RUSH: Here’s Jackie in Surf City, New Jersey. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi. How are you doing this afternoon, Rush?
RUSH: I’m great.
CALLER: Thanks for taking —
RUSH: How are you doing?
CALLER: I’m doing wonderful except, you know, I got my health insurance renewal in the mail.
RUSH: Oh.
RUSH: Yep.
CALLER: That means, of course, you get very high deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses and so forth. Do you see that President Trump will actually be able to circle back around to this and have any success in, you know, giving working families relief?
RUSH: You know, this is a big, big deal. It was maybe two, three weeks ago when I found the next scheduling price increases for people that get their insurance at HealthCare.gov, the Obamacare website, and I found some examples where people are going to be paying — not even for catastrophic, Jackie — $40,000 a year, or $20,000/$30,000 a year. This is obscene. This is as much as half of what people earn gross.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: They can’t afford to use it because the deductibles are so high. They can’t afford to buy it, but then there’s trouble in the law if they don’t buy it. The thing about it, Jackie, is this exactly what Obamacare was designed to do. It was designed to implode like this so that people would clamor for the government, somebody “to come in and fix it.” That meant take it over or put everybody under Medicare or go single payer or what have you. Now, I don’t… Obamacare is still the law of the land.
Despite all this talk about repealing and replacing it, it is still the law of the land. More insurers are pulling out. That means fewer choices. And whether they’re gonna be able to circle back to this — something is gonna have to happen, because it is gonna implode. And it may not be the worst thing to happen if it implodes without somebody standing in the wings ready to nationalize it, because something’s gotta return this to market forces to get prices down to where they’re halfway affordable and where there’s some semblance of competition in the whole industry.
CALLER: Well, you’re certainly so right, because, you know, it’s one of those things. It’s like you can’t live with it; you can’t live without it. If you try to live without it, you know, if you have a catastrophic illness, you know, you talk about people losing homes at this point. Again, I really hope that our president is successful. I hope that both aisles will come to some sort of understanding, although at this point I’m not sure if I’m really hopeful about that.
RUSH: One of the problems here — and you may think this is pooh-poohing it, but it really isn’t. Human nature is a powerful thing. The people you’re talking about on both sides of the aisle? They don’t have to pay for their own.
CALLER: No, they don’t.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: But if you’re just talking about normal, everyday, every month health care — checkup here, checkup there — the insurance costs so much than the treatment! It is silly to buy it, unless the law mandates that you buy it, which it does.
CALLER: And you just made a great point because I did write to both of my U.S. senators and I did write to my representative, and not one of them responded.
RUSH: They don’t know what to say. I mean, there have been half-baked efforts to fix this. But a lot of them don’t want to, Jackie, because now it’s an entitlement, and they don’t want to take away an entitlement because they think the people — recipients of entitlements — look at it all as free. The time to have done this was when they first gave this thing a shot in the first six months. I actually Trump should have done tax cuts first and then this, but they said at the time, “Well, no, we can’t afford tax cuts! We can’t pay for tax cuts unless we fix Obamacare.”
Well, that’s turned out to be not true, isn’t it? They’re doing tax cuts without having changed anything about health care. So all that talk about, “Well, we can’t do tax cuts first because we have to come up with the money for tax cuts cutting health care” was all a bunch of bunk. I know. This is panic time for a lot of people, you see, these premiums, these people renewing. It’s absurd. It’s a joke. It looks a joke. The actual treatment that you would need on a day-to-day, month-to-month basis costing so much more than the insurance itself makes no sense at all.
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