RUSH: Eighteen states have now joined the lawsuit to oppose Obamacare. Folks, Obama has come to divide. Even Pete Wehner! Pete Wehner is a good friend of mine who worked for Rove in the Bush White House and used to work for Bill Bennett over at Empower America. Pete Wehner, and 
he’s one of us, but for Pete to write what he wrote today about ‘Obama the Divider’ is akin to the pope uttering a profanity. Pete, he’s very reserved and so forth, and it’s not an over-the-top piece, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer. Michael Ledeen has a great piece today on Obama. I’ll read it to you as the program unfolds. Basically he’s just your typical undergrad, little idealist here. He never got out of school and only knows what he’s been taught, which is basically a theory of mine.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Nancy Pelosi, quote of the day: ‘It’s like the back of the refrigerator. You see all these wires and the rest…’ Now, let me stop there. When is the last time you looked at the back of your refrigerator? My refrigerators, I have a lot of them, are built in. I can’t look behind ’em. But in the old days, when I could look behind my refrigerator, I saw one wire. Well, I saw two, maybe: A copper wire for water for the ice maker and the power cord. What bunch of wires is on the back of a refrigerator? Now with that thought, let me resume the quote. ‘It’s like the back of the refrigerator. You see all these wires and the rest… all you need to know is, you open the door. The light goes on. You open this door, you go through a whole different path, in terms of access to quality, affordable healthcare for all Americans.’ That’s Pelosi explaining how her constituents can understand the health care bill that she recently passed in the House: Compare it to opening the door of the refrigerator, and all the goodies inside (all the food that you love!) is illuminated by a bright light, and you have all of those choices. But you’ll never see that if you look at all the wires coming out of the back of the refrigerator.
With that in mind, from the McClatchy Washington News Bureau (Snerdley, we got our wish): ‘Health Care Overhaul Spawns Mass Confusion for Public.’ It is happening. ‘Two weeks after President Barack Obama signed the big health care overhaul into law, Americans are struggling to understand how — and when — the sweeping measure will affect them. Questions reflecting confusion have flooded insurance companies, doctors’ offices, human resource departments and business groups. ‘They’re saying, ‘Where do we get the free Obamacare, and how do I sign up for that?” said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com.’
I love it, folks. I was hoping. When Dawn told me that she saw this happening at the breast center, I said, ‘Whoa, I hope this is happening all over the country.’ We even urged people (in a miniature Operation Chaos) who understand the bill to show up somewhere and ask, ‘Where’s my free Obamacare?’ Who knows how many of our people are actually doing this? I don’t know. But I also know a whole bunch of legitimate people are doing it as well: ‘Where do we get the free Obamacare? How do I sign up for that?’
‘[Carrie] McLean said the call center had been inundated by uninsured consumers who were hoping that the overhaul would translate into instant, affordable coverage’ as in free. ‘That widespread misconception may have originated in part from distorted rhetoric about the legislation bubbling up from the hyper-partisan debate…’ No! The reason people think this is ’cause Obama was lying to them! The ‘hyperpartisan debate’ was us trying to tell people the truth about this! Obama was the one telling people all these wonderful things about his health care plan and giving the impression that it was going to be paid for by a couple of millionaires. ”We tell them it’s not free, that there are going to be things in place that help people who are low-income, but that ultimately most of that is not taking place until 2014.” I hope it’s millions of people. I hope it is millions of people showing up, expecting their freebie, expecting their insurance coverage and being told, ‘Oh, no, no, no! That’s not going to happen for four years!’
‘Adults with pre-existing conditions are frustrated to learn that insurers won’t have to cover them until 2014 (though those under 18 will be protected in September); then they become both hopeful and confused upon learning that a federal high-risk pool for them will be established in the next few months. ‘Health insurance is so confusing. You add this on top of it and it makes it even more confusing,” said the person that works for the insurance company. ‘The Obama administration is embarking on a years-long public…’ Years long? Oh? Really?
By the way, whatever happened to the jobs push? Is Obama going to be focusing laser-like on jobs while he’s in Prague signing the giveaway arms deal with the Russians? Whatever happened to that?
‘The Obama administration is embarking on a years-long public education campaign about the overhaul, including a Web component. However, much of the guidance will depend on the Department of Health and Human Services regulations that are still being developed.’ It’s a nightmare. It’s a total nightmare out there. The ‘distorted rhetoric’ on all this probably began during the Obama-Hillary campaign. They both claimed it would be free. They both gave the impression. If they didn’t state it directly, they both gave the impression it was going to be free. So did John Edwards, the Breck Girl. These people, they are just incorrigible.
I’ll tell you, you know what you ought to do, people, if you voted for Obama on the premise that you supported his health care overhaul because you thought it was going to be free and you were going to get it immediately, you ought to go in and demand it. Don’t just go in and ask, ‘When do I get it?’ Go in and demand it! You know, pretend you’re Obama, pretend you’re a community agitator or community organizer. Go in and demand it! You’re an American! You are entitled to it! They passed the bill! The evil Republicans tried to stop ’em. As far as you’re concerned, that means the whole thing’s legit! So go in there and demand it. Wait until they find out that their tax refund has been cut to punish them for not having insurance.
Speaking of which, may I make an observation about that? Something that went right over my head yesterday (this normally does not happen) in telling you the story of the IRS commissioner saying the way they’re going to assess the fines on people who do not buy health insurance is via their tax refund. They’re just going to purloin all of it, or whatever amount of it they need, to satisfy the debt you owe if you haven’t paid your fine for not buying health insurance. Now, what does that mean? It means very simply that if you get a refund on your income tax return, what does that make you? It makes you a taxpayer. Obama said 95% of the American people would not see ‘one dime’ of an increase in their taxes. Yet the IRS commissioner yesterday just blew that up and smoked that one full of holes.
So we have the mass confusion on the public’s part, because they were led to believe some things that were not true about this, they did not apparently get the memo explaining what all this was really all about. ‘Americans who already have good coverage aren’t so worried about the immediate implications, but some admit that they’re plenty confused. ‘Why does it take so long for certain health care things to take effect?’ said Sandra Preston, a state employee in Patterson, NJ. Ben Wiesen, a software engineer who works for a small company in Tarrytown, NY, said he’d read up on the overhaul but remained concerned about the unknowns.’
For those of you who want to know why it takes four years for things to implement, I can explain it very quickly. Obama, in order to sell this, needed the price tag to be reported at something under a trillion dollars. So benefits, so-called benefits of health care reform — the actual stuff you think you’re going to get free — doesn’t kick in for four years. So there’s only six years of accounting for the costs. The taxes that we’re all going to pay to support this start now, immediately. But for four years, you get nothing for it. The true cost of ten years of benefits, so-called, and ten years of cost, spending, is $2.5 trillion.