RUSH: Here’s Lenny in Bayville, New Jersey. Lenny, I’m glad you called. Thanks for waiting, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you. Blessings this afternoon, Rush. That’s first and most important.
RUSH: Well, thank you very much.
CALLER: Now, with this medical insurance stuff from the companies. AT&T is taking all their retired, non-management employees and putting them into the private health exchange on January 1st of 2015.
RUSH: All their retired, non-management employees?
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: So the retirees that are still on the company health care plan because of the deal they had or whatever?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: They’re off-loading them to the exchanges starting January 2015?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: All right. Legally, by the way. Obamacare encourages it, we should be honest and say.
CALLER: But you’re talking probably a few hundred thousand or a million people.
RUSH: Oh, yeah.
CALLER: They’re gonna get dumped.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, wait ’til you get to the non-retired employees. They’re gonna get hit with this, too. That’s what’s kind of disingenuous. Look, I don’t want to get the Kaiser people mad at me. There’s nothing to be gained by that. But, for crying out loud, here! They’ve known about this.
They’ve got this big news story from yesterday warning people (scoffs) that this is going to happen, and they’re saying that there may be something they can do to help this situation. But, I mean, for crying out loud! Everybody who supported Obamacare has got to accept a share of responsibility for this.
Everybody who supported this, everybody who knew what was in it and didn’t tell anybody this was in it, is responsible. Two years ago! Go back to RushLimbaugh.com. You can read transcripts of it being discussed on this program. Again, I want to make the point: It was supposed to have been implemented in January of this year, 2014.
Right now, all these cancellations you’ve heard about? Those are just the self-insured. Those are not people that get their health insurance at work. You’ve heard enough horror stories from those people, what the replacement costs are, what the premiums and the deductibles are — doubled and tripled — and what’s happening to the copays.
All along we reminded people, “Wait, those of you who are covered at work? This doesn’t affect you yet. Your time is coming.” It was supposed to have arrived with January. But the Regime delayed it. Can you imagine, just in this guy’s example, if hundreds of thousands of people in January had been off-loaded to HealthCare.gov with the mess that was?
Can you imagine? We wouldn’t just be talking about a wave Republican victory; we would be talking about the funeral of the Democrat Party, and the Regime knew this. That’s why this has been delayed until after the election, and there are couple of other elements of Obamacare that have moved back beyond 2016 and the presidential race.
AT&T, all along, has been saying that Obamacare was gonna cost them over $1 billion a year, and this is how they are going to get out of that, in part. So the Kaiser report here is a warning story. “Ah, ah! Heads up! Warning! Guess what? Your employer is even now thinking about doing this.” Well, of course your employer is!
Your employer’s known about it for the longest time, just like everybody else has. We had a call. The guy couldn’t go on the air. He was afraid to go on the air. He was afraid he would be recognized. He told Snerdley his name. He’s a health care consultant. What did he say, 15 companies that he’s consulting? (interruption) Yeah. (interruption) Oh, okay. He’s a health care consultant.
In other words, he advises companies on how to best do health care, the most affordable pricing with the least expense involved and so forth. He said that so far he’s consulting 15 different companies/corporations who are gonna offload all their employees. He’s also advising them on the 30-hour workweek and what that will mean for them (i.e., part-timers don’t have to get covered at all).
That’s before January of next year. He told Snerdley that up next, the multinational corporations are wanting to know what elements of Obamacare legally impact them. The bottom line here is that there are gonna be millions of people who are not expecting it who are gonna get notices probably after the election. I guess the notices will go out probably the day after the election, the week after, or maybe two weeks after.
They’ll be warning them that in the coming months and on the first of the year, their health care will be transferred from the company to HealthCare.gov or some exchange. The employees are gonna get these notices from their companies, look at it, and they’re gonna panic because they’re gonna have heard all the horror stories of Obamacare, the exchanges, and all that. That’s gonna affect most of the people in the country.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Well, now… You know, darn it, Rush! I’m sorry, folks. I have been thickheaded and I haven’t seen something right in front of my face on this. IBM and Time Warner are planning on dumping their retirees into the Obamacare exchanges as well in addition to stages of their full-time employees.
And then there’s this story from May 1st of this year from McClatchy, and they are also shocked. “Report: Large Employers Could Shift Nearly All Workers’ Health Coverage to Marketplace By 2020.” It finally hit me what has been bugging me about this, and it does require that I apologize to you. The media is gaming and scamming everybody! They’re acting like they just discovered this.
That’s what’s bugged me about this. None of this makes sense. Why is this news? It’s not news. It’s been known for years that this was gonna happen, and yet all of these news organizations all of a sudden now think they’ve discovered it. They covered it up in service to Obama, in service to the Regime.
Do you think that Obama would have been reelected in 2012, do you think Obamacare would have passed if the news had gotten out to everybody that your employer could legally cancel your insurance, drop you from your plan, and force you to go to the government? Do you keep that bill would have passed? There is no way.
Because what was happening while all this was going on? Obama was lying for three years. “You like your doctor? You get to keep your doctor! You like your plan? You get to keep your plan!” All along, the law said that businesses, starting in 2014, could dump their employee-covered health plans over to Obamacare or to the exchanges, whatever they called them. So people believed the president, and the president lied.
(impression) “You like your doctor? You can keep your doctor! You like your plan? You can keep your plan!” For three years they told this lie left and right. The slavish Drive-By Media reported it all along, and they covered it up. Now, for some reason, out of the blue, Kaiser Health News, McClatchy, and a number of others think they have discovered something that these evil corporations are doing!
This is the tone in which this stuff is being reported now. “These mean, eeeevil, greedy, selfish Koch Brother types can just throw you off their health plan!” So this is part of an Election Year scam to tell you something that is at total variance from the truth. These news organizations — all of whom knew that Obama was not telling the truth when he told you could keep your doctor and keep your plan if you like it — are covering.
Anybody who had spent any time reading about or looking at the legislation knew that this provision was there. Furthermore, when the delay was announced, everybody knew what the delay was. “The Obama administration today announced a delay of one year of employers shifting their coverage to the exchanges!”
Well, hell, everybody knew it then when they announced the delay last year! But now here we are on May 8th and all of a sudden the news media has discovered that these evil corporations can just do what they always do: Treat their employees like dirt! “They don’t care about ’em; look what they’re gonna do,” with no reference in these stories that it is perfectly legal that it is part of Obamacare!
All there is is a small, little fine involved. So I ask you again: If you knew, in the run-up to the 2012 election, that your business could legally offload your health coverage for the exchanges — and were going to — instead of believing if you like your plan or doctor you get to keep it, what do you think the election outcome might have been? I dare say, I don’t think it would have been nearly as easy for Obama.
The same news organizations lied when the individual plans were being canceled. I mean, the individual plans were gonna be canceled all along. Remember, everybody thought, “No, no. I can keep my plan. I can keep my doctor. Obama said so!” Everybody knew that that wasn’t true when he was saying it!
Well, there’s a caveat. Some of these people in the news business, I don’t really know what they know anymore. I think it may be they only really know what Obama tells ’em and that’s all they care about. That’s part of the problem itself.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, stop and think for a moment on something we have heard today. In the news we have heard that the first thing that’s gonna happen with these corporations offloading is their retired employees. Now, who are they? Retired, they are certainly not in the target group Obama needs to be signing up, are they? Obama needs you Millennials. He needs you young, healthy people who are out there earning big money — ahem — to sign up at the exchange so that you can pay the freight for treatment for the seasoned citizens.
However, that isn’t happening. A vast majority of the enrollees already are the elderly and the sick. If hundreds of thousands, times however many corporations, of retired employees get dumped into the exchanges, that is going to overwhelm it. There isn’t the money. Well, there isn’t the money now. That’s the thing. We don’t have any money for any of this. But just taking Obamacare as a subset of itself and nothing else, it needs an influx of healthy patients making no claims because they’re not sick, they’re not having any crises or emergencies, they pay all the money for insurance, and that money covers the treatment of the sick and the elderly.
But you start dumping retirees, people that aren’t working, they’re net takers from the system. They’re not contributing anything, except they’re gonna have to start. They’re gonna have to start. They’re retired, their company is paying their health insurance, but now who’s gonna pay it, if the company doesn’t? Who’s gonna pay for their insurance? That’s the whole thing. That’s just gonna overwhelm the entire system, and it can’t work. It will collapse onto itself.
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