RUSH: Checking the e-mail again during the break and this is a good question. I’m glad I got the question so I can explain it to you. A lot of people are saying, ‘Rush, why is it guaranteed that insurance premiums are going to go up even in the private sector, even if the public option’s gone, and even if the Medicare buy-in is gone, what is guaranteed about premiums going up?’ Great, great question. And I, El Rushbo, ladies and gentlemen, am happy to provide you the answer. If the bill were signed as it is today, everybody would be mandated to buy insurance from a private insurance company in your state. And right there people say, ‘Why does that mean prices are going up automatically?’ Because of what else is in the bill. The bill mandates that people with preexisting conditions be covered. The bill mandates that people who are gonna die in two weeks be able to get insurance three weeks prior to that.
It’s just economic common sense. Insurance companies are not social programs. Insurance companies don’t give it away. If you mandate that they cover people who are a guaranteed loss for them, they go out of business. So they have to raise their prices to accommodate the mandates that exist elsewhere in the bill. Now, for some poor people, in the bill there are subsidies for them if they cannot afford to buy insurance on their own, because the bill requires everybody to do so. But if they can’t pay the premium based on their medical condition and their health at the time from a private insurance company, if they meet a test — and, of course, that’s a new bureaucracy that’s going to get all gummed up — but if they meet the test, then they get subsidized. By who? Who subsidizes them? The insurance companies. Well, who pays the insurance companies? We do, the rest of us. So the reason prices are going to skyrocket is because of what else is in the bill, the mandate to cover everybody regardless of what their health is. This is like an insurance company being told that they must sell homeowner fire insurance after the house fire has started.
You’re away, you come home, you don’t have adequate fire protection in your homeowner policy. When you drive up to the block in which your house is, you see it’s going up in flames. You call the insurance companies. ‘I want an insurance policy to cover my house being burned down.’ And the insurance company says, ‘What’s the situation now?’ ‘Well, it’s half gone.’ And if the government says that the insurance company has to sell somebody fire insurance when their house is burning, guess what they’re going to charge for it? Through the roof. This is exactly what’s happening in this bill. And the reason it differs is because health now is considered some God-given right that nobody should ever get sick, and if they do get sick, that they should never die, they should always get well. Well, the market doesn’t work that way. No entity works that way. You know, I’ve talked to football coaches. In fact, we talked to Jimmy Johnson once. We interviewed Jimmy Johnson when he was coaching the Dolphins, did an interview with him for the Father’s Day issue of the Limbaugh Letter.
I asked him, ‘Do you treat every player the same on the team?’ He said, ‘No, you can’t. Some of them don’t have the same ambition. Some of them don’t have the same drive. Some of them you don’t have to worry about their commitment, others you have to do certain things. If a guy screws up during the week in practice and you de-list him that week and put him on the inactive list, some players are going to react positively to that and say, ‘Oh, gotta impress the coach more,’ or they’re gonna pout. You have to know who you’re dealing with.’ No two people are the same. No two life circumstances are the same. But yet to have some generalized policy on health coverage and insurance coverage mandated by the government is just an excuse, folks, it’s a fuse. You lighten the fuse and costs are going to skyrocket.
The dirty little secret is the same truth would exist if there were a public option. If that were the only place you could go, because the rest of the bill mandates that people with preexisting conditions be covered. If you don’t even have a preexisting condition, there are even circumstances in both these bills where if you are diagnosed without any indication you’re sick, if you’re diagnosed with something that could lead to your death in a matter of years, you are able to go out, the insurance companies have to sell you coverage when you haven’t had any prior to that. So that’s why the prices are going to go up, the federal government, pure and simple, in the health care bill. There’s no way anybody’s health insurance costs are going to go down when the government’s involved in any aspect of this.
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RUSH: Look at it this way, ladies and gentlemen. When you are covering known illnesses, you are no longer insuring against something, you are paying a monthly fee so others will cover your existing illness. You’re no longer a risk; your illness is a reality. And this is not insurance. It’s being called insurance but it’s not. It’s something entirely different.
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RUSH: Now, about the premiums going up and my brilliant dissertation on why prices will go up in the private sector even if the public option is not there and even if the Medicare buy-in is not there, it’s not just preconditions that are mandated to be covered in the health care bills in either the House or the Senate. There was a recent amendment that added mandating private insurers to provide mammogram and other women’s issues coverage, including spousal abuse! Insurance for spousal abuse and mammograms, even though the mammogram age is going to be raised to the age of 50. Now, you think of all the mandates that will be added on to private insurance, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, if an insurance company cannot discriminate against preconditions, if they can’t do it, if you got a preexisting condition, they have to cover you. The premium has to go up. But if they can’t discriminate against preconditions, can they still charge more for smokers? Can they charge more for mountain climbers? Can they charge more for race car drivers? Can they charge more for knife thrower assistants? I don’t know. If they can, why?
If the insurance companies cannot discriminate against a precondition — a precondition could be defined as, you smoke, fine, your premium is going to go higher. But if they can’t discriminate against preconditions, they have to cover the high-risk people who are smoking 18 packs of cigarettes a day? If they do, if they’re forced to cover those kinds of people, if they’re forced to cover mountain climbers and race car drivers and other risky life behavior, what do you think the price is going to do? It’s gonna skyrocket. And this is a little indication of what this bill is really all about. It’s not about health care; it’s about controlling your life. And if you can’t get insurance because you’re a race car driver, what are you going to do? If the insurance companies can discriminate against you then who are you going to sue when they don’t discriminate against preexisting conditions? This thing is just an unbridled mess.
Now, I want to expand on this. When you are covering known illnesses, you are no longer insuring against something, you are paying a monthly fee so others will cover your existing illnesses. You’re raising prices for everybody. You are no longer a risk, because your illness is a reality. So this really isn’t even insurance. It is redistributing wealth, pure and simple. I have always tried to impress upon everybody that this is not about health care. It is about the redistribution of wealth via the controlling of behavior of people and the ability to charge them more for whatever it is they do in their lives that is in the unapproved list that some bureaucracy comes up with. Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood here because saying things like this can make people think that I, El Rushbo, am heartless. And of course this is the exact opposite. I have a huge heart. Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. I am not dumping on people who have illnesses. Many of us have various illnesses and so forth. But what is being discussed here is not insurance. If using my ‘your house is on fire’ example, if you were allowed to buy a rider to your homeowners insurance that covered fire only after your house fire had started, we’re not talking insurance. You’re not being insured because the risk has already happened.
We’re talking about something entirely different. We’re talking about the redistribution of wealth. And this is why, in case you’re also asking, ‘Why does Obama not care? Just get the bill now, just get the bill now.’ This is why Obama wants anything he can get, any bill that he can get. He sees this as a control issue. If the bill is not as radical as he would like, they’ll go back and they’ll fix that, they’ll make it worse in subsequent years. This bill is horrible, it is very bad, but they’re not going to stop there, just like they didn’t stop with Medicare. Do you think when they came up with Medicare that they ever intended it to get this big? Probably they did but did they tell us it was going to happen? No. Social Security, ditto. Did Social Security reduce the budget deficit? Did Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, did they keep the country from going bankrupt, or are they contributing factors to the country nearing bankruptcy? Well, we all know the answer to that, and of course what will health care, if passed, end up being but more of the same?