RUSH: Have you heard the latest about Obamacare? This is so good. The left, Tom Harkin and Baghdad Jim McDermott, that’s who it is, right? (interruption) Is it Baghdad Jim McDermott or is it Jim Moran? One of the two — and Tom Harkin, they’re wringing their hands over the fact that Obamacare — well, they’re not using the term “Obamacare.” They’re complaining about all of the people who are underinsured, all the new signatories, all the new sign-ups for Obamacare, but they’re underinsured.

And you know what the problem is? They’ve all signed up and they’ve got Obamacare, but they can’t afford to use it because the deductibles are so high, and the deductibles are so high because of Obamacare. So people have been forced into buying health insurance, and it is too expensive to use. And so now, Baghdad Jim McDermott — it is Baghdad Jim, right? Baghdad Jim McDermott and Tom “Dung Heap” Harkin now are demanding more money and different rules and all kinds of changes to Obamacare because, for some reason, I mean, something got past ’em.

They made sure people that didn’t have insurance got it but now that they’ve got it they can’t afford to use it. (laughing) I’m sorry to laugh, but it’s so classic. This is what you get when you don’t read the bill. So, anyway, that’s just a little off-shoot on insurance.

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RUSH: I mentioned earlier the Drive-Bys are salivating over a Supreme Court decision that they think could come any day. And we are nearing the end of the term and once you get into late May, early June, that’s when decisions start to be handed up, or down as it were in this case. The Drive-Bys are so excited ’cause they think the Republicans lose no matter what happens. This is the Burwell case and it’s about subsidies.

I have just two stories here, but it’s all over CNN, it’s all over MSNBC. They just can’t wait for this. Because if the Supreme Court rules that Obama violated the Constitution and violated Obamacare by setting up subsidies in states that they were not set up by the states and therefore they were illegal, and if the Fed exchanges have to be taken down, if the subsidies end, then the Drive-Bys think, “Oh, my God, this is great. The Republicans are gonna get blamed because they’re the ones that took the case to court. So all these Obama people are gonna have their subsidies taken away, and the Republicans are gonna be blamed for it, oh, we love that,” ’cause that is really what turns ’em on, folks, is any time they can construct a scenario where the Republicans get blamed for taking things away from people, which, of course, is not what is happening here. But that’s one way.

Now, the Republicans anticipating that they might, quote, unquote, win the case and the Supreme Court might invalidate the subsidies the Regime set up, the Republicans, you’ve seen it as well as I have, a number of ’em running around saying, “We have to do something. If we win this case, we gotta have something ready to go, because we can’t be seen as the ones taking subsidies and money, health care away from people.” So the Republicans are supposedly running around trying to create an immediately installable app, if you will, that will maintain people’s subsidies legally after the court strikes them down. In which case Obama wins, after he loses.

The other side of this is that if the Supreme Court upholds Obama and claims that there was nothing illegal, it was just a simple matter of people misinterpreting words and the federal subsidies that Obama started in states where there were no exchanges, those subsidies can stay in place, then the Republicans get shot down and the media gets to go after ’em again as failing to take benefits away from people. The people will be said to have won again and have been protected again by the court from the Republicans who do nothing more than take things away from them.

The media can’t wait. Because they’ve got it covered no matter what district court the Supreme Court decision is, that the Republicans lose and lose big, both realistically, substantively, and image and brand-wise, they just can’t wait.

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RUSH: Well, let me show you what I mean here. New York Times story on the Supreme Court decision coming up, and the headline is this: “Four Words That Imperil Health Care Law Were All a Mistake, Writers Now Say — They are only four words in a 900-page law.”

Wait a minute now. Obamacare is not 900 pages. More like 2,200 pages. What are they talking about? Well, anyway, “They are only four words in a 900-page law: ‘established by the state.’ But it is in the ambiguity of those four words in the Affordable Care Act that opponents found a path to challenge the law, all the way to the Supreme Court.”

There’s nothing ambiguous about “established by the state.” And that’s not the only time the point is made in the law, that only the states will establish subsidies. And look, just to remind you about this, this was a political trick that the Regime played. This is not a mistake. In order for customers, people, citizens, Americans, you, to get a subsidy to help you afford the unaffordable Obamacare, you have to sign up in a state exchange. And the only way a state can offer subsidies to its citizens is to sign up to Obamacare.

Well, it was a trick. It was designed to force Republican governors to embrace Obamacare and sign up and help the rollout by offering their people subsidies, people that live in their states, because Obamacare in and of itself is unaffordable. But a lot of Republican governors didn’t sign up. They didn’t establish the exchanges. The Regime thought it would be a slam dunk. Obama thought it would be a slam dunk to force Republican governors to set up exchanges in order to offer subsidies. But about 26 or 27 governors said “psst you” and didn’t. And so on now it was Obama in trouble.

Now less than half the people in this country have access to subsidies on a health care reform that makes it unaffordable. So Obama said, well, you know what, we’ll just offer subsidies through HealthCare.gov. The law says you can’t do that. The law says those subsidies can only come when established by the state. And so now the Obama people said, “The state means any government. We weren’t talking about the states. We were talking about any state, like the United States is a state, like Moscow is a state, Russia is a state, well, we’re a state here. We’re not talking about individual states.” But throughout the law it was clear they were talking about individual states as opposed to a federal exchange.

It was done on purpose. It was done on purpose to hornswoggle and force Republican governors who oppose Obamacare to embrace it, and they didn’t. So Obama and his boys panicked because now, after all the hullabaloo about $2,500 less premium expense, keep your doctor, keep your plan, after all of those lies it was gonna become obvious to people that this was unaffordable.

So they moved fast, and they started offering subsidies through the federal HealthCare.gov, which is not legal. The law says specifically that subsidies can only come from the state. So we’ve had this massive Supreme Court case over those four words and their meaning and the argument. And the New York Times is doing journalistic malpractice here by claiming those four words are ambiguous. If you read the whole health care law, there’s nothing ambiguous about those four words.

“How those words became the most contentious part of President ObamaÂ’s signature domestic accomplishment has been a mystery,” says the Times. “Who wrote them, and why? Were they really intended, as the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell claim, to make the tax subsidies in the law available only in states that established their own health insurance marketplaces, and not in the three dozen states with federal exchanges?”

Yes, that’s exactly right, but the Times is trying to convince its doofus readers of the exact opposite. But I can answer their question, “Who wrote these words? Why did they write them? Were they really intended.” I’ll tell you who wrote ’em. Everybody’s best buddy Jonathan Gruber who was out telling everybody how they had to lie to the American people and rely on their stupidity in order to get this law passed. Gruber wrote those four words.

Gruber designed this, specifically to force Republican governors into embracing Obamacare by establishing state exchanges and the Republican governors that did that would have been not tacitly, but directly embracing and accepting Obamacare, which is what the trick was. And some Republican governors refused to play and we are where we are now. And the media can’t wait ’cause they see a way to make the Republicans lose on this no matter how the court decides.

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RUSH: I mentioned at the top of the program a funny thing is happening on the way to Obamacare here, and it is a new crisis. The Democrats are launching a new health care crisis. And they’re launching it just in time for the 2016 elections. They’re framing it as what they’re calling a health care underinsurance problem. And the bottom line here is it seems that many low- and middle-income people eagerly signed on to Obamacare because they thought their premiums would be down $2,500 bucks, I mean, they believed the lies.

This is another thing. They get preoccupied with Bush lying about Iraq, how do you even begin to compare that to the ongoing, never ending lies of this administration? Which have been truly damaging to the fabric of our culture and society. But just in this health care sphere alone, Obama 23 different times promised people if they like their doctor, no problem, keep him, like your insurance plan, no problem, you got it, it’s yours. And your premiums are coming down $2,500. Twenty-three separate times it has been logged he made that lie. And so you had people act on it.

I mean, people want to believe the best about their government. This is just something that I don’t think your average low-information group out there, they’re always gonna want to think the best of their government ’cause in many cases the government’s all they’ve got. So here comes a guy, first African-American president, seems to be likable, and he’s assuring them 23 different times if they like their doctor, they can keep it. And all of this was a ruse to get ’em to sign on.

Obama needed sign-ups. Obama needed people signing up for Obamacare to create the illusion here that there was a mad dash of love and adoration and interest on the American people’s part for this. So he tells all these lies, and he creates all these people that sign up for it. And they signed up believing their premiums are gonna come down and they signed up believing they keep their doctors or their plans or both. Now the new reality is that those people largely make up a group called the underinsured. And it seems that these people are now facing high costs when they try to use the health care coverage they had.

And you heard right. When they actually use their coverage, ever higher deductibles are creating financial burdens. The bottom line is, here’s how it’s written in the AP: “A different health care issue has emerged for Democrats, in sync with the party’s pitch to workers and middle-class voters ahead of next year’s elections.”

What is this, a different issue has emerged? Nothing’s emerged here. It’s always been there. It’s just now been discovered because it’s affecting people because all of these realities were delayed or waved until after the 2014 election, and in some cases even the 2012 midterms. All of the really bad parts of this law were deferred for five, six years. Now they’re beginning to be implemented. And people who signed up on the basis of Democrat lies are finding they cannot afford the deductible. Therefore, they can’t afford the policy that they’ve got, can’t afford to use it.

They’ve got Obamacare and the Democrats are saying, “Yeah, a new issue has emerged here. And it’s just in sync with the party’s pitch.” The Democrats created this mess, and the AP is trying to write a story — not trying; they wrote a story claiming that an anomaly in Obamacare is surfacing at just the right time for the Democrats to fix it and be seen as once again the party of the little guy. The Democrat Party is seen as the party that cares.

They created the problem. This takes me off on a tangent here, but I’m gonna bring this back and relate it to this. We know the truth here. We know that AP is not writing the truth. We know that they’re purposely avoiding the truth. We know the AP is trying to cover up for the Democrats in a horrible, stupid mistake they made due to their own incompetence. They created a health care bill with underinsured people who cannot afford the deductible. The deductibles rose for predictable reasons. The high deductible was part and parcel of the plan. It’s not an accident. There’s nothing here that happened that nobody didn’t anticipate. Not this stuff, anyway.

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RUSH: It’s the same thing back to this Obamacare story. We now have an absolute disaster for people who believed everything they were told about it. The media is now still lying to cover up for Obama, and writing about what a great opportunity the Democrats have here and it’s just amazing that this opportunity happens to surface so near the 2016 election cycle. You see, it’s not the uninsured, but rather the problem of high out-of-pocket costs for people already covered. The Democrats calling it underinsurance. So the AP is reporting the Democrats have discovered a problem, they have already named it, and since they care so much they’re already working on fixing it.

When instead the truth is people are in this predicament precisely because they believed a bunch of lies the Democrat Party from the president on down told them about what their health insurance is gonna be under Obamacare. “After paying premiums, many low- and middle-income patients still face high costs when trying to use their coverage. There’s growing concern that the value of a health insurance card is being eaten away by rising deductibles, the amount of actual medical costs that patients pay each year before coverage kicks in.”

Well, folks, you who listen regularly here and who have been brainwashed — ahem — you know that these high deductibles were built in as a trick. It was how Obama was able to theoretically, on paper, lower the overall cost of a policy, but they didn’t tell you that your out of pocket and your deductible were gonna triple, until after you signed up. And then subsidies are not just an option; they’re a damn requirement. Hello, Supreme Court case.

Baghdad Jim McDermott, Democrat, Washington, congressional leader on health care: “I think it’s going to be the next big problem. We’ve got some 17 million more people covered … but they can’t access the care they seem to be entitled to. It costs too much to use the care. That’s the deceptive part about it.”

Well, who did this, McDermott? The Limbaugh Theorem once again on display. The Democrats are wringing their hands. They just discovered something, some evil force, invisible force, trick pulled on ’em and they’re just now discovering it. It’s a damn good thing they discovered this trick to save the little guy, and they’re on the case. When they are responsible from the beginning.

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RUSH: Here’s Carlton in Washington, DC. I’m glad you waited, Carlton. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. In your first hour you were talking about the upcoming Supreme Court decision on the Gruber effect of Obamacare.

RUSH: That’s right.

CALLER: Everybody’s focused on the legal viability of rebates in Republican led states that chose not to set up exchanges. Have you heard anything about what’s happening in the blue states where those exchanges failed because of incompetence?

RUSH: Of course not. (laughing) Nope.

CALLER: I was just wondering about when that panic is gonna hit.

RUSH: There are some Democrat governors that didn’t sign up for a whole host of reasons. I don’t know. Most of the states are Republican governor states that did not set up an exchange. But I don’t think it’s gonna matter. I think most members of the public who have bought Obamacare, I don’t think they have slightest idea this is even going on. I think the first they’re gonna hear of it is, whatever the decision is, let’s say that Obama loses, the Regime loses, and the subsidies are pronounced illegal all this time at the federal exchange, HealthCare.gov, that’s when people, “What? You telling me my subsidies end? Who did it?”

And the answer is gonna be the Republicans. “They sued our good president. The Republicans took our good president to court because they don’t want you to have subsidies,” and that’s how this is gonna be reported. It doesn’t matter if it’s a blue state or red state. And that’s what the Republicans are afraid of, so the Republicans are coming up with a plan to make sure the subsidies stay in place. Translation: Republicans are coming up with a plan in case they win the court case that Obamacare remains the law of the land. Go figure.