RUSH: The president’s addressing the nation, ladies and gentlemen, on how he’s gonna play dictator again and fix his health care problem. It was supposed to start exactly a half hour ago. He just started three minutes ago, opening up on the Philippines. He finished his remarks on the Philippines right as this program began. So we’re gonna JIP it. Here’s the president playing dictator.
OBAMA: — the 1.5 million people. Of those 1.5 million people, 106,000 of them have successfully signed up to get covered. Another 396,000 have the ability to gain access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That’s been less reported on, but it shouldn’t be. Americans who are having a difficult time, who are poor, many of them working, may have a disability —
RUSH: Folks, we know what he’s gonna propose here. We’re just doing this because I know the affiliates want to carry this stuff, so — (crosstalk)
OBAMA: — later today I’ll be in Ohio where Governor Kasich, a Republican, has expanded Medicare under the Affordable Care Act —
RUSH: I can tell you what he’s gonna do.
OBAMA: — 275,000 Ohioans will ultimately be better off because of it. And if every governor followed suit, another 5.4 million Americans could gain access to health care next year. So, the bottom line is in just one month, despite all the problems that we’ve seen with the website, more than 500,000 Americans could know the security of health care by January 1st.
RUSH: And they’ve just been shafted based on what you’re gonna propose here in a minute.
OBAMA: — and it’s significant.
RUSH: Five hundred thousand is significant?
OBAMA: That still leaves about one million Americans who successfully made it through the website, not qualified by insurance, but haven’t picked a plan yet. And there’s no question that if the website were working as it’s supposed to, that number would be much higher —
RUSH: No.
OBAMA: — of people who’ve actually enrolled.
RUSH: Not true.
OBAMA: So that’s problem number one.
RUSH: People are shocked at what they found there.
OBAMA: Making sure the website is working the way it’s supposed to. It’s gotten a lot better over the last few weeks than it was on the first day, but we’re working 24/7 to get it working for the vast majority of Americans.
RUSH: Can I ask a question here? Why would anybody believe what he says after the big lie about being able to keep — (crosstalk)
OBAMA: — concerns Americans who receive letters from their insurers that they may be losing the plans they bought in the old individual market —
RUSH: Yeah.
OBAMA: — often because they no longer meet the law’s requirements to cover basic benefits like prescription drugs or doctors visits. Now, as I indicated earlier, I completely get how upsetting this can be for a lot of Americans, particularly after assurances they heard from me that, if they had a plan that they liked, they could keep it. And to those Americans, I hear you loud and clear. I said that I would do everything we can to fix this problem, and today I’m offering an idea that will help do it. Already people who have plan that predate the Affordable Care Act can keep those plans if they haven’t changed. That was already in the law. That’s what’s called a “grandfather clause.” It was included in the law.
RUSH: Still continuing the lie, folks. (crosstalk)
OBAMA: — to people whose plans have changed since the law took effect, and to people who bought plans since the law took effect. So state insurance commissioners still have the power to decide what plans can and can’t be sold in their states, but the bottom line is insurers can extend current plans that would otherwise be canceled into 2014, and Americans whose plans have been canceled can choose to reenroll in the same kind of plan. We’re also requiring insurers who extend current plans to inform their customers about two things: one, that protections — what protections these renewed plans don’t include. Number two, that the marketplace offers new options with better coverage and tax credits that might help you bring down the costs. So if you received one of these letters, I’d encourage you to take a look at the marketplace, even if the website isn’t working as smoothly as it should be for everybody yet —
RUSH: There isn’t —
OBAMA: — a plan comparison tool that lets you browse costs for new plans near you is working just fine.
RUSH: Jeez.
OBAMA: Now, this fix won’t solve every problem for every person, but it’s gonna help a lot of people. Doing more will require more work with Congress. And I’ve said from the beginning I’m willing to work with Democrats and Republicans to fix problems as they arise.
RUSH: He’s lying again.
OBAMA: This is an example of what I was talking about. We can always make this law work better. It is important to understand, though, that the old individual market was not working well. And it’s important that we don’t pretend that somehow that’s a place worth going back to. Too often it works fine as long as you stay healthy. It doesn’t work well when you’re sick. So year after year Americans were routinely exposed to financial ruin or denied coverage due to minor preexisting conditions or dropped from coverage altogether even if they paid their premiums on time. That’s one of the reasons we pursued this reform in the first place. And that’s why I will not accept proposals that are just another brazen attempt to undermine or repeal the overall law and drag us back into a broken system.
We will continue to make the case, even the folks who choose to keep their own plans, that they should shop around in the new marketplace because there’s a good chance that they’ll be able to buy better insurance at lower cost. So we’re gonna do everything we can to help the Americans who’ve received these cancellation notices, but I also want everybody to remember there are still 40 million Americans who don’t have health insurance at all. I’m not gonna walk away from 40 million people who have the chance to get health insurance for the first time, and I’m not gonna walk away from something that has helped the cost of health care grow at its slowest rate in 50 years. So we’re at the opening weeks of the project to build a better health care system for everybody, a system that will offer real financial security and peace of mind to millions of Americans.
It is a complex process. There are all kinds of challenges. I’m sure there will be additional challenges that come up. And it’s important that we’re honest and straightforward in terms of when we come up with a problem with these reforms and these laws that we address them. But we’ve gotta move forward on this. It took a hundred years for us to even get to the point where we could start talking about and implementing a law to make sure everybody’s got health insurance. And my pledge to the American people is that we’re gonna solve the problems that are there, we’re gonna get it right, and the Affordable Care Act is going to work for the American people. So with that I’m gonna take your questions —
RUSH: All right, we’re not gonna listen to questions because all of this is gobbledygook. Greetings, my friends, and welcoming. Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute, Advanced Conservative Studies. Great to have you here. Through all of that gobbledygook, let me try to translate what you just heard. You would never know it, if you just listened to all that gobbledygook, you would never know that what Obama is doing is postponing the requirements that are forcing cancellations of your policies until after the elections.
He’s doing two things: He’s telling the insurance companies, as a dictator would, what they can and can’t do or what they must or must not do, or what they have to and don’t have to do. He is suggesting, for purely political purposes, that if you have your plan now and you like it, you can keep it for one more year so that you don’t get any angrier at Democrats than you are now and vote against them next November.
If your plan has been canceled, he has just ordered the insurance company to make it available to you, so that you can go back and get that plan. The problem is that that plan was canceled precisely because it conflicts with his law, with Obamacare. So he has declared war against the insurance companies here and is making it veritably impossible for them to do business. This is purely political.
All of this gobbledygook is designed to make everybody think that somebody else came along and canceled your plan and he’s going to come to the rescue now and give you your plan back, but just for a year — and he reiterated the original lie. He told you that when he told you that you could keep your plan “unless there’s a change in it.” He never said “unless there’s a change in it,” so he’s continuing the first lie — well, the second lie to cover the first lie — with this announcement today.
So essentially, this probably also serves the purpose of preempting the Upton bill in the House of Representatives, which we talked about yesterday as a potential trap for the Republicans, and there is a lot to wade through. Folks, this an absolute swamp now. It is an absolute disaster, and it’s also a minefield. This is all anybody needs to know that government has no business doing any of this. This, today, is an admission of abject failure in the president’s quest to actually destroy constitutional government.
Well, no, he’s not failing at that. He’s actually succeeding at that. What he’s trying to do here is just speed the process to get to the point where the government is the only provider of health insurance and health coverage. That’s his ultimate aim, and all of this chaos is designed to speed that process. What the president’s actually trying to do here is subvert democracy, in my opinion, with all of these mandates.
I want to take you back. Listen to something that I said on this program back on October 30th — just a couple of weeks ago, essentially. I was talking about Obama and Obamacare, and Obama was making changes in it willy-nilly, and he was talking about how much he cared for people, and I was asking, “Well, why doesn’t he play dictator the other way?” And today he did. So listen to this. It runs about a minute and a half, but it is explanatory unto itself.
RUSH ARCHIVE: If Obama is gonna go out now and play dictator, let’s realize he could play dictator in any direction he wants to go. If he has the power to deny you your grandfathered plan, the one you liked and the one you were told you could keep, and if Obama didn’t know all of this was going on and he didn’t know all of these problems with the website, and if Obama really cares about being truthful and honest with you, then maybe Obama can play dictator and re-grandfather your plan.
If he can play dictator and take it away from you, then he can play dictator and fix it, I assume. If he’s gonna play dictator, if he’s gonna pretend the law is subject to his whims, then let’s all realize that he’d have the power to restore millions of health insurance policies by waiving that’s new Obamacare regulations, which is forcing insurance companies to cancel policies. … Well, he loves you, he has compassion for you, cares about the little guy. Why doesn’t he get mad at all these people being canceled and go in there and fix it?
If he can play dictator and take things away, why can’t he play dictator and give ’em back? Why doesn’t he fix it? He knows people are being canceled in the hundreds of thousands. Why doesn’t he fix it, if he really cares about you? He told us if Congress didn’t give him everything he wanted he would simply do it himself. Obama has said, again, folks — and we’ve played the sound bite — “Well, if Congress won’t do it, I’ll just go in, I’ll take care of it myself.”
RUSH: So here he is doing it today, playing dictator the other way, reinstating your canceled plan, but just for a year. But it isn’t gonna be that easy. Your plan is gone. And, by the way, he didn’t say anything about your getting your old premium back. Who knows what the reinstated plan’s gonna cost you. Remember, he’s doing this not because he cares about you. He’s not doing this because he’s upset you’ve lost your plan.
He’s doing this because he’s losing the media, and he’s losing his fellow Democrats, and he’s losing the proposition. This is a purely political move today disguised as typical Democrat Party compassion. “I’m worried to death about you losing your plan. How could this have happened?” He’s gonna blame the insurance companies, and if the Republicans aren’t careful, they’re gonna make that policy.
He’s gonna blame governors; he’s gonna blame all kinds of outsiders and invisible people for making this happen. He’s riding in today as the white knight, playing dictator. The thing that I want to remind everybody is that I thought it was settled law. I thought it was the law of the land. I thought back when Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and others were saying, “Look, let’s just delay this whole thing,” or “let’s just defund it and repeal it,” we couldn’t because it was the law of the land.
Remember all those angry lectures that Obamacare was settled law? The Democrats said, “It’s the law of the land. You can’t change it.” Well, so much for that. So much for the rule of law. So much for constitutional republicanism. Now we have the president playing dictator the other way to save his party’s bacon and to save his dream of government-run socialized medicine. This is where we are, and the Republicans had better talk about this honestly.
This is not how things happen in a free country. What is happening is wrong. All it adds up to is why this mess should be repealed and gotten rid of. It is only gonna get worse. How can we…? You know the big question is, given how frequently and how easily Obama lies, why do we even believe this today? Why do we even believe this? You know, there’s a bunch of people that also have to act and make this happen.
He’ll sit up there and play dictator and wave his magic wand and say, “I’m gonna give your policy back.” Well, there’s a bunch of people in the insurance business here who now are gonna have to go back and say, “Gee, what do we do now? I mean, we’re complying with one part of the law; now he’s saying we don’t have to. What do we charge for this?” And what about the people that are gonna get their cancellation notices at work starting next year?
Oh, it’s just an abject mess and the chaos will play out to his advantage. The more chaos, the more there will be calls to “fix it, to fix it, to fix it,” and the simple solution, it will be said, is, “Look, let’s just put one guy in charge of this. Let’s put the president in charge of it and be done with all this. We’ll close the exchanges! We don’t want those anyway.” He really doesn’t want the exchanges, folks, when you get down to brass tacks.
I mean, they’re just placeholders designed to make it look like it’s something that it’s not in this whole health care plan. So we’ve had a series of time bombs here and the president determines when each one detonates, and that can’t stand. You can’t run a country this way. Simply can’t. This bomb needs to be defused. We’ve had enough explosions. There’s been enough damage and collateral damage, enough to know that we don’t need to any more.
This thing just needs to be shut down. It is incompetent, it is impossible, it is amateurish, it is beneath this country to have something like this happen with something that is so important and so crucial to so many people, to have it bounced around as a political ping-pong ball, which is what’s happening.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So the fantasy continues. The fantasy. The fantasy that you can have the health care you want, it doesn’t cost you anything or much at all, and that if you ever get sick, you’re gonna get well immediately. It’s gonna all be handled and it’s never, ever gonna be a problem for anybody again. The fantasy continues. By the way, I just listened a bit more of Obama. He said, “You know, I wasn’t the only one that made that promise.
“A bunch of people up on Congress told you you’d keep your plan, too.” That is just… That’s first grade kind of excuses. That’s Bart Simpson. “I didn’t do it, you didn’t see me do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove anything!” He’s up there saying, “Yeah, there were 10 or 12 other people on Capitol Hill making the same promise. We all had our good intentions here.”
This is such a disaster, folks. The original problem with this remains. We have president of the United States who thinks that he can compel people to go buy something. He thinks that he can compel people to go use something, even something they don’t want. If they don’t buy it, they’re gonna get fined or penalized. He goes so far as to deny what they want.
If they don’t go get what he wants them to have — i.e., having their policies canceled. This outrageous. This is so un-American, this whole thing, and now what’s the “fix”? The fix is for this guy to play dictator again and now command or compel the insurance companies to run their business the way he wants them to for the next year is that his part won’t be hurt in the elections next November.
This isn’t America, folks.
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