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March 13, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:39
March 13, 2014, Thursday, Hour #3
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Hi, how are you?
Great to have you with us, my friends.
You're tuned to the most listened to and the most talked about Radio Talk Show in America.
It's hosted by me, Rush Limboy, your guiding light.
There are times of trouble, tumult, confusion, chaos, unbelievability, absolute frustration.
And yes, your guiding light even to the good times as well.
It's uh great to have you.
Here are the telephone numbers 800-282-2882 if you wish to be on the program, and everybody does.
If you want to send an email, it's L Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, legally or not, the President of the United States, through his Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sabilis, has unilaterally changed the unaffordable care act, Obamacare yet again.
Very quietly, the regime has delayed the individual mandate until 2016.
For those of you on Rio Linda, the individual mandate is the central part of Obamacare.
It is the part that requires you to have health insurance.
The individual mandate mandates, requires, demands that you go by a policy.
However, you must do it.
Healthcare.gov, however you do it, you got to do it.
And your doing it by mandate was going to provide the money for Obamacare to pay for the health care of others who couldn't afford it, and the sick and the needy and the seasoned citizens.
However, the regime has determined that it's become a hardship to purchase an Obamacare policy.
Their website doesn't work.
They don't know, even after people have visited there whether they're actually enrolled.
People who are enrolled do not know if they actually are.
There is no way of confirming that people who've paid have indeed paid.
It is an absolute mess.
The whole thing is a hardship.
Obamacare is a hardship.
Now, as you'll recall, the individual mandate was debated before the Supreme Court and It was said to be by many constitutional scholars unconstitutional.
Because the Constitution specifically says in the Commerce Clause, the federal government cannot make you buy anything.
It really wasn't even arguable.
Although the left wanted it, Obama wanted it.
He's the first black president, so we don't oppose it.
We just don't because of race.
So it ends up at the Supreme Court, and the justices, a majority of the justices, apparently agreed that it's unconstitutional.
However, the Chief Justice then decided that it's not the role of the Supreme Court to deny a president and a Congress what they actually want.
That declaring this unconstitutional would just be too monumental.
So the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, actually rewrote a portion of Obamacare in his ruling.
And he then said that the individual mandate was a tax.
The penalty for not buying insurance was a tax.
And the government can levy taxes anytime, anywhere it wants.
And so Obamacare's individual mandate became a tax increase, and therefore constitutional.
That is, if your current health policy did not meet the requirements dictated by Obama, you either purchased an Obamacare policy or you paid a tax.
And this was to force everybody into Obamacare policies.
Nobody wanted to pay the fine, although for the first three years it'd be the smarter move.
Now, however, Obamacare's individual mandate has been declared a hardship by the people who told us that not having Obamacare was a hardship.
Now the problem with waiving the individual mandate is I mean, who was the beneficiary of this?
If you were paying any attention when it's all was going down, you might have noticed, and you might have been a little curious about why in the world were the insurance companies supporting this.
Don't they know that they are being targeted?
Well, yes, eventually.
But they wanted to make as big a score as they could until they were targeted, and they interpreted the individual mandate as the government delivering millions of new customers.
There were 30 million Americans that didn't have insurance who were now going to have to have it by law.
And the insurance company saw, wow, 30 million new customers, yes.
But now that the mandate has been delayed to 2016, who is it holding the bag?
It is the insurance companies who now will not have enough customers, who will not be paying sufficient premiums to cover treatment for people who are sick, who have policies.
Now, if you want, let's revisit the purpose of the mandate.
I have here from Kaiserhealth News.org from September 2013.
Question, why is there a mandate anyway?
Answer.
Obamacare was designed to extend insurance to nearly everybody, including those who have medical conditions that require expensive care and are denied coverage, i.e., pre-existing conditions.
See.
But to pay for their care, insurance companies need to have a large enrollment of customers, especially young and healthy people who aren't going to be making any claims.
This is this is Kaiser Health News making the giving the answer here.
Basically saying, look, we are forced to cover people after they get sick.
We can't afford that unless some suckers have to pay up here who are not going to be making claims.
In other words, it's all income to us.
Some 21-year-old stud's got to pay $300 a month.
He's never going to get sick, according to our tables for a little while yet, so he's not going to cost us anything.
He's just pure income.
And we'll use his money, this SAP's money, to pay for these pre-existing conditions, things that otherwise we wouldn't cover because it makes no sense.
But Obamacare is making us do it.
The mandate, in other words, was adopted to guarantee a broad base of customers.
The individual mandate was essential, in other words, if you got this, another way of looking at this.
The individual mandate was essential for command and control health insurance policies to be affordable.
And they aren't affordable now.
Even after all of these supposed new customers and after the real smart people, government liberals, they're the ones that really know how to do things.
After they've gotten in charge and started running it, nothing is affordable now.
But without the mandate, it's even worse.
Because there isn't the money associated with all the new customers.
Healthy people, because the mandate has been delayed for two years now.
Healthy people can will choose not to buy overpriced insurance policies.
This will leave insurance companies forced to cover a smaller pool of unhealthy, a larger pool, actually, of unhealthy people without the money to do it.
You have a question?
It's a larger group of well, prices are going to dramatically rise along with property taxes doubling in Chicago, which means people aren't going to Be able to afford it.
And again, the ultimate objective here is to wipe out private insurance.
And here we are right on schedule.
If you promise health insurance companies all these new customers and you get them to sign on, support your law, and then all of a sudden you take those customers away from them, and all of that income via policies that are not going to sell, how are they going to stay in business?
Because they have to cover people who are sick.
They gotta pay for their care, but they don't have any offsetting income.
So they have to raise prices on those who do have insurance.
And you see how this all works now, folks.
This some people are looking at this as Obama's delaying this because the mandate will hurt Democrats at election time.
And that's true, but it's also going to speed up the insolvency of insurance companies, which is the ultimate objective of Obamacare.
The ultimate objective of Obamacare is total control over as much of your life, the food you eat, the cars you drive, the distances you travel, where you go, what you can buy, how much it's going to cost, they're going to control it all.
And the faster they can get rid of private health insurance and make the government the only place you can turn to for insurance, the better.
And how better to get rid of the private insurance market than to make it unaffordable for most people?
MAMO.
Now, the thing about this very confusing about what's really happened because the delay of the individual mandate has not been announced.
It has not been trumpeted.
Nobody from the White House has strode to a microphone and announced it.
In fact, Kathleen Sibelius is still denying it.
Let's go to the audio sound bites.
This is yesterday in Washington, House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the budget request that Obama submitted.
And Kevin Brady, Republican from Texas, asked Sibelius a question.
Are you going to delay the mandate that individuals have to buy government-approved health care or pay a tax?
No, sir.
Are you going to delay the open enrollment beyond March 31st?
No, sir.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers an editorial from the Wall Street Journal.
Right there it is.
And it's from two days ago, March the 11th.
Obamacare's secret mandate exemption.
Obamacare's implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded.
The latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate.
To wit, last week, the regime quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to buy health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.
This latest political reconstruction of Obamacare has received zero media notice.
The Health and Human Services Department did not even think the details were worth discussing in a conference call.
Press materials or fact sheet, none of it's been made available.
Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't comply with Obamacare benefit and redistribution mandates.
Our sources only noticed the change last week.
That seven-page technical bulletin where the mandate being delayed was included...
That seven-page technical bulletin includes a paragraph and a footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years until 2016.
And lo and behold, it turns out that this second rule, which was supposed to last for only one year, allows Americans whose coverage was canceled to opt out of the mandate altogether.
So if your policy has been canceled, you do not have to go get a replacement until 2016.
In 2013, Health and Human Services decided that Obamacare's wave of policy terminations qualified as a hardship that entitled people to a special type of coverage designed for people under age 30, or mandate exemption.
Health and human services originally defined and reserved hardship exemptions for the truly down and out, like battered women, battered evicted women, or battered bankrupt women.
Now are you having trouble keeping up with this?
I ask that only because this is what this has all become with these brilliant wizards of smart in charge of it.
We've got a health care system that's impossible to translate.
We have a health care system, it's impossible people know whether they're in violation of the law or in compliance with the law.
We've got people being canceled, left and right, scared to death, do not have coverage, do not have treatment, don't know where to go, don't know whether they're paying a fine, don't know what they should do.
And now they sneak in this exemption for people who've been canceled.
Hey, guess what?
You know what?
We're going to relax the mandate until 2016 for you.
Well, what about people like me who do not have insurance yet?
Do I now also have an exemption?
Apparently not.
Apparently I am still subject to the fine if I do not go get a policy.
And so are you.
If you haven't been canceled, then you are still subject to the mandate.
We think, because this is the next thing.
Nobody really knows.
They snuck this in a seven-page little document dump on Friday.
Now we mentioned last week how the regime pushed back the deadline for the cancellation of non-Obamacare policies, the mandate after the 2016 election, but the journal has found two other rule changes that were buried in the same news.
Now the Wall Street Journal suggests, I'm not going to read the whole thing.
If you get to the bottom of their editorial, the journal suggests that the Democrats want to keep this latest waiver a secret until after the elections, except for their friends.
It's another way to buy votes.
This was not supposed to be discovered.
The journal's theory is that we weren't supposed to know that the mandate for certain people has been canceled.
They hoped to keep it a secret by telling people who've been canceled, guess what?
You've got a break so that they could benefit from it politically, but they weren't going to tell anybody else.
Only the people who've been harmed and would be mad at Democrats were going to be exempt from the mandate.
But now the journal has discovered it.
And now everybody is trying to interpret what does this really mean for everybody?
Because it's very clear that this is a partisan move.
The New York Post has an editorial about it, which I'm going to take a break here.
But Betsy McCoy says, wait just a second.
How can you exempt the once insured...
And people have been canceled, but not those who've never had policies like me.
I mean, that has a political shelf life about 15 minutes because once people like me find out that only the canceled are exempt, people like me supposed it can erase hell.
We'll see.
I gotta take a break.
You sit tight, we'll be back with more after this.
Okay, so to summarize, in a nutshell, President Obama has extended very privately.
He has extended for another two years the hardship waiver for people who had their insurance canceled.
They put that in last year when the cancellation Started hitting the fan.
That already existed.
What happened Friday was they extended it for two more years, a total of three now, that people who've been canceled do not have to go out and replace their policies.
It was supposed to be private so that only those people knew and would love the Democrats and vote for them.
The Wall Street Journal says that a second change is now going to allow anybody to claim a hardship waiver.
This is how they interpret the rule that they read, published by the government.
A second change is going to allow anybody to claim a hardship waiver because it no longer requires any kind of proof of hardship.
You can just claim hardship.
You don't have to prove it, not economic.
It can be any kind of hardship.
All you have to do is claim it, not prove it, and you are supposedly going to be exempted from the mandate.
All you have to do is claim that buying Obamacare would be a hardship.
And you get your penalty waiver next two years, and that's what I'm going to do.
That's what I, El Rushbow, am going to try.
So they found two things.
The hardship waivers for having your insurance canceled has been extended for two more years, total of three.
Another rule change that allows people to claim a hardship waiver, even if they haven't had their policy canceled, or even if they're not poor, all they have to do is claim it's a hardship.
So theoretically, if the journal is reading this right, everybody could claim that it is a hardship and take the exemption for the next two years.
And if everybody does, then the entire 80%, 90% of the funding of Obamacare has just gone away for two years.
It will have no money.
Look, folks, don't misunderstand.
I I'm not patting myself on the back.
But I'm just, it it took me two hours of show prep to put all this together that I just explained to you in 20 minutes.
The point here is this is so convoluted.
It is so complex, so it it lacks any common sense.
There is no flow.
There's not a central objective here that's been stated.
That's the problem.
The real objective of this, they're not being honest about it.
So all of this is superfluous gobbledygook.
It is impossible for people to understand this or keep up with it.
And all we're talking about is health care.
Look at how unmanageable and incomprehensible these people have made it.
It is so out of whack, ordinary people cannot possibly have the time or hope to figure it out.
And it's so unnecessary, and this is classic what you get from professional agitators and bureaucrats and theoreticians who think they're arrogantly smarter than everybody else, and they sit around the faculty lounge and they complain about everybody who's actually making things happen and making things work.
They sit around and complain how stupid, how dumb they are, and how if we were running it, how much better it'd be.
And this is what we get.
I don't care what these people try to run, they bollocks it up.
In addition to their ideology being dangerous, they are totally unqualified and incompetent, combined with an arrogant condescension to everybody that just makes this untenable.
They do not know what they're doing.
And so as it continues to unravel before their very eyes, their focus is not to fix it, but to try to hide from everybody how incompetent and unqualified they are.
And they do that by gumming it up, making it even more complex, and then claiming you're not bright enough to figure it out, but just leave it to them and you'll be okay.
They, in their own minds, incapable of making a mistake.
Incapable.
And to me, this is just crying shame what they've done to the health care The finest health care system the world had ever seen.
And these people are in the process of destroying it and dismantling it.
Which they want to do, because they've got an end objective here that nobody would vote for if they knew what it was.
It's really as disturbing as an American to see what these people are doing.
And then that when you know what their attitude about it is, this infuriates me even more.
But Sibelius has now amended her statement from yesterday.
So what I want to do, just to illustrate what I just said, she doesn't know any idea what she's doing, folks.
She doesn't even know what this law says.
She hasn't the slightest idea what's happening out there.
She has no ability, none of them do, to put themselves in your shoes and imagine what this is like for you.
Because it's okay for them.
They're not subject to any of this garbage.
They're taking care of their health care plan doesn't have anywhere near this complaint.
They go to the doctor, somebody pays for it.
Over with.
That's it.
They have to mess with any of this stuff they're putting the rest of us through.
Again, Kevin Brady asking Sibelius a question yesterday, House Ways and Means Committee hearing.
Are you going to delay the mandate that individuals have to buy government-approved health care or pay a tax?
No, sir.
Are you going to delay the open enrollment beyond March 31st?
No, sir.
You know, it's entirely possible.
She doesn't know what her own department released last Friday.
She may well not know.
Or she may know, and it's enough for March 31st, if if you haven't had your plan canceled, Dan, you're gonna have to comply.
My bet is she doesn't know.
So let's move to this morning.
House appropriations committee hearing on Obama's budget.
And here is Jack Kingston, Republican Georgia, talking to Sibelius.
He says, I don't understand the authority in which the regime uses to waive certain requirements on mandates, and how many mandates have they how many mandates have they waived, uh waived, Miss Sibelius?
Nothing has been discarded in terms of the law of what we are doing uh with some of the features of the law in terms of having a transition most focused on people who have insurance uh coming into compliance with some of the new features of the plans uh to gradually phase those in over a period of time.
I defy anybody to understand what she just said to explain it and how it relates to you and to the question she was asked.
She she's just flying blind, she had no idea.
No, no, no, we're not changing the law.
We're just we're just tweaking some of the features.
There aren't any features.
A feature is something really cool and advantaged.
There's no features in this law.
There are nothing but penalties and punitive behaviors in this law.
There's no features.
Anyway, she doesn't know what she's doing.
She doesn't know how to explain what's going on.
She and I'll tell you why.
Because what they really have in store, they don't dare tell anybody.
This thing wouldn't have gotten, wouldn't even seen the lie today, if they would have been really honest about what the purpose of this is when they first started talking about it, which is total control of the health care system.
They would not have, if they'd have told you they're going to be in charge of what you can eat, what you can't eat, if they would have told you that they wanted to make happen what is going to happen, nobody would have wanted this.
Well, nowhere near a majority.
They can't be honest about it.
So now, when they're when when this thing's falling apart, and they're asked to explain it, their whole focus is to say whatever to make sure you don't find out what the real intention is.
Do not doubt me.
By the way, folks, uh, just as a reminder, at the House hearing yesterday, Sibelius also claimed that the regime does not even know how many people have paid their Obamacare premiums.
They don't, they're at a loss.
I'm at a loss to describe what an absolute boondoggled disaster this is.
Let me put it this way.
If they had wanted to screw it up, they couldn't have done it this badly.
There are times in the golf course I hit shots I couldn't hit if I tried to.
They're so bad.
I couldn't do it if I tried.
That's exactly what's happening here.
These people are screwing up so bad they couldn't do it if they were trying to.
That's how incompetent they are.
They don't even know how many people have paid.
What the hell is the website for?
You think Amazon doesn't know who's paid.
Dwayne in uh in Auburn, Washington.
Great to have you, sir, on the program.
Hello.
Hello, Megadinos, Rush.
Thank you, sir, very much.
I want to talk to you about the Unaffordable Care Act, real quick.
Yeah.
When the president goes out and says, don't get cable TV, get rid of your cell phones.
I've already done that.
I've done that for two years.
The only reason I have a cell phone is because my wife and I own a small business.
Let me just illustrate how the Unaffordable Care Act would impact us.
Currently, my family pays just over $200 a month for full coverage for health care.
$1,500 a year catastrophic cap.
$5 medication copay, $25 office visit copay.
This is just by going out and getting Obamacare.
My premium goes to nine over $900 a month.
A $6,000 per person per year catastrophic cap.
You know.
$25 medication copay and a $50 office copay.
How is that affordable?
It isn't.
And I'll tell you what burns me, but here you have in this country really decent, hard working people.
And the Democrats are making it impossible to even keep up.
They're making it impossible to have any hope of economic improvement or advancement.
They're just making it impossible.
And these people haven't done anything to deserve this.
Unless they voted for Obama.
They haven't done a thing to warrant this kind of punitive action against them.
Many of them are just unsuspecting, unfailingly trustful in government as a benevolent, wants to do the best for everybody institution.
And it just breaks me apart.
When I hear about these horror stories, they're all over the place.
And we all only get one life, and everything.
And these people are making it so damn difficult for everybody that are working.
The people working and producing are the ones that get the excrement sandwich with this bunch of people.
They're the enemy.
They're the suspects.
They're the ones not paying their fair share, whatever the hell is it these people say about them.
They're the targets.
They're blamed for all the things that have gone wrong in the country.
It just burns me up, folks.
It literally burns me up.
And then add to that, these people do it get away with being thought of as the ones who have all the compassion, and they're the ones who care about people like me and all that rot gut.
It is terribly wrong.
All of this is just terribly, terribly wrong.
Okay, folks, that's it.
We are out of time for today, but as always, back tomorrow.
And tomorrow is open line Friday.
Always look forward to that on a host of reasons.
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