RUSH: So over the weekend food stamp credit cards went down due to a computer glitch caused by a power outage. Do you know the NSA is having the same problem? They’re losing data, which some people are not unhappy about, at some of their new installations because of power glitches. So the cards did not show any limits on purchases. And when these EBT cards, the food stamp cards, when they don’t show any limits, the unscrupulous food stamp users are going to go out there and take advantage. And they did. Did it surprise anybody? It’s not that they weren’t able to buy anything. It’s that there was no limit on anything and they all went to town.

Now, in one sense, folks, I mean, you can understand it. You’ve got an economy in the tank, 90 million Americans not working. All they’ve got is what they get from the government. They don’t have any hope of providing for themselves, and many of them don’t even think they should anymore and so they’ve just been conditioned. They’re very smart about how it is they get what they get, and they see no limits and they just go to town on it. And they get a run on Walmart Stores. And you have to wonder, you know, why would Walmart go ahead and ignore the limits and allow use of the cards when there were no limits on them?

And obviously the answer to that, well, customer service. We don’t want to make the customers mad. We don’t want to make the government mad. Nobody wants to make the government mad at you. If the government causes a problem, well, okay, we’ll deal with it. If they enforced limits, even when there are no limits on the cards, I’m sure they feared rioters would destroy the stores. They feared the government would come down hard on them for being mean to people. I mean, this is the basis for a federal program. So we’ve got half the country, 48% is on food stamps, and the government advertises for more. We have 90 million Americans not working, 48 or 49 million on food stamps and more all the time because the government’s advertising for it.

We have 90 million people not working, not knowing where they are going to next eat or anything and so they’re very sophisticated. And once the limits are missing from the cards, it’s Katie bar the door; let’s go to town. I guess what bothers me about this, folks, if I could somehow express it, look at how tenuous our hold on order is. Look at how narrow the thread that everything is kept in order and civil, if you will. And look at how much of that is dependent on government. It all relates to this Obamacare business because this has yet to happen in Obamacare, and it’s going to happen to Obamacare, and it’s going to happen a lot.

There are people, despite what you think, there are all kinds of people out there who still think that Obamacare’s just another food stamp. Just show up with whatever they have, their card, and they get treated and it isn’t going to cost them anything and they’re not going to have to have insurance. They don’t know any of this. And they’re going to end up in the system, and one day the system’s going to get a glitch and there isn’t going to be any medical service available, and look at how — I can’t think of another word to put it. Look at how totally incapable so many people are of taking care of themselves. And then to add insult to this, we have an entire political party who likes that and then promotes that and tries to increase that number of people who are totally dependent.

I remember when I worked for the Kansas City Royals, and it’s just a little microcosm of a story. Nothing bad happened, but in the off season various teams did their winter sports dinners where they gave awards to great players the previous season. They would attract the players in. They would sell tickets at the dinner. It was a way to keep interest in baseball alive during the winter. And one year a Royals player was invited to go to one of these things in Milwaukee and he called lost in O’Hare. Didn’t know how to change planes. Did not know what to do. He had to be walked. He had to tell us what the sign said. Then he had to be steered down a particular hallway to the terminal, to the gate.

He didn’t know what a gate number was because when you travel with a baseball team, you get on a bus at the stadium, the bus takes you to the airplane. When you get to the hotel, the traveling secretary’s there with your room key. You don’t check in, you don’t do incidentals or any of that until you leave, and half the time you skip out on those. It was a microcosm lesson. This guy had never made his own way through an airport. Well, here we have people who don’t know how to feed themselves. And when a glitch happens, something goes wrong, look at the chaos. Look at the near riot potential that existed here.

Now, it bothers me. You know, I can easily say, “It doesn’t affect me; I’m never going to be in that situation. I couldn’t care less about those people.” But it bothers me that this is happening in the United States of America. This is not the kind of thing that should happen here, not to the degree that it’s happening, not in the level of the masses of people that it’s happening.

“Shelves in Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, Louisiana, were reportedly cleared Saturday night, when the stores allowed purchases on [foodstamp] cards even though they were not showing limits.” A frenzy ensued! Our hold on order here is just by the thinnest of threads, and you see how easily a mass riot could occur. Now you move this forward to the Obamacare plan or program.

There’s a story out from Forbes magazine today: “Obamacare’s Website is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You to Know How Costly the Plans Are.” That’s the headline of the piece. “A growing consensus of [information technology] experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s … exchange is crashing. HealthCare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping.

“This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. [Health and Human Services] bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.” What these people are saying is that the slowdown and the near shutdown is actually somewhat purposeful.

In order to keep people at this stage, first days, early days implementation, from learning what it’s actually going to cost them. If that’s true, I totally understand it. “[T]hey were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away,” and force them out of the system and not sign up. “The answer is…” This is a pulled quote from the story:

“The answer is that Obamacare wasn’t designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions.” So the purpose was to get healthy people with average incomes to sign up and then gouge them, but the IT experts say the regime didn’t want them to see when they signed up they were getting gouged.

So they caused the glitches that caused the slowdown so that people would keep trying to sign up, while not being able to, all because at this stage the regime can’t afford for people to learn that there isn’t going to be a $2500 discount in your premium, there isn’t going to be free healthcare, there isn’t going to be anything Obama’s promised for healthy people with average incomes. They think that they are the chosen group!

These people that vote for Obama, healthy Democrats, they think they’re in it and Obamacare is to get this for them free or much cheaper than what it would cost them if they had to use their employer. And, of course, the dirty little secret — and it always has been, I mean by design — is that healthy people who are not going to access the system for treatment because they’re healthy are going to be gouged and their higher premiums are going to cover the cost for those who do need treatment and the people that can’t afford it.

Well, that dirty little secret, they can’t afford to be discovered. The regime can’t let that get out. This is the theory in this Forbes story. Another pulled quote: “It’s quite possible that much of this disaster could have been avoided if the [regime] had been willing to be open with the public about the degree to which Obamacare escalates the cost of health insurance.” Fat chance of that! There was no way. They couldn’t have sold it.

They couldn’t have got it passed if they would have told people what it was actually going to cost them. But the Forbes writer says that if the regime had been honest about it, “then a number of the problems with the exchange’s software architecture would have been avoided. But that would require admitting that the ‘Affordable Care Act’ was not accurately named,” and was not actually affordable. This is a profound piece, folks. It makes the case here that Health and Human Services…

You and I know this, but the fact that it’s in the news now… Well, it’s Forbes, and it’s still there. Health and Human Services didn’t want users to see Obamacare’s true costs and political objectives trumped operational objectives. So this is kind of frustrating, too, because now the truth is out after the fact and the people writing these stories say, “If the regime had just been honest with people and told them that the healthy and the young were going to be asked to pay more in order to pay the freight for everybody else, then we wouldn’t be having these problems.”

We also wouldn’t have had Obamacare if they had been honest about that. So they couldn’t very well admit what the real endgame here was. And, of course, when you’ve got a food stamp card and “unlimited” shows up one day, or when you’re one of the 90 million not working and you’re still eating, why are you going to be worried about what something costs when you don’t have to be now?

So here comes Obamacare, and Obama sold it. “You get to keep your doctor, you get to keep your insurance plan if you like it, and your premium’s going to come down $2500,” except none of that’s true. They couldn’t afford for people to figure that out in time to implement or roll out the program. So they engineered HealthCare.gov to shut down and be a debacle, and that is the political calculation trumping operational objectives.

So once again, you’ve known this and I’ve known it. You’ve known the truth about Obamacare from the get-go. The truth now comes out after the fact, after it’s signed into law, after it’s passed — and now after it’s been implemented. The truth starting to trickle out that it isn’t affordable, it isn’t going to be cheaper, and it’s actually designed to screw young, healthy people who are going to be paying more and eventually their fines are going to be higher than what the cost of a policy would be.

After they’ve been lured in with the idea of, “Oh, I’ll pay the fine. That won’t cost anything.” Yeah, for a couple years, and after that the fine becomes more expensive than the policy, which is outrageously priced. Now this is why Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and all of the defund and delay people are out trying to stop this, folks. It’s because the utter debacle and disaster of this is known.

Now, you might be saying, “Okay, Rush, this is even more evidence then that we should sit back and do nothing, let this thing implement. Let these people find out how they’ve been lied to, how they’ve been screwed, how they’ve been shafted, and the Democrats and Obama will get the blame.” Okay, I tell you what: Then let’s just sit back and let the shutdown happen and let’s just sit back and let’s let the debt limit come and go without raising it, and let’s let the Democrats get blamed for that.

I mean, if it’s good for Obamacare to sit back and let all this disaster happen so that everybody naturally concludes that it’s Obama’s fault or the Democrats’ fault, let’s do it on the shutdown, and let’s do it with the debt limit. Would I like to see the debt limit not raised just to see if all this stuff is true? Umm, you know, here’s the thing: The debt limit is a big lie. We’ve got the money to pay the service on the debt.

This is what I meant earlier by, “Everybody inside the Beltway is totally absorbed in this.” They really think the end of the world is at hand. It’s their world. They live in it. “Oh, my God, the government might close! Oh, my!” I mean, any Fox journalist, you name it, they’re all into this. You and I know this is not true. I’m not sucked in by it. So I wouldn’t care that the debt limit wasn’t raised because I know the truth.

Just like the financial crisis of ’08 was not the end of the world and Y2K was not the end of the world, this isn’t the end. Nothing. The government not getting what it wants, government not doing something that it wants, that is not the end of the world. Government not getting what it wants is good news to me. Government not being able to get every dime it wants, spend every dime it wants, that’s the objective to me.

So yeah, if we can deny them, let’s see what happens when the shutdown happens or the debt limit goes my way. I haven’t raised it just for the abject point. It’s just like the stock market today. They were fully expecting the market to crash today because of Christine Lagarde. They were expecting it to plummet — and it didn’t, and they’re upset by that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: It’s hard to say what would be the big news of the day. I think for me one of the biggest stories is the Forbes piece that we ended up getting about 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, an hour ago, that the information technology people that put together Obamacare purposely structured all of these glitches in order to keep certain people from finding out what this is going to cost them.

See, Obamacare was not designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It’s designed to force those people to pay more. Healthy people with average incomes get soaked in Obamacare, but the Forbes story says the website got bogged down so that they wouldn’t figure that out at this stage of the game because, of course, it was sold as either free or cheaper for everybody.

We’ll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com and we’ll see you back here tomorrow right here from Los Angeles.