.
Uh uh went to the Supreme Court, uh, the thing that they call the tax is actually a penalty.
And Roberts, the chief uh uh I think you're driving at a question.
What's your question, John?
My question is why do people uh concern themselves with uh meeting this deadline?
The government has to get their crap together first before you should worry about it.
Well, I think the American public are the people that are subject to this deadline, they're answering that.
They're not complying.
They're not signing up.
They're figuring, you know, they don't think the IRS is going to find them for a long, long time.
So that's the whole problem here.
If you're somebody who's out there and you don't have health insurance right now, and you've got a decent enough income, so you're eligible for maybe you're eligible for a subsidy, maybe you're not, and you've been paying pretty much out of pocket.
Why would you sign up for Obamacare?
Thank you for thank you for the call.
I want to I want to walk through what he asks.
Why would anyone comply?
The bronze plan is the one that most people are signing up for so far.
That's the cheapo plan.
The bronze plan has an average.
This is across the United States, of course, it's going to be different from state to state.
But the average out-of-pocket health care cost for someone who signs up for the bronze plan will be forty three hundred dollars before their insurance kicks in.
True, there are some things that are free.
There's the free health screening and some of the preventive stuff is free.
But for basic medical coverage, you're pretty much going to be on your own for the first four thousand three hundred dollars if you buy the bronze plan.
So why are people taking the bronze plan?
Because it's the cheapest.
If they want to have their insurance kick in earlier, say 2500 out of pocket, they've got to go up to the silver plan or the gold plan or the platinum plan.
They're all focusing on the cost, trying to buy the health insurance as cheaply as they can.
So they're buying this bronze plan, which requires them to pay thousands of dollars before the insurance kicks in at all.
Well, why do that?
Isn't that essentially the same thing as not having insurance?
The one thing that bronze plan will do is it'll cover your major medical.
If you have a heart attack, you have a terrible condition.
If you've got something in which thousands and thousands, thousands of dollars of medical bills come your way, it will pay for that.
But there are all sorts of people out there, especially the young and especially the healthy, who have gone years without health insurance, figuring I'll just pay out of pocket.
So now they find an individual mandate that tells them they can get insurance, but guess what?
They're still paying out of pocket.
Talk about the sticker shock that they're going to face.
They weren't buying health insurance before.
They are buying health insurance now, But they still don't have anything that's paying for their bills.
Nothing's paying for their drugs, nothing's paying for their doctor appointments.
They're in the same boat that they were in when they didn't have health insurance, but now they're being forced to pay for something that isn't really health insurance.
The same thing with the catastrophic coverage.
So tell me what problem we've solved here.
We haven't solved anything.
The reason we created an individual mandate is that we were attempting to force people to buy insurance at inflated rates for the young and the healthy, so that we could subsidize care for everyone else.
But people have figured this scam out.
They figured out that it's a rotten deal.
They aren't really getting insurance.
They're paying for an expensive policy that doesn't cover anything until they're several thousand dollars in.
So they're voting with their feet.
Well, people, and it is not just the website.
The sign-ups are going poorly because there is a complete lack of enthusiasm among the people who were the targets for all of this, the suckers.
The people who were told you need to buy this, and we're gonna go out and find you, because we need your money.
And there's I'm not gonna sign up.
The rules keep changing.
He keeps extending the deadline.
Why should I sign up for this now?
They'll never find me on the fine, they'll never be able to find me to find me anyway.
Or I'll just pay the fine.
It's still cheaper than the cost of buying this bronze plan, which I don't want because it doesn't cover anything.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling's sitting in for Rush.
Charles Crowdhammer, Washington Post.
This came out over the weekend.
The story of the year is a nation waking up to just how radical Obamacare is, which is why it required such outright deception to get it passed in the first place.
Obamacare was sold as simply a refinement of the current system, retaining competition among independent insurers, but making things more efficient, fair, and generous.
Free contraceptives, free mammograms, free or subsidized insurance for thirty million uninsured, and not costing anyone a dime.
In fact, Obamacare is a full-scale federal takeover.
The keep your plan if you like your plan ruse was a way of saying to the millions of Americans who had insurance and liked what they had.
Don't worry, you'll be left unmolested.
For you everything goes on as before.
That was a fraud from the very beginning.
The law was designed to throw people off their private plans and into government run exchanges where they would be made to overpay, forced to purchase government mandated services they don't need as a way to subsidize others.
Well, he's right about that.
The reason why all of these people had to be canceled is you had to come up with some way to force them into the system, force them into the exchanges where they pay higher rates with services that they didn't want or don't need, so that you can take all of their money and provide the subsidized coverage for everyone else.
That was the whole point of this.
But now that they've done it, they've canceled all of those plans and tried to force people in.
There's this mass rebellion going on.
People aren't signing up.
And the ones who are going to sign up on today of the deadline, they're not happy about it.
They're complaining to the Democrats who voted this thing in.
So you get this panic in which Obama's now trying to pull back the very thing that he passed.
Well, wait until we actually get into Obamacare.
This is going to completely break down.
You're going to have way more claims coming in for the people that are in the exchanges and the people who have health insurance.
They're going why?
Because the people who are signing up are the ones that are sick.
The people who are signing up are the ones who have to go to the doctor all the time.
In the meantime, the people that we dragged into this thing with the individual mandate, forcing them to come in, they're not there.
They're not signing up.
And you can pretend it's because they have a rotten website, which they do.
The reason they're not signing up is they think it makes no sense for them to sign up.
They're going to ride this thing out, they'll pay the fine if they get caught, or maybe they'll sign up for the cheapest plan of all, meaning the insurers don't get anywhere near the money and premiums that they need to pay out in all of the claims that they're going to have from these people with the preexisting conditions and everybody else who went into the Obamacare exchanges.
Let's go to College Station, Texas, which is where I think Johnny Football's from.
Uh Jim, you're on EIV with Mark Belling.
Merry Christmas, Mark.
Merry Christmas.
You hear I've heard a number of people say that Obama's arbitrary delays of of various parts of the Health Care Act are unconstitutional.
So where are the legal challenges and will there ever be any?
You know, you ask a good question too.
Both nerdly's giving me very interesting callers here.
Well, it clearly is unconstitutional.
The President of the United States can take a law and change it.
He doesn't have that authority.
The reason why I think no one is challenging this is because the changes he's making are changes that the public is demanding.
For existence, for instance, everything he's doing really is watering down Obamacare, right?
Well, if you're a Republican, you want Obamacare watered down because Obamacare stinks.
Bo points out there are some challenges, and people are doing this.
I don't think you're seeing a lot of high profile people getting on this because they don't want to confuse you.
If you're, for example, a Republican senator, do you really want to file a lawsuit to try to force Obama to enforce the individual mandate?
That confuses people.
But the point you make is a real one.
You've got a law that's pla that's passed that doesn't work.
You've got a law that's passed that people are hating as they're seeing it, and a president who's just pretending that this part of the law doesn't have well, we're not going to enforce this.
We're not going to enforce that.
You can't do that with the law.
It requires an act of Congress to change to change a federal law.
He's just making this up as he goes along.
It's a remarkable power grab.
There are some challenges, and in the courts, I suspect that much of these changes that he's making are going to be deemed to be illegal because the president doesn't have the authority to just run around and say, I'm going to change a bunch of laws.
He doesn't have that power.
Well, it seems like the insurance companies have something to lose because not as many folks are signing up as they need.
So they're the ones with uh they're the ones that might have a motive to challenge such things.
Yeah, and you know, I uh they're in a real pickle here.
And I don't feel sorry for them because the insurance industry, not the smaller companies, but the large insurers, they were part of the selling job on this.
They thought that they were going to be just fine.
So I don't feel all that badly for them.
But here's the problem with them filing a challenge.
Do they really want to hack off Obama right now?
Given the fact that he's making all of these dictims, he's already fouled up all of their financial models by backing off the individual mandate, telling people that they only can sign only need to sign up for the catastrophic, and had such a terrible website that they can't even enroll the people who are trying to hand trying to sign up.
If you're an insurance company, aren't you kind of terrified right now?
He has the potential of destroying their businesses.
So I suspect they don't want to challenge this, but what they're doing is a lot of grumbling.
I mentioned that Wall Street Journal story uh, Karen Incogni, who's the top representative of the insurance industry in Washington, just talking about all of these problems that all of these changes these that he's bringing in are going to create.
But how much do they really want to complain?
They're probab they're they're terrified of him for two reasons.
A, he's proven completely incompetent at administering the law, and B, they don't know what he's gonna do next.
Because you've got Obama and the Democrats trapped in a corner right now.
It's a political corner, and they're gonna lash out and try to blame anyone that they can for the problems that exist.
All of these people who signed up, if their enrollments aren't properly processed, the insurers are going to end up getting the blame for that.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
There are real victims in this beyond the country.
Suppose you're somebody who had an individual market policy.
It's been canceled, you've got some medical issues, maybe you've got an overactive thyroid, maybe you've got a heart problem.
You need insurance.
You've been looking into Obamacare, you can't even get onto the stupid website.
Finally, you're moving yourself around over there, and now you see what the cost for these plans are.
You're not sure whether or not your enrollment is going to go through.
You're not sure what's a good idea for you.
You've got regular old Americans that don't know what to do.
I mentioned at the beginning of the hour that I'm guessing other than the people who are in the industry, almost nobody knows right now who's ha who has to sign up and when and what you're required to do.
This thing's a complete foul up.
They had years to put this together.
It wasn't just the website.
The whole plan is falling apart, and they keep changing the rules again and again and again because it doesn't work.
In a way, they're getting what they deserve.
Unfortunately, the victims are all of us.
▲
Export Selection