RUSH: Here’s more Bernie Sanders. This is where it starts to get funny. Now, he was on MSNBC this morning, and, remember, yesterday he said, (paraphrasing) ‘I’m not voting for the bill. I’m struggling with this. I’m not voting for it. I’m going to do my best to make this bill a better bill.’ This morning he kind of changed his tune. Question: ‘Howard Dean yesterday compared the health care bill mandating new health insurance customers without breaking up the insurance monopoly without introducing the public option or any other competitive aspect is a bigger bailout for the insurance companies than the one that Ben Bernanke provided to AIG and Goldman Sachs. Do you agree with that?’
SANDERS: I am not there yet in terms of voting for it. I’m not there in terms of voting against it. Right now I am dealing with the White House, dealing with the Democratic leadership trying to make this bill as good as it can possibly be. It is not my view that passing anything is better than passing nothing.
RUSH: Really? He doesn’t think that? Really? I wonder if he means it. Now, interestingly, this whole imbroglio, ladies and gentlemen, has been brought up, the reason the left is unhappy with this is the bill does mandate that everybody buy health insurance, everybody has to, and if you don’t buy it, you face a fine and the IRS will be administering the fines, and you also might go to jail. Well, that was all fine and dandy with the left if there was a public option or if there was an expansion of Medicare, because then, being forced to buy into it was okay because you’re buying into a government-run plan. That’s fine and dandy with them, but Lieberman and a couple of others said, ‘Look, we’re not voting for this thing with a public option in it, and we’re not voting for this thing with a Medicare expansion.’
So in order to get Lieberman’s vote they took those two things out and that’s when the left erupted because what it means to them now is that the requirement, the mandate to buy insurance means the only place you can buy it is from the evil, mean private sector insurance companies, which are a hated industry, and that’s why’s Dean’s upset, that’s why all the kook fringe left-wing bloggers are upset, and that’s why they consider it a sellout and that Big Pharma has won, along with Big Insurance. They’ve been mad at Lieberman since the 2008 campaign when he was out there campaigning for McCain, and to see Harry Reid throw everything the left wanted in this bill out in order to get Lieberman’s vote has sent them into a tizzy. So make no mistake, they don’t mind everybody being forced to buy insurance as long as you have to buy it from something run by the government. This notion that the public option, which has always been misnamed because the public option may be an option for a couple years but after that it won’t be because private insurance will have been run out of business.
The way it would work under the original plan, the public option would be very, very cheap, on purpose, and by design. The purpose of making it cheap was to see to it that businesses off-load their current health care program and plans, their benefits plan to the public option. Businesses would love to do that. And then after a while the price would then come up, and it would spiral out of control and there would be no competition after that. So the Democrats talking about the need for competition, we gotta have a public option. I don’t know how many thousands of insurance companies out there there are. The idea that there’s no competition in private insurance is foolhardy. It’s sophistry. And the idea that adding a government-run option to the thousands of existing private options is gonna add to competition is absurd because the end result was it would limit competition because it would shut down the private sector health insurance industry, in toto. That was its purpose. That was its point. And that’s another reason the people on the left are upset, because they think that their leaders are simply giving up on the idea of eventually having a single-payer health plan.
Now, there’s this story from the Los Angeles Times: ”Democrats Take Aim at Healthcare Bill Provision’ — Thirty-one lawmakers, including 29 from California, object to a facet of the House and Senate bills that would allow insurers in one state to sell policies in many other states.’ That would increase competition even more. Right now, if you live in Florida you can only buy private health insurance from a Florida company. Same thing in Alabama, California, what have you. Now, anybody who understands free market economics and competition understands that if somebody in Florida can shop around the whole country for a health insurance policy and doesn’t have to be restricted to selecting one from Florida, you’ve got competition wide open. So, 31 lawmakers, all Democrats, including 29 from California, object to allowing people to buy health insurance across state lines. What was that they were saying about competition? They want more competition in this? They want the public option to be in competition with the private sector insurance companies? And yet the one thing that would really provide competition they are opposed to?
The Democrats are taking aim at allowing more competition in the private sector. That’s the bottom line here. And there’s another reason they don’t like this, and listen to me on this. They don’t like the idea of competition across state lines, buying private insurance across state lines. They also don’t like what might go by the wayside, and that is state mandates. We’ve had plenty of people that work at insurance companies call here and explain they would love to offer policies that they cannot offer because the states have restrictions on what they can offer, what they can charge. If you have a piece of legislation that allows individual citizens to purchase health insurance policies from any company in the country, regardless where they are and regardless where the customer lives, then you also are wiping out the whole notion of state control and state mandates, or you’re putting a dent in it. And what are states? They are government.
So no matter where you look at this, even the latest iteration of throwing out the Medicare expansion, or throwing out the public option, wherever you look at this, what you find is the only thing they want is anything that empowers government, be it federal, be it state. They want to disempower you. They want to disempower the private sector insurance companies, pure and simple. They don’t have any desire for competition, none, zilch, zero, nada. Competition is fundamentally part of capitalism, and we know that they hate capitalism; they want no part of it. So don’t buy this. This is Alinskyite, this is the way Alinsky advised Obama and taught all these radicals. Look, you can’t go out there, Alinsky said, and tell everybody who you really are. You can’t say that what you want is the overthrow of the US government. You can’t say you want the destruction of the private sector. You can’t say you want to go out and get social justice. What you have to do is speak in the language that your audience understands and make them think that you’re talking about things they’re interested in.
So when Obama comes along and says, ‘Yeah, we want a public option because we want to increase competition because everybody knows the private sector insurance agencies are a bunch of cheats and liars and thieves,’ they demonize the agency just like they demonize Big Oil, just like demonize Big Pharma, they demonize Big Insurance, say we need this government option, we want competition. In fact, it’s just the opposite. They know that most Americans understand full well the effects of competition, makes everybody better, it lowers prices. It’s inevitable. It’s the way free markets work, not what Democrats want. But they can’t come out and say, ‘What we really want to do is control every aspect of your life and we’re going to do it by making you buy health care from us and you’re going to have to live a certain way and vote a certain way in order to get covered.’ They can’t say that.
Well, Bernie Sanders did. This is why Coburn read Bernie Sanders amendment, which was essentially a 767-page amendment saying just that. So they had to stop the reading of the bill. They had to stop it. He was panicking, he went down there and had it stopped even though he violated Senate rules to do it.
So you hear Obama and Reid and whoever it is on the Democrat side talking about competition, common sense, folks. You know they hate the capitalist system. They hate the private sector. When they start talking about competition, you have to scratch your head and say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s part of capitalism, that’s part of free market, we know you guys don’t like that.’ So they have to speak in terms that they think you understand and lie to you in the process so you go along with it. And, see, that’s not what’s working anymore. Thank goodness to the so-called New Media or the alternative media. We’ve got over 60% of the American people in a Rasmussen poll who oppose this. How do those 60% who oppose it know what the hell is in it? F. Chuck Todd’s not telling them, Chris Matthews is not telling them, CNN’s not telling them, the New York Times is not telling them, the Washington Post is not telling them, TIME, Newsweek, whatever, not telling them, the Los Angeles Times is not telling them. But how are they finding out?
This is why everybody is so shook up on this. It wasn’t long ago that something like this would have sailed through in a matter of months with hardly any waves, any problem whatsoever. So now they’re up against an opposition media they don’t know how to deal with other than to demonize, but the facts of what’s in this bill are getting out and more and more people don’t want it, which then closes a loop and explains in part why they’re in such a hurry to do this. Now, back to Bernie Sanders. We’re gotta let you hear exactly what happened on the Senate floor yesterday. This is Bernie Sanders interrupting the reading of the clerk on the Senate floor reading his amendment. And you’ll also hear the acting president of the Senate here, Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland.
SANDERS: Mr. President? (gavel bangs)
CARDIN: The senator from Vermont.
SANDERS: I withdraw my amendment. And Mr. President…
UNIDENTIFIED SENATOR: Regular order, Mr. President.
CARDIN: Senate, Senator… The senator has that right. The amendment is withdrawn.
RUSH: That was Cardin, and he has the right to remove it, but it can’t be stopped, it can’t be removed, it can’t be recalled until there’s unanimous consent, every senator must agree, and they bypassed that step. I know, Snerdley, I’m not surprised. These are Democrats, to hell with rules, to hell with the parliamentary process. This is full-fledged fraud and deceit. Bernie Sanders submits his amendment and Coburn says, wow, they’re being honest here, let’s go read this so people know what he’s talking about, and he showed up and he was livid. He continued with this.
SANDERS: We have a $12 trillion national debt and the best the Republicans can do is try to bring the United States government to a halt by forcing a reading of a 700-page amendment. That is an outrage.
RUSH: I love it. I absolutely love it. The outrage is that you wrote the amendment. The outrage is that your stupidity brought it to the floor. The Democrats have to know that the Republicans have threatened, they’ve promised they’re going to read this bill once it comes there. So they actually did it. And to say there’s a $12 trillion national debt and the best the Republicans can do is try to bring the US government to a halt. We’re trying to stop the debt from piling up even further, Senator Sanders. We are trying to protect the United States from people like you.