RUSH: Here’s Steve in Newington, Connecticut, as we head back to the phones. Thank you for waiting, sir. Great to have you on the air. Hi.

CALLER: Oh, it’s my pleasure, Rush. I’ve had 20-plus years with you. It was a thrill the first time I heard you say what I was thinking, so thank you for a lot of great years together.

RUSH: Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

CALLER: Hey, my question is simple. I wanted your opinion on something the Republicans might want to offer, which would be to supplement — but not supplant — our current health care, where there is a problem with the rollout. Sebelius said that she wanted five years and, you know, the senators up for reelection are talking about backing off the mandate. Why don’t we just say let’s keep the current system in place, supplement it with Obamacare, and if it is that good, keep on running parallel tracks. You know, if people want to go that way, they can, but just don’t pull people off their current insurance and let Obama and the Democrats try to sell it at that point.

RUSH: Well (sigh), it’s an interesting academic exercise, but you know it would never happen. If I understand you right, what you’re suggesting is, “Okay, let the Republicans propose to people: ‘If you like your insurance, you keep it. If you like your doctor, you keep it. If you like your insurance, if you like your health care, you keep it, and you don’t get touched,'” and then Obama can deal with people that don’t like it and the end of the day we see which one wins?

CALLER: Yeah, run parallel, ’cause it’s not ready for prime time. It will back ’em up ’til after 2014, and they’ll have to cave on the mandate.

RUSH: Here’s the problem with that. I may be misunderstanding you here, but the problem with that is Obama doesn’t want what he’s doing to “work” in the same way that you and I think of something succeeding. His definition of this working is wiping out private sector insurance and everybody ends up on Medicaid. You’re looking at the Republicans making political points by offering, “Here’s our solution: You like your plan, you keep it.” Right?

CALLER: Well, yeah, but also let Obamacare try to get on track and run parallel courses for a determined date or indefinitely in the marketplace.

RUSH: But what…? Look, I may be really thickheaded today, but who’s gonna let the Republicans do this?

CALLER: Well, if it’s not ready yet and everyone’s running up on this December 1st and January deadline where nothing’s ready —

RUSH: Obama’s not gonna admit that it isn’t ready. It is ready. They’re gonna announce enrollment figures here. They’re heading on down the tracks. There’s nothing wrong. Obama apologized for the way you’re feeling about it. He has not apologized for what he did. There’s nothing wrong with it as far as they’re concerned. It’s working just fine. They’ll get that website up and running by the end of the month, they say, and then we’re off to the races.

CALLER: Well, the 11 people that signed up could easily be absorbed into the current system. I’d like to see someone say, “Let’s not scrap the current system and let it run parallel to Obamacare.”

RUSH: It’s too… There’s no way.

CALLER: It’s possible. You’ve got Democrats — Democrats are looking, yeah, at 2016. Because when Obama’s gone, they’ll still be here. You’ve got people, senators walking up to the White House saying they have a problem with this. Obama, he’s just gonna —

RUSH: It’s too late. The plans are gone. You can’t keep it. We’re that far into Obamacare. You can’t keep Obamacare on one track and then have people keep their insurance on the other track because the policies are gone. They are vanished. They have been canceled. They have been done away with. They don’t comply with Obamacare. There’s no way. This is like my proposal after Obama was elected. I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal.

I said, “Mr. President, you want to spend $1 trillion on your stimulus. Well, give me 47% of it, ’cause my side got 47% of the vote, and I’ll do with 47% of the stimulus what I think, and you do with yours what you think, and at the end of a year we’ll see who’s doing better.” He’s never gonna do that. It was an academic exercise. It was a think piece. It was not proposed thinking that it was ever gonna happen.

Obama is not gonna do it, and there’s no Democrat that’s gonna go to Obama and say, “Look, pal, we’re sucking here and we’re in bad trouble and you’re gonna have to let people start keeping their policies.” It isn’t gonna happen. I don’t care what you do. The last thing that’s gonna happen here is they give the Republicans anything. It just isn’t gonna happen — and besides, the policies are gone.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: It’s great to have you, and I don’t want anybody to think I was mean or dismissive of our previous caller. There’s some reality here. In the first place, the Republicans have legislation out there. It’s been proposed. “You like your plan, you get to keep it.” There’s all kinds of Republican alternatives. They’re never gonna see the light of day. I know that was the argument of Ted Cruz, but Ted Cruz was trying for something different — a groundswell of public opinion to stop it.

That’s about the only thing that’s gonna work.

Congress is a follower, it’s not a leader, and Cruz understood this. But there is legislation to that effect before Congress, and Barack Obama’s never gonna sign it, even if it got through Congress. But here’s the problem. You cannot have “parallel tracks” with the right way on one hand and Obamacare on the other hand. In the first place, Obamacare can’t survive with private sector insurance the way it is today. There’s no need for Obamacare. Obamacare doesn’t peacefully co-exist with the private sector.

Obamacare is not an alternative. You choose Obamacare, you lose your policy. Obamacare is mandatory. There is no choice, by definition. You are losing your choice. And all of these hundreds of thousands, millions of people being canceled are now learning this. There is no choice anymore. That’s the whole thing with liberalism. You lose your choice. Everything becomes a mandate. Everything becomes something you have to do, or you’re in violation of the state.

Obamacare simply cannot survive with private insurance the way it is, and so those policies are gone. Even if you came up with a way to keep your current plan, at some point that plan’s gonna go away because it’s not in compliance — and once that happens, you’re gonna lose it anyway, and then all you can do is go to an exchange and take what they offer — and it isn’t much. Nobody, nobody is going to sign up for Obamacare unless they are forced it. That’s what Obama knows. Nobody would choose this.

This is why I… Folks, I’m sorry. Five years, four years, three, whatever it is, I’ve been shouting this stuff from the mountaintops to people, and because of people’s attitude toward the presidency, they just don’t believe the president would lie to them. They didn’t listen. They didn’t hear it. Now the reality is seeping in, and they’re even struggling with how to deal with that.

But nobody will sign up for Obamacare unless they’re forced to, and therefore everybody is going to be forced to. That’s why there is an individual mandate! You have to be forced, otherwise you wouldn’t. Even they know it. Even the Obamacare people know it. Nobody would choose this. That’s the whole point of liberalism. You don’t know what’s good for you. They do. You will never do the “right” thing.

You won’t spend your money the right way, you won’t donate to the right people, you won’t support government enough. They have to take your money. They have to tell you how to live. They have to tell you what you can and can’t eat and what you can and can’t drive. And they have to tell you how big your portions can be. This is who they are, folks. There is no parallel system where you can choose. That happens at the ballot box.

That’s where you have to make that choice, is when you vote. It’s too late now on this. The only solution here is to get rid of Obamacare, not peacefully co-exist with it, because that can’t be done, that isn’t possible. And the idea, “Well, maybe Democrats are in trouble. Maybe Obama would go for that.” Obama’s not up for reelection. He doesn’t care about the other Democrats. He doesn’t! Here’s the thing that matters.

If you believe nothing of what I say, if you believe nothing of what I say, believe this: What people do not understand is that as far as Obama is concerned, Obamacare is working perfectly right now. It is happening exactly as it was drawn up. It is happening exactly as it was designed. “Mr. Limbaugh, do you mean to tell me they intended for the website to fail?” Well, let me ask you a question about that.

I’ve got a story here about three nerds from San Francisco who went in and created an Obamacare alternative over the weekend that’s up and running. It’s a mock-up. Do you know…? I would submit to you that there is a possibility this is a screw-up on purpose, because there are two things that you do not learn when you sign up. A, that when you sign up, every bit of personal data you give is irretrievable.

It’s gone. The government has it. You can’t get it back. The next thing is, you have to keep drilling down and drilling down and drilling down before you find out what this costs. Every other website that you visit, the price of what you’re gonna buy is on the first page you visit. That’s the first thing they tell you is what it costs, because in most cases that’s the selling point. With Obamacare, it’s hidden.

The costs, the lack of choice, the benefit range is what you never get to, because you get the dreaded 404 ERROR, and it is my contention that that is on purpose. If the first thing you saw when you went to HealthCare.gov was, “Sorry, you lose your policy and your premium now triples,” that would cause the revolt. They are purposely hiding this. You have to drill down on this website so far that you can’t get there before it crashes.

So you’re learning how much it’s gonna cost because your dreaded insurance company is canceling you, not Obama. So you hate the insurance company. You think they’re typical, trying to kill you, don’t care about you, big-time corporate Republicans, right? The fact of the matter is, Obamacare has set up so that you do blame the insurance companies and not him or the Democrat Party.

But those of you that have gone to HealthCare.gov, tell me: How easy was it for you to find out what your new costs are gonna be, and how easy was it for you to find out that you’re gonna lose your doctor and that your current plan was no good? My guess is, you never did learn that on that website. So there’s a part of me that thinks even the website screw-up is on purpose ’cause nobody with $600 million could devise something this absolutely worse unless they intended to.

I mean, it’s that bad.

You go to Amazon.com. Whatever you go there for, there’s the price, and the sale price and the rebate, and what it will cost you if you give a coupon. None of that is available with Obamacare. You don’t know what the hell anything is gonna cost! They’re hiding that from you. They’re hiding your premiums, tripling or doubling them. They’re hiding your deductible tripling. They’re hiding what’s happening to your out-of-pocket, and they’re certainly hiding from you that your current plan goes by the wayside.

They’re putting all of the really important stuff on the back end of this website — on purpose, by design — not the front. So my point to you is: Whether the website was designed to be a mess, I don’t know, but I could make a case for it. It doesn’t matter. The fact of the matter is, if you believe nothing else of what I’m saying, understand that as far as Obama is concerned, Obamacare is rolling out nearly perfectly. The only way that Obamacare will survive is if millions of people are forced into it by losing their previous coverage.

Now, I think, at the end of the day, it’s never really going to work. That’s the sad thing. I mean, it’s not gonna work in the sense that you or I think of something working. You have to understand the way the liberal looks at something working. Their purpose here is not to provide you health care cheaply, affordably and plentifully. That’s not what this is about to them. This is about taking over one-sixth of the US economy and controlling as much of your life as they can. I realize that a low-information voter hearing me say that is not gonna believe it. That’s gonna sound like kook talk to them. I know it’s not persuading anybody to tell ’em that, but that’s the truth.

I mean, I’m sure that they would love it if you would happily give up your current policy, you’d happily pay higher costs so that other people can be insured. I’m sure they’d like that, don’t misunderstand. But the chaos, the confusion, the fact that you’ve got nowhere to go other than the exchange now, that’s exactly as designed. They don’t want an option where you keep your plan available to you. This is why the nature of Obama’s lie is so profound and huge and personal and impeachable, if you ask me. This lie, that you can keep your plan if you like it and keep your doctor, folks, that’s fraud. My good friend Andy McCarthy wrote a great piece on this over the weekend at National Review Online.

I mean, I got a question for you. I think my brother tweeted this out. I think that’s where I saw it. It is arguable now who committed the greater fraud, Bernie Madoff or Barack Obama. Madoff defrauded a few. This is defrauding the entire country. The president of the United States lied to the entire country on the most important thing to people, their health care and their current plan, and remember, now, I want to try this one more time. His number one selling point that he repeated over and over again for three solid years was: “You like your plan, you keep it.” There’s an obvious question that derives from that. Well, then why change anything?

If everybody can keep their plan or keep their doctor if they like it, then what the hell is wrong with health care? If that’s what it took to get your vote, if that’s what it took to get your support for Obama — you like your plan, you keep it — then what was wrong? Why do we need Obamacare? “Well, there’s 30 million uninsured.” Oh. How are we gonna insure ’em? It turns out they’re not even gonna be insured after all of this. But this lie, you like your doctor, you can keep it, the premium comes down $2,500, you like your policy, you keep that, that’s why this lie is so bad. It’s because he lied about the most important fundamental truth of Obamacare, which is you can’t keep your plan, you can’t keep your doctor, by definition.

They aren’t going to exist under Obamacare. And he knew it, and his Regime knew it and it’s in the Federal Register. They knew that 93 million Americans were gonna lose their policies, their current plans that they like. Obama, in 2010 — I’ve got the sound bite here — even admitted to people that what’s happening now was gonna happen. He even admitted that people right off the bat were gonna lose their insurance. He even admitted it. But that’s just a tip of the iceberg. There’s nobody that gets to keep their plan. You don’t have Obamacare if you have that. You are mandated to have Obamacare. Obamacare is not your current plan, by definition. And that illustrates the scope of that lie and why it is out and out fraud.

This is not just a political promise of promising to cut your taxes and then figuring out we don’t have the money for it. This is over the top, purposeful, willful fraud, because he knew that his legislative plan, his health care reform plan could not work if everybody kept what they had and didn’t change anything. If there’s no reason to change, then why are we doing Obamacare? Now more and more doctors are dropping out of this and refusing to play ball. It is an absolute nightmare. But, again, all of that plays right into the ultimate objective: government running everything.

Such a big mess is being created now. You can’t go to your old doctor. You can’t go to your old insurance company. They’re not offering anything anymore. You’ve got one place to go now: Obama, Democrat Party, government, they are your savior. That’s the plan, that’s the design, to have you begging them for insurance, not the picture of them forcing it on you.