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RUSH: Here’s Deborah in North Carolina. I’m glad you waited. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: It’s an honor, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: My question is about Obamacare, for people who have health insurance already.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And they already have a pre-existing condition. If dropped from their insurance company, then let’s say Obamacare goes away, will they be able to get health insurance from a private company again?

RUSH: Well, if I understand it, the question is what does a privately insured person with a pre-existing condition do if they’re dropped and Obamacare goes away? Because you’re under the impression Obamacare covers or requires people with pre-existing conditions to be covered. So, if Obamacare goes away, then what happens to you, right, or those people?

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Well, in that specific sense, the one variable there is: Obamacare going away. I don’t think anybody has yet concluded that that’s going to happen. But, if it did, what would people with pre-existing conditions do? What did they do before?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, our previous caller, she could have been talking about one of two things. She could have been talking about people who were already covered on their pre-existing condition because their insurance preceded Obamacare. Then they dropped it when Obamacare came along and got on the Obamacare pre-existing insurance plan, policy, what have you. Then if Obamacare somehow goes away, where do they go? What do people do who had pre-existing coverage and then dropped it to go to Obamacare? Can you just force insurance companies at that point to take those people again? Now, I am not sure about this.

I’m kind of conflicted about pre-existing conditions. See, folks, I’m the mayor of Realville. Pre-existing condition insurance, it isn’t insurance. If you don’t have to buy homeowners insurance until your house is halfway destroyed by fire, we’re not talking about insurance then. If you want to buy insurance against your house burning down, you go buy insurance and then you make a bet that your house will not burn down. The company’s making a bet that it won’t, and whatever, and if it does, then you make a claim and then they pay you back. But if you can wait until the house is on fire and then go buy an insurance policy, that’s not insurance, that’s something else.

It’s the same thing with pre-existing conditions. If you have a terminal disease and an insurance company is forced to provide you essentially payment for treatment, we’re talking about something other than insurance. And there’s no insurance company in the world outside of coercion that would do that. So the coercion has been employed. And in many states — this is what I’m not sure of. I don’t know how many, but in many states, pre-existing conditions have to be covered. And this came about by virtue of public pressure and sympathy for people who didn’t have the money to pay for their treatment, and it was the result of ours being a compassionate society.

Now, Obamacare’s got the high-risk pools and the pre-existing condition coverage, and if it were to go south, I assume that a market would exist, be created somehow, some way — the market’s an amazing thing. Somebody would come up with a way and figure out a way for those people to be taken care of. I know I’m speaking esoterically here, maybe generically, philosophically, but the market is a wonderful thing if you just leave it alone. I know you have to have certain regulations against predatory behavior, criminal behavior, and this kind of thing, but the market is a beautiful thing. The market responds to practically every need and desire if there is a compensatory willingness to pay for it, by somebody.

Markets work. It’ is when government gets involved that markets get gummed up and screwed up and convoluted, corrupted, perverted, and don’t work because the government is not an equal player in the market. The government doesn’t have to make a profit. The government’s an unfair competitor in an otherwise free market. We’re in this mess because the government’s already gummed up the insurance market. It’s gummed up the health care and treatment market. And that’s why everybody’s going through hoops here.

It’s been reduced to, “What about me? What about what happens to me?” Everybody’s acting as individuals in a victim sense. I think it all predicates on the fact that, is Obamacare ever going to go away? We all want it to. But that better happen because the longer this goes on, the more people — that’s why they’re sweating, folks — the more people that do sign up at HealthCare.gov, the more people that they can get registered at these exchanges, the tougher it is ever gonna be to get rid of this thing. That’s why the defund and the delay movement, either one of them, were so crucial.

That’s why it would be so great if you could delay the individual mandate for a year, you’d come close to dealing a deathblow to this. And then the private sector insurance market would come back in to clean up the mess and pick up the pieces and take steps to make sure that there’s plenty competition in that market, you’ll have every circumstance pretty much. Not all. Nothing’s perfect. But you’ll have a lot of circumstances that will be accommodated by the market taking care of if there’s a willingness to pay. And we are a compassionate society. We always have been. Truth of that’s in our daily existence here. Sometimes we have been overly compassionate.

I firmly believe this. And I know people on the left listening are laughing themselves silly with this kind of faith in the market. They think that’s what’s wrong with America. They think the market’s predatory. It preys on people, it rips ’em off, it kills ’em, it steels from ’em and it kicks ’em out of their homes and kicks ’em out of their cars. It’s a crock. The history of the country is all the proof you need that that’s not true. Anyway, I don’t know specifically what would happen, but I have the ultimate faith that those people would have a solution. They would have multiple solutions, should that eventuate.

Look, a major future fault line in politics is going to be between those who don’t want their Obamacare taken away versus those who want it gotten rid of. We don’t want to get to that point. You don’t want that battle. You don’t want that battle among people in the country. That battle, you can foresee that by imagining trying to take away food stamps. What would happen? You saw the other day when a glitch caused there to be no limit on food stamps for one day, you saw what people did. Can you imagine telling them that one day it doesn’t work, you can’t use it. There would be riots in the streets.

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