RUSH: CBS News: ‘President Obama has said in recent weeks that he still supports a government-sponsored health insurance option.’ By the way, Steny Hoyer is out there today saying, ‘Ahhhhh, we may not need to have a public option in there.’ Steny Hoyer. (interruption) I’m sure she knows. It’s all part of the game. Pelosi is out there saying, ‘Oh, we’re definitely going to have a public option.’ Steny Hoyer is number two saying, ‘Oh, we don’t have to have a public option.’ Obama is out there saying ‘he still supports a … ‘public option,’ but he has stopped short of calling it a necessary element … For tens of thousands of his supporters , that is not good enough. More than 70,000 former Obama campaign staffers[i.e., robots], volunteers and donors have signed a petition, spearheaded by the liberal group the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, saying as much. ‘We worked so hard for real change. President Obama, please demand a strong public health insurance option in your speech to Congress. Letting the insurance companies win would not be change we can believe in.”
So here’s CBS News with a story that, ‘Oh, my gosh, Obama seen in trouble from his left side! Why, his supporters are upset that he’s pulling out the public option. Oh, please don’t do this, President Obama!’ They want to make it look like he’s trapped. He’s not but it looks that way. ”Unless liberals rethink this premise, and fast, Democrats will squander their best chance in a generation to end the scandal of the uninsured, bring health security to every American family and begin the long-term process of getting national health costs under control,’ writes Matt Miller, who worked for former President Bill Clinton.’ This guy says that liberals ought to forget the public option because the public option will doom this thing to defeat. Matt Miller says we got a bigger problem. Get rid of it; it’s going to go down. It’s toast, essentially, if the public option remains in it.
Folks, if we end up with a government-run health care program, it’s a government-run health care program. If we get a bipartisan bill, if we get a Democrat-only bill, if we get a health care bill that Obama’s going to sign, I guarantee you it’s a government health care bill! If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. You cannot have the government do a health care reform bill and not have the government be involved. The two don’t go together. It’s a government health care bill. (interruption) The cooperatives, yeah, and, ‘How about the exchanges, Rush? The health care cooperatives, the health care exchange.’ It’s just different words. By the way, co-op, commune, all that stuff? Forget it. The trigger? Well, yeah. Now, that’s the latest trick and that comes from Ben Nelson. I don’t know that he knows that he’s actually being used here as a ploy or trick.
They’re saying, ‘We should have a trigger required before the public option kicks in, and that is only if the private sector fails in doing its job of providing health care for everybody. The public option should be triggered.’ Well, who the hell is going to decide whether the free market fails? A little clue here for you, folks: Obama long ago decided that back in Hawaii. He doesn’t like the free market! That’s why he wants to do this. All of this talk about the public option not being in it? Don’t fall for it. The whole thing is going to be a public option. The whole thing! This is just rhetoric consigned to set up the speech tomorrow night to make everybody think, ‘Oh, Obama is responding to the people.’ No, he’s not. He’s thinking, ‘Okay, how can we trick ’em? They don’t want a public option? Fine! I’ll say I don’t care about one.’
But anybody with a brain knows that if you have a health care program that the government’s in charge of what the hell do you have? You don’t have the free market running it. This business about the uninsured, let me tell you something about this. I mentioned this once before, maybe twice. We ran the numbers on this. The number of uninsured in this country who are generally uninsured who want to be is 12 million. That’s the closest anybody can come to it. It’s not this mythical figure of 47 million. The 47 million includes illegals, Martians, and any other group of people the Democrats can throw in there to try to evoke a little sympathy. But some people don’t want health insurance and choose not to buy it. They’re young. They’d rather go out and buy a plasma LCD display, whatever.
Maybe save up for an extra container of McNuggets, whatever. They don’t want health care. So they don’t buy it. Some people work at a place that doesn’t have it. There are 12 million people that want it. Now, do you realize that every year we could insure — for between 25 and $35 billion, we could insure — everybody in this country that’s uninsured. That would accomplish the primary objective. The primary objective is, ‘This country is so unfair! It’s just so cruel that 47 million people are without health care insurance,’ but there aren’t 47 million who don’t get health care. A whole lot of people get health care whether they’re insured or not. It’s called the emergency room. But despite that, $25 billion or $30 billion to insure the 12 million uninsured? You got that money sitting there in the unspent stimulus. Why not just go get it from the unspent stimulus?
Why do we need a trillion dollars? We need a trillion dollars because Obama wants there to be no personal responsibility to health care, except… Well, he’s not going to know how personal responsibility and lifestyle… You’re going to have that dictated to you, too. That’s what this is all about is trying to get as much power over every aspect of every individual’s life as possible. That’s who the guy is. That’s why the speech to the kids today about personal responsibility was a trick. It’s a scam and it’s a joke.
RUSH: Look, let’s look at this speech tomorrow night. Let me use that as a mechanism for explaining this. The president of the United States has called for a joint session of Congress to solve his personal political crisis and to further damage the US economy. It’s all about him. It is all about trying to make his audience tomorrow night think the opposite of what he intends to do. What is the special occasion for Obama’s address to Congress? These are very rare. The special occasion isn’t for a State of the Union address. We have not been attacked. Congress is not counting electoral votes. Now, there are reasons to call Congress together for an address by the president, but why call for an address to a joint session of the Congress regarding radical change in the way Americans receive health care? When Obama has the votes, in theory he’s got the votes in the House and the Senate to pass any legislation he wants and yet he’s calling a joint session essentially of Democrats in Congress to help him save face, is what this is about. This is a display tomorrow night of great weakness and it will be televised for the entire country to see.
As president, Barack Obama tried to cram a scheme to fast track socialized medicine and ration care through Congress in less than two months and a plan that still would not be implemented for four years. It has been a spectacular political failure. This is the equivalent of the Hindenburg crash and burn. The only difference is there’s no media out there reporting on the crash and burn. That’s the special occasion for calling Congress together for a semi rare joint session. Obama’s failure to muster the votes from his own party to pass a bill that would effectively seize one-sixth of the American economy and allow Washington to control virtually every aspect of our lives from publicly funded abortions to withholding end-of-life care, that’s what this speech is about tomorrow night. The American people collectively have said they like their private insurance. They would like to see free market solutions and improvements to private sector health care. They do not want the kind of third-rate medical care we see in Great Britain. They don’t want any part of it.
So, again, what is the reason for this unusual call for a presidential address to a joint session of Congress? It’s not to announce his failure. Nope. The purpose is demand that Congress override the wishes of the American people. His speech tomorrow night, regardless how it’s worded, is going to be a plea to the Democrats in the Congress, the House and the Senate, to override the wishes of the American people and to give him, Obama, what he wants so he can save face and have that monument built to himself. He has a personal and political crisis on his hands of his own making. The only real crisis facing this country at this time is economic in nature. Specifically, the private sector has been half destroyed by the president’s own hand. The bills that he has asked for and signed have damaged the private sector’s ability to create new jobs. As a result, millions of Americans are out of work, families are suffering, there’s no hope and change on the horizon, millions of employers are fighting to keep their businesses afloat, and he calls a joint session to get his rear end out of the bacon. It’s all about him.
He isn’t calling for a joint session of Congress to deal with your pain, to deal with the economy and the lackluster future. He’s not asking the Congress take steps to get out of the way of the private sector, such as tax cuts. The president is calling for a joint session of Congress so that they can pass a debacle of a piece of legislation that will prevent the total collapse of his image to his own party. The unbelievable part of this is that the plans Obama has for our health care system will add to the economic malaise that we are in. His health plan will explode the deficit and create more joblessness and that’s what Obama will be asking Congress to do tomorrow, make the economy even worse. Because the priority is asking Congress to help him save face as a leftist, partisan, radical politician and further damage of American economy, because that’s what’s going to happen. That’s the practical end result.
I don’t care what government program, war on poverty — when you read the legislation of the war on poverty did you see anywhere in that legislation, ‘Oh, and this will destroy poor families, this will destroy the black family,’ did you see it in there? No. Wasn’t in there. When the left tells us, ‘There aren’t any death panels in there, there’s no end of life,’ oh, really? It doesn’t have to say it to be in it. Welfare, the war on poverty, we were supposed to wipe out poverty and all we did was wipe out the black family. But that wasn’t the intent of the legislation, was it? Just like in this health care bill, the words ‘death panel’ may not be in there, but I’ll damn well assure you there’s going to be one. There can be no other way. So you got an economy that’s plundered, you have an economy that is tanking, you have no hope on the horizon for job creation, and this guy is calling a joint session to get his rear end out of the bacon to save his image with his party and to get this health care bill passed so he can build a monument to himself.
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RUSH: All right, back to the phones, Punta Gorda, Florida. This is Bruce. Thank you for waiting, sir, you’re next. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Over the weekend I was with three of my neighbors and they’re all medical doctors, not PhDs. Their big question seems to be with the 40 million people without health care insurance, regardless of reason, with potential of maybe 30 or 40 million more individuals that have union health care and corporate health care, if they all go over to the government-run program, excuse my French, but where the hell are all the medical doctors going to come from?
RUSH: Well, this is a question everybody is asking. If you enroll all of these new people with insurance and you start squeezing the doctors, which is what Obama’s plan is, meaning reduce their reimbursements, where you going to get the doctors?
CALLER: Well, they say right now they’re pretty up to their eyeballs with patients and to throw this many patients upon them is going to create havoc in the system and that’s what the program Obama’s pushing is not telling you.
RUSH: Well, a lot of people have figured this out.
CALLER: Well, I wish the lay people had because down here in Punta Gorda, Florida, we have a lot of seniors and they really aren’t aware that it might take a heck of a lot longer to see a doctor if they —
RUSH: Wait a minute, now. I’m sorry, but who the hell is showing up at these town hall meetings? I think more people than you know are aware of all of the impending disasters that are in this plan, whether it be end-of-life counseling or the death panels or shortage of doctors and so forth, people are well aware that this is not good and they don’t like it. If they don’t know the specific business about doctor shortage, they know enough to make them oppose it. The deal about doctor — again, what’s frustrating is the market will take care of this if you leave it alone.
CALLER: Yes. That’s true.
RUSH: But when Medicare and when the government is telling doctors what they’re going to get paid and how often they’re going to get paid, more and more doctors are going to opt out of Medicare.
CALLER: Well, I think they’ll not only opt out of Medicare, the talk down here with my neighbors, three of them that surround my house say that they’re just going to get out of the whole medicine business.
RUSH: I’ve heard some doctors say that, too, but —
CALLER: You don’t believe it?
RUSH: Well, no, it’s possible. We’re in a heated, passionate moment, and if you put that much work into something it’s cause you love it.
CALLER: Rush, can a doctor then go on their own and whatever the government system has let that doctor just see some patients on his own or will he be too liable for whatever?
RUSH: Well, see, now, that’s an interesting question. Under the House plan, there would be a severe penalty for this. Once you opt out of any federal plan, Medicare or whatever, you can never get back in it. But see, that’s something too, that’s already happened. There already are doctors who have opted out. There are doctors who charge a retainer. They have a clientele of patients that they can handle, they charge a retainer and then you pay whatever it costs for whatever you need, and this is how they’re opting out of the system. But this requires a certain income level to be able to afford to see doctors this way. But the messes that exist in the health care system exist precisely because of the government being involved and forcing solutions that are not market based. And eventually people just say, ‘I can’t live under this, I can’t go being reimbursed 20% of what it costs me to provide treatment, or 50%, and I can’t wait three months for it when they decide to pay me, the patient load here, these people coming in for every little nook and cranny that’s wrong with them and so forth.’ It’s just a mess, and it’s only going to get worse. I don’t doubt these guys being honest with you that they’re that frustrated.