RUSH: Okay. Back to the phones. Who’s next? John in Indianapolis. John, I’m glad you called. Great to have you on the program. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, “conservatarian” dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I want to make a quick point about blame and Obamacare. I believe one of the most insidious aspects of all this is that as it fails, the people who will be blamed will be the doctors, the hospitals, the insurance companies. As it fails, then we will be moved — or the attempt will be made to move us — toward nationalized health care for everybody, universal health care.
RUSH: I think so. Yeah, that’s right. That’s by design, actually.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: It’s designed to get people ticked off at the doctors and the hospitals, particularly the insurance companies. It’s fascinating. The insurance companies signed on to their own demise by agreeing to this.
CALLER: They bought ’em off. They bought ’em off, I think.
RUSH: For how long, though? I mean, he gave ’em two more years of validity before they’re out of business. Big whoop.
CALLER: Right, but my main point is — and the press is the key element here. They will be the drivers who continually blame elements of the private sector. Every time the government gets involved, it distorts everything, and then when people actually try and act in their own interests as the private marketplace dictates, they get blamed. Profit is evil. The government is good, lawyers are good, politicians are good — except unless they’re conservative — and the private sector is bad because they want evil profit. It makes me sick, and I just wonder if our generation can get it back, or will it take the next generation? I think it might, but what do you think?
RUSH: I don’t think our generation is gonna do anything. Our generation, in my estimation, has too many members that are in the process of caving to this. I don’t think our generation has a majority of people who want to fight any of it.
CALLER: Right, but there are young people who are —
RUSH: I don’t know. Because the problem is, as you have etched out the scenario, I don’t know how many people are gonna come to this conclusion instinctively. I mean, here you have a provision that’s designed to help small business. Of course, there’s nothing about this plan that’s gonna help anybody other than big government people who are gonna benefit from a bigger government. But it’s designed to take care of small businesses and small business employees. Okay, they can’t implement it in time. They’re running way behind.
Well, what do people do? You can’t delay your need for health treatment. You can’t delay your need for insurance. So what do you do? They’re just arbitrarily moving this. I don’t care what happens, people are gonna run into all kinds of bottlenecks and bureaucrat obstacles, and nobody’s gonna have any answers for them. That’s when, you’re right, the people they’re interacting with are gonna get the blame. It’ll be the insurance companies, who are gonna say, “Look, I can’t do anything. There’s a government law here.” People aren’t gonna hear that, and it’s all designed to get people further dissatisfied with the private sector and turn to government for help.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, look, let me tackle the real question our last caller asked. We’re all descending here into government-run everything. His question was, people in our generation, and I assume he meant mine, the Baby Boomers, he was asking, are there enough of us that are gonna stand up and stop this? Now, I know polling data indicates that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose Obamacare. An overwhelming number of people know what Obamacare is, and they don’t like it.
Now, it’s a different question to think, “Okay, they don’t like it, but what are they willing to do to stop it?” And that’s what I don’t know. One of the problems with this is, since this is a legislative reality, there are two ways of stopping it. Either counter-legislation, legislation that doesn’t pay for it or repeals it, or simply public protest in refusing to go along with it. And that gets kind of dicey because how willing are people going to be to make a stand on something where health care is concerned, particularly for their children. They also see that in Washington, their own elected representatives have provided lip service to repealing Obamacare, but not much else. And the most often asked question I get from people is, “What can I do beyond voting?” Which doesn’t seem to be enough.
So there’s public protest, simply refusing to participate, with enough people participating to make a real difference in refusing to allow the program to implement. I have really no idea how many such people that there might be. Now, we turn to the young. People who are millennials, people who are Gen X, they have an entirely different outlook on things, particularly social. They are perfectly comfortable with the government intruding anywhere if what’s at stake is equality and fairness and being nice to people. Now, you would think that when the actual responsibility of paying for this hits them, that they will awaken and realize what’s happened.
Theoretically, yeah, I would fall into a camp that suggests that that will happen as well. But when I look at some of the younger generations, and I look at the ’em issue by issue by issue, I don’t find nearly the distrust, problem with, dislike for government that I have. I literally think the federal government is an absolute disaster. I think it does much more harm than any good that it does. But I also think I’m in an increasing minority that looks at it that way, in terms of the entire population the country. Not generational, but just adding them all together. I think it’s an absolute disaster. Fiscally alone, this is utter irresponsibility.
We’ve got a federal government that gets away with things that no one in the private sector would be allowed to stay out of jail for a week doing. The irresponsibility in spending money that’s not theirs, the redundancy of programs, the absolute waste and the fraud, all of this. I’ve got no problem saying any of this, but, boy, a lot of people, even if they think what I think are not gonna dare say this. They’re too afraid of what might happen to them by the authorities.
I’ll never forget, I talked to people that lived in the Soviet Union. They would retreat into their bathrooms to have real conversations with each other because they figured the bathroom wasn’t bugged, that the least chance of being overheard was either outside or in the bathroom. I can’t tell you the number of places where I have people whispering to me about things, and I can’t hear. People whispering or don’t want other people to overhear what they’re saying because they’re afraid of what reaction it’s gonna get. So I really don’t know what the younger generation’s reaction to costs that they have no idea are coming, I have no idea what the reaction’s gonna be. Common sense would say they’re not gonna put up with it. Common sense would say, at some point, because this does happen generationally.
Every third or fourth generation comes along and some of them at some point say, “You know what? We don’t want to live the way that our parents and grandparents live. We don’t want to live what they’re bequeathing us,” and they change it all around. It’s how you got the Victorians, for example, and cultural rot has tended to be self-correcting in that way, illustrated, scientifically studied and proved every third or fourth generation. But we’re to a point now where this government is so big, so massive, and so involved in the most mundane things in people’s lives, that getting it out and reducing its role is a major, major consistent, long-term undertaking. Not something that one election can fix, for example.
One election can stop the direction we’re going. Another election can turn it around. Another election can create energy in the right direction. But that means winning three elections. And not just for the presidency, but having like-minded people in Congress and state legislatures. You heard the call yesterday. Do you know how many people have learned how to profit from government as it exists? Rather than spend that time and that creative energy into making something of themselves in the private sector, they have spent all that time and creativity and energy in gaming — and they don’t think that’s what they’re doing, by the way — the system. It’s like I said on the day after the election last November, it’s just really hard, folks, to beat Santa Claus, is what this all comes down to. It’s really difficult to run an election against Santa Claus and win.
