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Dec. 27, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:19
December 27, 2013, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
You know, this is one of the only days of the year where it's actually okay to say those two crap words, happy holidays.
I'm okay with it right now.
You know, yesterday through the next few days.
That's about it.
Otherwise, happy holidays is just you're just hiding.
You're cowardly.
You don't really want to say what you're what you what you mean to say.
I may explain that later, I may not.
Rush is rightly proud of his stack of stuff.
You know, I bet he references his stack of stuff.
Every day he does a show.
I got a stack of stuff and then he wrinkled me on the whole thing.
Well, I can't be Rush.
That was made pretty clear to me 25 years ago when Rush started to be Rush.
I try to, you know, throw my cloud around in my radio station in Milwaukee, and I talk about the things that happen here when I do the Rush Limbaugh program.
Well, at Russia's studio, you're not in Russia's studio now.
You're in Milwaukee.
Well, but Rush is it, you're not Rush.
All right, I'm not Rush.
And I know that I'm not Rush.
I am one of the people who fills in when Rush isn't here to distinguish me from the other Mark, Mark Stein.
He's the guy whose accent you can't figure out where it's from.
Mine is the one that you all think is from Canada.
I got that just recently at the airport in New York.
A woman said, You're from Canada, aren't you?
No, I'm not.
No, I'm not.
I still have a good health care plan for five days.
Anyway, Rush brags about his stack of stuff.
And while I'm not Rush, I think I can confidently state that my stack of stuff for today's program is as good as any stack of stuff that Russia's ever had, and that's a really good thing because today is Live from New York City.
It's open line Friday.
I used to be intimidated when I come in on Friday and do open line what open lives?
The callers.
Take control of my future.
I'm just a fill-in as it is.
The potential to screw up is you know, it's infinitely greater for a guest host than it is for the regular host of the program.
But today I embrace Open Line Friday because there is so much material to cover, and let's get started at it right now.
There's a remarkable piece in today's Wall Street Journal.
And I don't want to oversell this, but it is.
It's remarkable.
There's a physician from New York named Dr. Mark Siegel.
You may see him on Fox News.
He's one of the medical correspondents or medical commentators for Fox News.
In addition to that, he's a professor of medicine at the New York University's Langone Medical Center.
He has a piece in which he talks about how Obamacare will erode the quality of care for almost all Americans.
A lot of people have talked about that.
But very few, I think, have explained it really well as to why Obamacare will affect the quality of our care.
I think many people presume that it will, because the whole thing is governmentalized and bureaucratized, but they aren't sure exactly how it comes into play.
He writes about that today.
The title of the column is The Death of the Bedside Manor.
The Death of the Bedside Manor.
And he talks about a day a few days ago in which his office manager called in sick, and he had to handle some of the appointment work.
I want to read you a few paragraphs in this piece.
It's extraordinary stuff.
And I think it will help you understand why Obamacare isn't just a financial nightmare, why it isn't just driving up the cost of everyone's insurance, why it isn't merely failing to achieve its goal of providing insurance to the uninsured, but how it will not only affect the economy of our country and make our lives more complicated, but it will literally affect our health.
Let me give you a few paragraphs here.
He writes, my office manager who protects me from the daily insurance grind of referrals and approvals and pre-certifications and blood drawing was out sick.
Thus the veil was lifted from my eyes and I awoke to the harsh realities of our medical future.
One patient was severely depressed and needed medication and a referral to a psychiatrist.
Another was having trouble breathing from asthma that requires inhalers.
A third had a faded rash on her arm that she was ready to call a spider bite until she showed me a two-day old iPhone photo.
It was the angry red rash of Lyme disease.
Each problem had an effective treatment, but each visit took over half an hour to carefully complete.
Patients still have the expectation that their doctor will be patient and listen carefully.
But one by one, doctors and patients are awakening from that comforting vision of the past to the rushed, restricted world of the Obamacare future.
I was forced to forfeit the vision I had of myself as an old country doctor practicing in a big city.
For me and many of my colleagues, the real practice of medicine is supposed to involve an intimate encounter with each patient and a diagnosis of illness leading to a potential cure.
In the future, however, a diagnosis of Lyme disease or the severity of a patient's depression may be missed because showing the photo or taking an extensive mental health history doesn't fit squarely into the ten minute visit authorized by insurance, along with mandatory computer documentation, insurance verification, and appointment scheduling.
These problems predate Obamacare.
But the new law brings more regulations and low quality insurance at a time when we are already struggling to comply with the electronic health record mandate.
Supporters of health reform will say that the Affordable Care Act didn't cause all these problems, that President Obama shouldn't be blamed for wanting to make sure that everyone has health insurance.
Unfortunately, the kind of insurance that is growing under Obamacare's fertilizer is the exact kind that was jeopardizing the quality of health care in the first place.
The kind that pays you for seeing a doctor when you are well, but where guidelines and regulations predominate and choices restricted when you are seriously ill.
That's a great point.
I want to go back to it.
He continues, how can quality of care not be affected if the antibiotic or statin drug or MRI scan I feel you need isn't covered under your plan?
How can Obamacare be labeled a success when it adds layers of bureaucracy to an already overburdened system?
This month, even as HHS struggles to fix the health exchange websites, the Obama administration announced that errors are occurring on the back end between the government and insurers at a rate of one out of four enrollees.
That means that when you come to see me in January, assuming I actually participate in your narrow new Obamacare network, there is a substantial chance you'll never make it past my front desk.
Because your new insurance will not be active.
Since insurers are being compelled to cover more folks with pre-existing conditions, with no lifetime limits, and to cover everyone in a family plan up to at least the age of twenty-six, all popular provisions of the ACA, they reduce costs by cutting fees to vulnerable doctors, while restricting the tests they can order.
This makes the practice of quality medicine almost impossible.
But it helps preserve an insurance company's bottom line while complying with a government mandate, he goes on, but that piece is in today's Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Mark Siegel.
The point he makes is this.
We are loading all of this extra bureaucracy into the healthcare system.
This comes at a cost.
The compliance with all of the regulations and requirements are going to require doctors and hospitals to add staff to deal with all of the red tape.
That's money that would have gone into the practice of medicine.
He also argues that all of the new things that are mandated.
Obama, for example, brags about the free mammograms, the pre prevented h preventive care, and so on.
The insurance companies that have to pay for that, he argues, are going to squeeze everywhere else.
The point that he made, already we have insurance biased ward and now it's going to be worse.
Getting all sorts of healthy people to come into the doctor.
Look at under the Obamacare mandates, what's guaranteed to be free?
It's all this preventive stuff, and I'm not arguing preventive care is bad.
But if doctors' offices are going to be clogged with people going in for all of the free stuff, the preventive stuff, the people who are actually sick are going to have a harder time getting in to see their doctors.
And when they do get in, they may be rushed through out of sheer necessity.
If the insurance companies are going to put limits on the length of off at v office visits, we're not going to compensate you one for one that's 30 minutes.
The doctor's going to be rushed.
Things are going to be missed.
This is a practicing physician's perspective on what's going to happen.
They want to wring savings out of health care.
Just like a dirty old dish rag, squeeze it and squeeze it and squeeze it and squeeze it.
While doing all of these additional things, supposedly insuring new people and providing all this preventive care.
But when you do all this squeezing that Mark Siegel, the physician is talking about, fair amount of quality is being squeezed out.
I can relate to this.
I've had the same doctor pretty much as long as I've been in Milwaukee.
The thing that I like about him is he listens to me.
The thing that most people don't like about their doctors, and people complain about their doctors, if they've got a doctor that they don't like, he doesn't listen to me.
It feels like I'm talking and he's in another world, or he doesn't understand what I'm saying.
Well, part of that listening is taking the time to do it and not rushing the patient.
So when you go in and you're describing your this, that, or the other thing, you can take the time so you don't miss the detail that allows the doctor to think, oh, that's what's wrong with old Belling over there.
That's why he screwed up this time as opposed to the 38 different things that he came in for before.
When we rush, rush, rush all of this, maybe that detail won't come out.
When we start squeezing out, well, let's not do this test or the other test.
Maybe that's when we're going to miss the thing that really is the problem.
It isn't just an insurance plan, this Obamacare.
This is going to affect the quality of our health care at the level that you and I reside.
I've got a lot of stuff today on Open Line Friday, and that means I've got to give you our phone number here.
1-800-282-2882.
That's the phone number every day on the Rush Limbaugh program, even when I'm here.
My name is Mark Belling, and I am sitting in for Rush.
Does anybody care who's working with me on the program?
I think the audience cares, don't they?
Bo Snerdley is call screening and producing.
I actually have a rare appearance from broadcast engineer engineer Mamon here.
The guy we call Friday did the uh program when I was here on Monday.
Now it's Friday, and Friday isn't here and we have you.
Well, let's go to Naples, Florida on Open Line Friday.
Debbie, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Hi.
Hi.
Um, with regards to the um editorial that you were just reading and your remarks regarding what's happening to um to your doctor's visit in general and and health insurance problems.
My physician that I had had down here for many, many years switched over to a concierge practice several years ago, and I signed Up with him knowing exactly what was coming and what is coming down right now in terms of doctors not having time.
It doesn't make any sense from a common sense point of view that you can introduce millions of people into the health care system and still have the same access that you had before.
That's an excellent point.
Now, I believe that they're actually going to be fewer people in the health care system because Obamacare's fundamental goal getting more people insured.
I believe that by the end of next year, by this time in 2014, fewer people will have health insurance than have it now at the end of 2013.
But what we will be doing in here through A, the expansion of Medicaid, and B, the mandates and all of the things that will be free.
Remember, if you buy one of the cheapo policies, the bronze or even the silver plans, you've got huge out-of-pocket costs, but there are some things that are in there that are free.
That's where the thing that you describe is going to happen.
People are going to come in and take advantage of the pre of the things that are free.
In addition, some people who may not have been insured in the past are suddenly going to gravitate into their doctors.
There's going to be this crush on the system.
The other part, though, is you mentioned that your doctor went over to a concierge type practice.
The other thing that's happening is these health insurance plans have narrow physician networks.
They don't have every doctor in your community in it.
A lot of the doctors, especially some with the smaller practices that aren't part of the larger groups, they're being aced out of this.
That means there are going to be more and more people in to see those doctors that are part of those narrow networks, again, the crunch, in order to get the kind of quality of care that you need.
Some doctor visits can be handled in ten minutes, but some require an hour.
When you bureaucratize this whole thing and force that it require that every patient be treated in a cookie cutter approach, one size fits all.
This is how long the visit can occur.
This is the drug that this patient could receive.
This person has high blood pressure.
You must put them on this.
Well, the doctor said, Well, maybe he needs to go on that.
Or maybe I need to do an additional test to see what the cause of the high blood pressure really is.
That's the stuff that's going to suffer as a result of Obamacare.
Thank you for the call, Debbie.
I've got remarkable story here about VISTA.
Remember VISTA?
You always used to hear about VISTA.
It was like the stepbrother of the Peace Corps.
Become a Peace Corps volunteer, and if you're too chicken to go overseas, join VISTA.
Well, VISTA has sort of merged with AmeriCorps.
It's the volunteer program for people who want to do good things here in the United States.
Today's New York Times reports.
This is beautiful stuff, really.
The employees of VISTA, which is part of the government, have been told that they're all, all of them, are going to lose their health insurance.
They were just told this, just this month.
They're going to lose their health insurance.
You know why they're going to lose their health insurance?
Because their plan does not conform to the requirements of Obamacare.
See, it isn't just individual plans.
There are some group plans that are provided by employers.
The thing that's just so special about this is who's the employer that was providing the group plan to these workers for Vista and Americor?
government.
Obamacare has just resulted in the cancellation of an insurance plan that was provided by the government.
This is creating tremendous hardship.
Let me quote from the New York Times story.
The notice is surprised and worried workers in AmeriCorps, the federal community service program that is often described as a domestic version of the Peace Corps.
Mary Strassen, the director of the AmeriCorps VISTA program, described the changes in a bulletin to members December 16th.
December 16th.
They're telling them about what's going to happen to their insurance on January 1st on December 16th.
The coverage provided by the agency, the Americor Health Care Benefits Plan, quote, does not satisfy the individual responsibility requirement of the Affordable Care Act, which takes effect on January 1st, Strasser said.
Accordingly, she said, VISTA members may be required to pay a tax penalty if they do not have other coverage and do not receive an exemption.
Now remember, a lot of these people are volunteers or people being paid Low stipends.
They're going to end up with nothing here.
Or they may be forced to comply with the individual mandate and get their own insurance because the coverage that they were provided, the coverage they were being provided by Barack Obama's government doesn't fit the requirements of Barack Obama's new law.
The impact, according to the New York Times and community service workers, is another.
I love this.
Unanticipated consequence.
How many of those are there is another unanticipated consequence of the health care law, which is making coverage available a little or no cost to many uninsured people, but disrupting coverage for others who already had it.
One little story, just out there in America.
People who are volunteering for the government are losing their health insurance because the coverage they had that they were perfectly happy with, they're being told wasn't good enough for them.
Now they got nothing.
I'm Mark Bellingham for Rush.
You hear that?
I don't mean Johnny Donovan introducing me.
Christmas bumper music.
Big conflict between me and the staff here.
I argue there should be Christmas bumper music today.
The staff of Eastern elitists, they don't want to do the Christmas bumper music.
Here's my uh here's my position on this.
Christmas starts too early.
This October nonsense that's that's garbage.
Now the Black Friday starts on Thanksgiving Day.
Thanksgiving no longer even exists.
We have instead Black Thursday or whatever it is, where they start to We celebrate Christmas so early that by the time the Christmas actually gets here, people are sick of it.
You're not supposed to be sick of Christmas.
I don't want to hear the Christmas bumper music in October.
I don't want to see the stale stuff in November.
Does anybody even remember what Christmas is?
Christmas is supposed to start on Christmas.
The religious element of Christmas, I know there actually is one, said that Christmas season is to be celebrated by Christians for twelve days between Christmas Day and the Epiphany, which is an early January.
That's why that worst of all Christmas Carols, the twelve days of Christmas came about.
This should still be the Christmas season.
Instead, people want to be so done with Christmas.
Well, that's because you all started so doggone early.
If you wouldn't have been celebrating Christmas on Labor Day, you wouldn't be sick of it by the time we actually get to Christmas.
Beast.
Uh both snerdly argues that the 12 Days of Christmas is now a planned parenthood song.
My retort to that is we have a lot of people for whom Christmas hasn't even started.
They ordered from Amazon.
Their stuff's just showing up now.
For them, today is Christmas.
So we're plan.
Do I have the ability to order you guys around or not?
I know, as I was saying before, I'm not Rush.
We don't know if Brush would actually want the Christmas bumper music played now because Rush probably has never ever worked December 27th in the entire history of his program because he would probably be taking vacation, leaving the show over to people like me who are apparently too big for my uh britches, which is plausible.
1800-282-2882 is the phone number.
It is open line Friday.
Let's go to Tucson, Arizona.
Steve, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
How are you doing, Mark?
Thanks for taking my thank you.
Hey, um, a couple of months ago we got our insurance canceled.
We're two of the six million people that got their insurance canceled.
Uh, our insurance company uh emphatically said that we had to go on the website to get insurance, and we we weren't gonna do it.
We didn't do it.
Uh it finally came down to where I went down to the insurance company.
Uh, the vice president of the company called us back.
Uh they're headquartered in Tucson.
So I went down there.
Don't name the company, but keep going.
I'm sorry.
Don't name the company, but keep going.
Okay.
The vice president called us back the next day after I physically went down there the day before and said, Steve, you don't have to go on the website.
All you got to do is go see an insurance agent and get insurance.
And I said, You're kidding, right?
So what I did is I called our insurance guy who insures all our other stuff, made an appointment, went in there, and got insurance just like the old days.
Um the reason I'm calling is that since then I have asked everybody I know and I've talked to them and I've told them the story.
Not one of them knew that you could go to an agent to get insurance.
Not one person.
That is correct.
If you if you I'm trying to figure out, I understand why the liberal politicians have not told people this, but why haven't people like John McCain come out and been shouting from the rooftops, telling people that all you have to do to get get another policy is go to an insurance agent.
Well, there are a couple of caveats to what you say.
If you do go to an insurance agent and you don't go through Obamacare, you're probably not going to get the subsidy.
But if you're not eligible for a subsidy, it doesn't matter.
That's right.
As Steve is pointing out, the individual mandate merely requires that you have insurance.
It doesn't require that you get it from the Obamacare exchanges.
The policy, however, does have to be one that is a conforming plan.
So in other words, what they kicked you off of, what they canceled your policy, they replaced it now with something that conforms to Obamacare.
But you're right.
Anybody who wants to go out and buy an individual policy from an individual insurance agent can still do so.
However, the if you if you're eligible for a subsidy because of your income, that insurance company's going to have the same problem as everybody else has and getting through the website and so on.
But if you don't need a subsidy, you're right.
You don't have to go and get the insurance that way.
I think you're probably correct that a lot of people who have been canceled and presume that they have to go now go to an Obamacare exchange, you still can go by an individual policy.
It's likely to be different than what you had before, and it is going to be one of these cookie cutters that Obama now says is okay for you to buy.
Thank you for calling Steve.
Let's go now at Victoria, Texas.
John, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark.
Um great show today.
I'm a surgeon down here in uh in Victoria.
And one of the things that's in the Affordable Care Act is this accountable care organization that doctors and hospitals are putting together to meet the requirements so they can gain a little bit more money with their with their reimbursement.
The problem with this is in the old days when you went to see your doctor, it was a contract between you and your doctor.
You paid him and he he was your doctor who treated you for under this patient-doctor relationship.
Right.
Nowadays that relationship is changed, and the doctor's working for the accountable care organization, and he's not going to want to spend the money.
But the bottom line is is the doctor working for you, or is he working for the insurance company?
I want you to explain I want you to explain what the accountable care group does.
This is the group that essentially tells you what will and will not be covered, what you can and cannot do.
Am I correct about that, John?
Well, it's yeah, and it has performance criteria.
Let's just say you're diabetic and you're one of the things they measure is your A1C.
Well, the government's gonna come down and audit you, and if your patients uh uh A1Cs are all high, then you're not treating your patients very well.
Therefore, they're not gonna reimburse you the same amount.
They're gonna cut you one percent, two percent, three percent on your reimbursement, depending on your performance.
Tell me why tell me why I I'm I'm not arguing, I'm interested.
Tell me why that's bad.
Well, because what what it will force the doctors to do is basically cherry pick patients.
They're gonna want patients that will be um uh that will be uh responsible and keeping their numbers under control.
Yeah, because you you meant you mentioned uh the the diabetic uh the counts on diabetic, the blood sugar levels and so on.
There's only so much you can do.
If the patient isn't following your advice, they're eating the wrong things and so on, they're gonna have bad numbers.
And your point is is that the gov the networks that are established by the government or the monitoring by the government and how well you are practicing, if you see some schlup that you think is not gonna follow all of your uh advice, you may not want that guy.
And that guy might be the one who most needs you because he's the sickest.
Exactly.
So you think some physicians are going to, particularly since a lot of you now are gonna be booked to the max because of Obamacare.
Uh, you know, I can't handle you, Charlie.
We know about you, and Charlie's gonna be shunned off down the hallway until he finally finds a doctor that's willing to treat him because Charlie is somebody That isn't all that cooperative with the doctor.
So instead of you dealing with Charlie and you lecturing Charlie and working with him and working with her Charlie, you can't keep eating the chocolate.
Charlie, you can't do this.
You're just not going to have Charlie anymore because you're not going to be paid for treating Charlie because Charlie's a lot of trouble.
You're saying, yeah, I don't want to misquote you, but am I getting what you're telling me?
That's that's that is exactly the point.
The doctor's working for the uh he's accountable to the cannibal care organization and not to the patient.
And isn't that exactly what Obamacare wants for the doctor to be working for the bureaucracy, the doctor to be working for the system, the doctor isn't working for the customer, the customer is the patient.
Thank you for calling, Dr. John.
That was that's interesting stuff.
And like the piece that I read to start the hour from Dr. Mark Siegel, these are physicians now talking about how what this law, how this law is going to affect the quality of care and the doctor-patient relationship.
At some point, I keep saying this, at some point they're gonna get their dumb website fill fixed, and people are going to be able to sign up.
And there's this belief on the part of people on the left that once the website's working, everybody's gonna live happily ever after, and then Obamacare is going to be fine.
No.
Come January 1st, Obamacare starts, and it's going to be all this stuff.
You listen to that doctor, he's not making this up.
Doctors that are fighting to maintain their incomes and are now being squeezed to above.
You can see them making the decisions that the hypothetical physician that he was describing would do.
Let me give you this one now.
This is from USA Today, page one yesterday.
I love the fact that the mainstream media is finally stumbling onto some of this stuff.
They find that there's a group of Americans that are going to be able to opt out of the individual mandate and not buy insurance.
These are people who make a little bit too much money to get a subsidy.
In other words, their income is high enough that they're not eligible for any Obamacare subsidy, but they can't afford the cheapest plan available under Obamacare.
In most parts of the country, the cheapest plan you can buy is the bronze plan.
That's the one that has high out-of-pocket annual minimums, where you've got to pay for the first several thousand dollars and then your insurance kicks in.
In a number of metro areas around the country, they're finding that the minimum monthly premium for a bronze policy is well over 5% of the income of somebody who doesn't qualify for a subsidy.
Here are a few examples.
Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, the minimum monthly premium, $475.
My own community, Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, 487 dollars is the minimum monthly premium.
Bergen, New Jersey, 559.
Uh Franklin County, Ohio, 476.
Mecklenburg, North Carolina, 447.
In many instances, that's the minimum monthly premium for someone who makes just enough money that they're not eligible for a subsidy under Obamacare.
So here you again had people who were getting insurance.
Now they can't afford insurance.
They make a little bit too much to get the subsidy, but the premium is still so womanly high that they can't afford it, and we're not even going to mandate that they have insurance.
Another group of Americans who were insured who are now not insured.
How is this a good idea?
Wasn't the goal of this thing to get people insured?
Yet we keep coming up with story after story after story about people who are losing their insurance because of the program that was supposed to help people get insurance.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
It's Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program, and don't think I only have Obamacare stories.
The story in Egypt's interesting stuff.
The government is starting a major crackdown.
I guess not starting, but stepping up their crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.
They're confiscating financial accounts.
They're essentially declaring the organization an illegal organization.
Egypt might be heading to an open civil war.
So all this peace and love and Good feeling that everybody thought was going to happen after Mubarak fell.
We're going to go to an open society.
It's just the opposite.
The government, which is controlled by the military, feels as though the Muslim Brotherhood is a major threat.
The Muslim Brotherhood ran the country in the immediate wake of the overthrow of Mubarak with the Morsai government in place.
The Morse government alienated the majority of the people.
The military stepped in and tossed them.
The Muslim Brotherhood wants to come back to power.
This is certainly not an issue in which the United States should be doing anything about militarily intervening.
But how do we react to it?
What do we think about?
I think you've got to back the government here.
You may want to think that we live in a world in which everybody's a nice person.
We live in a world in which there is a philosophy that is widely subscribed to, especially in the Middle East, of terror.
And it isn't just a problem for countries like Israel or the United States or the nations of Europe.
It's a problem for these Middle Eastern countries.
Egypt's got to do whatever it has to do in order to stop these terrorists, and that's what the Muslim Brotherhood is, from slaughtering everybody in the country that doesn't subscribe to their ideology.
It may not be pretty, and it's not the way, well, I shouldn't say it's not the way we handle things in our country.
We're getting that direction, but I think it's what they have to do.
Cleveland, Ohio, and Jim.
Jim, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, thanks for taking my call.
Yeah, we've been hearing uh, and I'm I'm dragging you back to the Obamacare thing.
Uh we've been hearing about it.
It's open line Friday, we're going all over the map.
Don't worry about it, Jim.
Uh we've been hearing about the million people that have signed up for for uh health care through the uh uh website and other sources.
And I'm wondering, you know, how many of the million that have signed up are actually part of the five million that were thrown off the health plans they had.
You know, the government really shouldn't count those as new covered people if they've been tossed and have no choice but to go to that site for the city.
It'd be like if somebody was fired from a job on Thursday, hired on Friday, and Obama then brags about all the jobs he's creating.
We don't know the you're right, we don't know the answer to that.
The big question is going to be whether or not the new signups for Obamacare become a higher number than all of the people who lost their insurance in the first place.
I've argued that you are going to have fewer Americans by this time next year with health insurance than have it this time this year.
That Obama has literally come up with a plan that's supposed to try to insure more Americans that's going to insure fewer Americans.
But you're you're probably right about that.
Who would be the likeliest person to go and seek health insurance?
It would probably be somebody who had it for years and had it canceled out from underneath them.
So if you're right about your theory that a lot of the people of this, whatever the number is, 1 million 1.2800,000 that have signed up for Obamacare are merely people who had policies before and were canceled.
It means that all Obamacare did is move them from one plan that they liked to another plan that they didn't like, but it isn't doing anything to go out and find that mass of millions of Americans that weren't insured in the first place.
In other words, if you're right, we don't know you're right, but I think you make a pretty good case here, then Obamacare isn't insuring anyone new.
It's not taking care of the problem at all.
It's just shuttling people from one plan over to another plan that's probably more expensive.
You know you're probably right about this, Jim.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I want to share with you a story from my home community of Milwaukee.
This is in the media, the last couple of days.
Bus route supervisor for the Milwaukee County Transit system.
County buses are government buses, but it's contracted out to a private business called Milwaukee Transport Services.
The bus route supervisor, William Beerman, was out on one of the bus routes and he saw a guy beating up a woman.
Or at least he thought he was beating her up.
He told her to stop, she wouldn't.
He intervened and separated the two.
Beerman was fired from his job.
He was told by the county bus system look, you can get a suit if you get involved in something like this.
It's not your job, it's your job to just call the cops.
He was saying my radio that you assigned me didn't work.
Secondly, I'm a human being, I saw someone being attacked.
This is what happens to human beings when bureaucrats and government get in the way of normal human interaction.
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