RUSH: Here’s Denise in Trenton, Michigan, as we head back to the phones. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. My question is pretty simple, but I also want to ask, you talked to somebody on Tuesday, it was a guy, I know you’ll remember him, he worked two part-time jobs and he had a one-year-old and he talked about how he can’t get benefits. And you had told him that you had hope to give him, and you talked about a time where there were people in like their fifties and stuff, and they had to go back and they basically lost their jobs, and they did what they really wanted to do.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: And I just hope he’s listening today, ’cause I was on the phone with you on hold saying, “Please take my call so I can tell him.” It was true then, and it’s true now. That’s what we’re doing. That’s what our family is doing, ’cause of course thanks to Obama and his infinite wisdom, I went through the same thing and lost two of my jobs, and I’m back in school and I’m gonna do what I want to do. And I just want your guy — I hope he hears this because anybody can do it, and you are who you are not because of who they let you be, but because of you. He has to do what you said and follow his passion, because —
RUSH: That’s a good point. It really is. Just to recap, I remember the guy. He was working two jobs because he had been downsized because of Obamacare. He’d been reduced in both jobs to part-time status, so he’d lost his benefits. Even though with two jobs he had the equivalent of a full-time job, he didn’t have any benefits, and health care, particularly, was gone. He didn’t know what he was gonna do. He was from Asheville, North Carolina, and I told him, “You know, even true today, most of the limitations that people face are self-imposed.” And I asked him, “Are you willing to move to pursue your dream?” He said, “Yeah.”
Okay, well, that’s the big one. Once you’re willing to move you’re really over a hump, but if you’re not gonna leave Asheville, then you have to realize your potential is dictated by what Asheville has, what there is to do there job-wise, career-wise, or what have you. But the point that I made that you recounted here that’s really worth it, all these guys in the nineties laid off in their middle ages, fifties, white-collar guys, could not get rehired at the salaries that they were earning. So what they did late in life was start businesses with the things they really loved and always wanted to do but had never done.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, one thing from our last caller. The caller she was talking about was Andy from Asheville, North Carolina. This is worth repeating. He was downsized in two jobs, so he had a full-time workweek with two jobs. So he was part time in two jobs, did not have any benefits as a result. He was been downsized in both jobs because of health care. The companies where he worked converted him to part-time status so that they would not have to provide him health care coverage, and that’s common and it’s happening with greater frequency and will increase its occurrences as more companies realize what they have to do to be complicit with Obamacare.
If they want to stay in business they’re gonna have to let people go. If they want to stay in business they’re gonna have to convert people to part time. They’re gonna have to reduce their hours and they’re gonna have to reduce their benefits. No, that’s not the spirit of Obamacare at all. In fact, Obamacare officials are shocked and stunned that this is happening. Actual people in the government can’t believe this. They thought that the health care experience in America would be, as they said, enriched because of Obamacare. They’re just a bunch of political lug heads who accept the flawed premise and promises of liberalism. And because they’re good people and because they’ve put the program together, it’s magically gonna work. Never does.
(interruption)
I was just asked if they just discount all the articles that point out how it’s not being implemented as it was designed. ‘Cause it isn’t a surprise. It isn’t a surprise that business is doing this. Everybody that paid any attention, had any smarts at all, knew exactly what businesses were gonna have to do in order to stay in business once this thing started to be implemented. And so the question is, don’t these guys in government — how do they not know this? Don’t they read these stories? I don’t know. Maybe they don’t read them. But more likely they do and just discount what they’re reading. They do. They think it’s all right-wing propaganda, no matter where it runs.
All of these forecasts, Obamacare not working, all of these stories of companies downsizing, they just think that’s evil business profit-taking. These people in the government who really thought that Obamacare and even do still think Obamacare is gonna lower costs and expand coverage, and when it doesn’t happen, what do they think? They think that evil CEOs are being greedy and they’re just laying people off using the excuse of Obamacare, but all they’re doing is hoarding money and building bigger houses for themselves and buying nicer cars while they’re firing or laying people off. That’s what they think. They think that all of this is right wing conspiratorial activity designed to harm Obama. When they read these stories — look, try this one. This is from the Washington Examiner but this is just a repeat of an LA Times story.
“UnitedHealth, the nationÂ’s largest private insurer, will not participate in CaliforniaÂ’s Obamacare health exchange, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. Health insurance giants Aetna and Cigna will also opt out of Covered California, the state agency charged with implementing Obamacare. All three insurers will still provide health insurance through large employers in the state,” but they’re not going to participate in the Obamacare exchanges.
“Kaiser Permanente, the largest health insurer in California, will work with Covered California, as will Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of California. Together, these two companies already control 87 percent of the stateÂ’s individual health insurance market. That number will only go up as UnitedHealth, Aetna and Cigna drop out of the individual market entirely. Market consolidation and decreased consumer choice is exactly what some supporters of Obamcare hoped would happen all along.”
This is my point. As UnitedHealth pulls out, as Cigna pulls out, as Aetna pull out, what does that mean? It means consumers have fewer choices. That’s the design. The people that really thought about this at the government, the Obamacare people, the people that really put this together with their ultimate aim in mind, intended all of this. They intended for it to be too big, too unworkable, and too expensive. They intended for all of these companies, be they businesses or insurance companies, to pull out, to not insure people, they intended this. That’s why the fines for not having insurance in the first couple years are very cheap.
The fines for not having a policy cost much less than having a policy. They want people to not have the policy. They want people to pay the fine. They want to upset the market and create a mess — and, then to clean up the mess, they want everybody just to finally say, “You know what? You know what would fix this? Single payer! Just have the government do it. To hell with Aetna, to hell with Cigna, to hell with United Health, to hell with private insurance. Just have the government do it.”
That will be the solution.
It’s not me saying so. Obama said this in 2007 in a speech to the Service Employees International Union. We’ve played the audio of that speech on this program I don’t know how many times where he said to ’em, “I know you want single payer. I want single payer, too. But we can’t get there overnight. It’s gonna take 10, maybe 15 years. People are going to have to be slowly conditioned to it and ultimately it’s going to have to be the only option available. That’s how we’ll get it done.”
Because people don’t want that. Obama knows it. He knew it in 2007; he knows it today. He’s governing against the will of the people. People do not want single-payer, government-run health care. They don’t want Obamacare. Still, the numbers are 60%. But the people in the regime who believe in this, who think that all of this is the perfect solution to our health care problems, they’ll read a story here. They’ll read this LA Times story: United Health, Aetna, Cigna pulling out.
They will tell themselves that the people running these companies are just a bunch of greedy Republicans trying to screw Obama. Everything is political to them, and there is no legitimacy in capitalism, and therefore no capitalistic entity is legitimate. They’re all cheats, liars. They’re all frauds. “Capitalism is unfair. Capitalism is what the 1% use to stay the 1%, and they got to be the 1% by taking everything from everybody else!”
So if you start out from the standpoint that there’s nothing legitimate about free markets, if there’s nothing legitimate in capitalism, and you read a story like this (and you know how mean and nasty Republicans are), well, you’re just gonna assume that the people running these companies are Republicans and hate Obama and they’re trying to screw up his grand plan. Then, at some point, they realize what’s going on. That’s when you get the stories, “Yeah, we really thought it was gonna lower costs!
“We really thought it was going to enrich health care experience for people.” The cookie-cutter liberal, the standard operating procedure liberal is really a giant ignoramus. I mean that seriously. They’re really ignorant. They are so politically oriented, and they are so arrogant and condescending — and they have such solid boundaries built around themselves — that the truth of anything doesn’t permeate. The only truth is what they believe and what they think, including all of their biases and all of their prejudices.
Those things are truth. Anything outside their believability system, outside the cocoon, is a conspiracy designed to undercut them or destroy Obama — or it’s just a bunch of right-wing kooks. That’s the challenge. That’s why there’s no working with these people. There isn’t any point in bipartisanship. There is no area of commonality. We don’t have anything in common with these people. That’s why, in my mind, politically they’re to be defeated. The problem is we usually do. They are a minority.
We’re just being governed by a minority. It’s made to look like the majority because of their never-ending media support. I mentioned yesterday that even the union for the people who are going to enforce Obamacare, the IRS, is begging out of it. It’s the National Treasury Employees Union, which runs the IRS. That’s the union that all IRS workers are members of. They want to be exempted from it. Their job is to make sure you sign up. Their job is to make sure you are assessed a fine if you don’t get insurance under the terms of Obamacare.
They want an exemption. That is liberalism for you. They set up two sets of rules: One set for everybody else, and another set for them. They never have to live by the rules that they set up for everybody else. ‘Cause they’re special! They’re better. They’re more important. The rules set up for everybody else are to handle “the masses,” the bourgeois — you know, the slow-witted, dim-witted, mindless people that are incapable of taking care of themselves.
So they set up rules for them, and then another set for themselves, and that’s how it works. United Health, Aetna, and Cigna opt out of the California Obamacare exchange — and they’re going to continue to offer insurance policies to employers. Eventually what is designed to happen, and therefore will, is that the policies are going to be so much more expensive than what will be found at the exchanges, private insurance will end.