RUSH: The left’s agenda just keeps marching. You’ve got Dingy Harry. Dingy Harry says that we are, what, just one set up away from single payer, what we’ve always wanted. Dingy Harry’s out there complaining about how health care became an employer benefit in World War II, that if that hadn’t happened, we’d already be at single payer. So the Democrats are marching on with Obamacare, salivating over having it become single payer, government-run. All of the chaos that’s happening in the health care and health insurance fields is by design. It’s supposed to be a big mess that people can’t figure out. It’s supposed to be a big mess that leaves a lot of people uninsured and untreated.
It’s supposed to be a big mess so that people eventually turn to the place of last resort, the North Pole where the White House is and Santa Claus. That’s the design. And the Democrats are pumping iron, they’re very confident, folks, they don’t think anything can stop them. They really don’t. And why would they? They got the Republicans in Washington basically agreeing with them. They’re marionettes. They’re puppet masters. They want the Republicans to focus on destroying their base by going out and appealing to Hispanics, they do it. They want the Republicans to fail to distinguish themselves on socialism and capitalism by basically agreeing with the Democrats on Obamacare, they do it.
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RUSH: This is Obama, and this is from his press conference on Friday, which, you know, interestingly, started after this program. Normally Obama does these things at one o’clock Eastern time, while this program is going on, and the objective there is to get some of our stations to bump out of this program and carry the presser. But this time he did it after this program so there would be no possible commentary about the press conference from me. So he’s talking about the Republicans and Obamacare, and listen to this. This cuts to the quick.
OBAMA: My friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care. That’s hard to understand as an agenda that is gonna strengthen our middle class. At least they used to say, “Well, we’re gonna replace it with something better.” There’s not even a pretense now that they’re gonna replace it with something better.
RUSH: Now, this is his characterization to low-information voters of the Republican effort to repeal this. Because it is an abject fail. Do you realize after Obamacare is fully implemented — and for any of you out there in the low-information voter crowd — well, normally you know who you are, but people in the low-information do not know that they’re low-information. I mean, the poor know they’re poor, the fat know they’re fat, the ugly know they’re ugly. Low-information people do not know that they’re low-information. They don’t think of themselves that way. Nobody does. That’s why when Romney started talking about the 47% that’ll never support, I mean it wasn’t the best thing to say, but most people in that group would not admit that they’re in that group, so they could act righteously indignity that Romney would treat other people that way.
But even after Obamacare’s fully implemented, 30 million Americans are still not gonna have health insurance. In fact, a lot more than that are not gonna have it because it’s gonna be so expensive. “But my friends in the other party have made the idea preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail.” So in a press conference, there’s Obama saying the Republican Party doesn’t want you to have health care, not health insurance, the Republican Party doesn’t want you to get treated. It is patently absurd. There’s nothing to back that up. It is an absolutely irresponsible allegation, but he makes it with community, nobody in the press corps challenges him on it, and the low-information voters pick up on it, “Yeah, yeah, the Republicans hate people. They don’t want anybody to get well. You get sick, die. That’s what the Republicans want.” And this is what people end up thinking, when the entire anti-health care effort is based in saving the best health care system the world has ever had.
Obamacare destroys it. Obamacare makes it unaffordable. I got an e-mail from a female doctor who’s treated me in the past for an ailment. Doesn’t matter which one. And she’s a liberal, by the way. She sends me this note talking about how impossible it already is to comply with this, and she’s thinking of leaving the profession. It’s unworkable. She was talking about the mess that electronic health records are and have become and the place where she works is just more suited for a reality TV show than a genuine health care center. This is happening all over the place. I mean, Obamacare is what is destroying the American health care system. Obamacare is what’s pricing it out of reach, by design.
And it’s like Dingy Harry says, we are but one step away from single payer. It’s in the Las Vegas Sun. Senate Majority Leader Dingy Harry said “he thinks the country has to ‘work our way past’ insurance-based health care.” He was on a local PBS show in Vegas on Friday night called Nevada Week in Review. “When then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: ‘Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.'” We cannot have a decent health care system that requires people to have insurance.
Well, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Every week there’s a new story of this company here, that company there, pulling out of that state exchange over here, that state exchange over there, because it’s not profitable to stay in it. And the objective of Obamacare from the get-go has been to eliminate private sector insurance as an option for people so that they have nowhere to go but government-run enterprises, be they the state exchanges or whatever eventually replaces them. The idea of introducing a single payer national health care system to the US sent lawmakers into a tizzy back in 2009 when Dingy Harry was negotiating the health care bill. But what’s happened here is that he has slipped up. The mask has come off. And in this instance, Harry Reid has told the country what the endgame has always been when it comes to Obamacare.
If you take insurance out of the game, then what do you do for your health care? Your employer no longer provides it. You have to go to the federal government. They’re gonna end up running it. That’s what he means. And we’re just one step away from it, one step away, and that one step is getting rid of insurance. In another story, the Las Vegas Sun story I just treated you to does not mention this. But one of the things that Dingy Harry talked about on his TV show Friday night was blaming employer sponsored health care as a benefit for the current morass. And he was accurate, he told people it started in World War II. In World War II, General Motors and everybody needed qualified, really qualified employees. And somebody came up with the idea of adding health insurance as a benefit to employment.
That’s where the whole notion of employer provided health insurance began as a benefit. And Harry Reid cited it: “The post-WWII auto industry labor negotiations that made employer-backed health insurance the norm, remarking that ‘weÂ’ve never been able to work our way out of that.'” Now, what he’s saying is, that’s been the obstacle to single payer, which is something they’ve dreamed about for as long as you’ve been alive. But as long as you were able to get health insurance from your boss, you were satisfied. It’s a great benefit. And they’re in the process of tearing that down. And he just admitted it. It’s just out there now. That’s why the repeal of this thing is so important. Even if it can’t happen, it’s an issue where the Republicans can distinguish themselves.
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RUSH: Well, there wage and price controls in World War II. This is so silly. The wage and price controls, so employers had to improvise and come up with new ways of paying people, because there were controls on wages, and that’s where employer-provided health insurance was born, as a benefit and a way around wage and price controls. And what Harry Reid is saying here is that’s where the whole thing broke down, that’s where the whole effort was derailed to go government-run health care. The unions were big on this, too. It’s a little bit of an anti-union statement as well.