RUSH: Speaking of this, there’s a new mantra out there, it got started yesterday. Obamacare now is a matter of life or death. There are no limits on the extremes to which these people will go. (interruption) No, Snerdley, Headline News is CNN, but Maude Behar is not John King. You know, John King apologized, some guest said ‘in the crosshairs.’ (imitating King) ‘We’re really trying, we’re really 
trying,’ but Maude Behar, she’s not bound by any of that, propriety. It’s the same umbrella network, CNN, but two different networks, two different philosophies. So last night and yesterday we have a montage Bobby Scott, Democrat, Virginia, George Miller, Democrat, California, Frank Pallone, Democrat, New Jersey, Nancy Pelosi, Anna Eshoo, Democrat, California talking about the possibility of the repeal of health care reform.
SCOTT: Health care reform is a matter of life and death.
MILLER: This is life and death.
ESHOO: An issue of life or death.
PALLONE: The issue of having health coverage is a matter of life and death.
PELOSI: A choice between life and death.
RUSH: Not only is this absurd, it is — I don’t know the word for it — it’s just patently wrong. It’s not a matter of life or death. You mean if we repeal Obamacare we’re gonna start dropping like flies? The absurdity of every argument the left makes is mitigated only by its utter disastrous impact on our culture and society. These people are single-handedly doing what they can to tear it down. Remember this? All these Democrats, a matter of life and death, last Sunday, Meet the Press, David Gregory during a discussion about civility in politics.
GREGORY: Is that the real problem? Is a description of political discourse and political disagreement as being apocalyptic, having such huge consequence for the direction of the country?
RUSH: Is he gonna have these people on to talk about that? You think he will? You think he’ll go get Bobby Scott, Frank Pallone, George Miller, Anna Eshoo, and Nancy Pelosi to come on and answer his question about this? Ask them to defend their apocalyptic life-and-death rhetoric? You can’t get more apocalyptic than life and death. How about it, Mr. Gregory? Have the invitations gone out to these people to come on and explain themselves to you?
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RUSH: Terry, Arcata, California, hi, and welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Yeah, hi, Rush. Thanks. Listen, it’s life or death because everyone would have insurance and that means preventative medicine would be practiced. And that’s what saved my life. I had colon cancer five years ago and because I had insurance —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait just a second. I need to start again. You’re calling to suggest that the repeal of Obamacare is a matter of life and death?
CALLER: Yes, ’cause I’m saying if people don’t have insurance they won’t get preventative medicine, and that’s what saved my life.
RUSH: Wait a second. I hate to tell you here, but Obamacare isn’t even kicked in yet. Obamacare doesn’t really kick in ’til 2014. Most of the so-called benefit provisions haven’t even started. It doesn’t kick in ’til 2014. So people are gonna be dropping like flies between now and then if you’re right, because —
CALLER: Well, let me tell you something. I have what you would call a preexisting condition, and my insurance agent told me, she said, ‘You can’t get insurance because you had cancer in the past.’ I can’t get insurance. She said, ‘After five years you might get it, but it’s gonna be extremely expensive.’ So that’s what a preexisting condition means.
RUSH: Okay. Were you able to go out and get insurance?
CALLER: No, luckily I’m able to handle —
RUSH: Well that’s good because you can’t yet. You’re not gonna be able to ’til 2014 and by that time — preexisting condition, it’s not even insurance.
CALLER: No, no —
RUSH: We’re talking welfare, not even talking insurance.
CALLER: People with preexisting conditions, such as myself, can get insurance after it kicks in in 2014. But the main thing is right now, because I had insurance, I went and got a colonoscopy —
RUSH: Yeah, but look, I live in Literalville. You are agreeing with the notion it’s a matter of life and death. That means the life expectancy ought to be plummeting, because Obamacare doesn’t kick in until 2014. I live in Literalville. I don’t live in platitude land. If you’re gonna tell me that you agree with the fallacious concept that Obamacare, repealing it’s a matter of life and death, I’m sorry, I’m gonna disagree with you no matter what circumstance anecdotally or individually you give me. If people with preexisting conditions are destined to die and have been destined to die for hundreds of years because it’s been that many years since we’ve not had Obamacare, then somebody’s gonna have to show me the statistics where the number one cause of death in America is people dying because insurance companies don’t sell preexisting condition insurance. And you can’t because it doesn’t exist.
I hate to see people falling for this. I don’t care if it’s individual anecdotal stories. It matters. Words mean things. This stuff matters. The talk about this being a matter of life and death is absolutely irresponsible. It’s not factual. The life expectancy in this country has done nothing but increase. Nobody is signing up. The way this is happening out there, Terry, is they’ve got these things called high-risk pools. High risk is preexisting condition. So there is an advance system set up, and nobody is signing up for them. Denying preexisting condition only means you have to pay higher rates. It doesn’t mean that you can’t get it. It just means you have to pay higher rates. That’s insurance. It’s the world. It’s life. It’s how it exists.
Now, nobody is signing up for higher risk pools. Nobody is. If it is such a matter of life or death, you would think more than a thousand or so people woulda signed up by now, you woulda thought millions would have signed up for it if it’s a matter of life and death, but it isn’t. But I know I don’t win any points here. This is the problem living in Literalville. You score no points with the truth. You get somebody emotionally connected to the idea, I don’t even know how it happens, repealing Obamacare is gonna cause death, if they get emotionally connected to that there’s no untying them, no amount of fact, logic, nothing. Truth will do it. And that is frustrating.
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RUSH: Folks, do you remember all during the debate on Obamacare, every day we were told X-number of people were dying — every day — because they lacked health insurance. It was absurd. It wasn’t this 43 million people don’t have insurance. There are people dying every day. They were trying to attribute daily deaths to a lack of health insurance, preexisting conditions. Has that number gone down since last March? We don’t hear about it anymore, ever since Obamacare was passed. Here’s a Reuters story from September 18th, 2009: ‘Study Links 45,000 US Deaths to Lack of Insurance,’ by Susan Heavey.
‘Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday. ‘We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction … than drunk driving and homicide combined,’ Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard…’ So according to this study, 123 people die in the US every day because they don’t have insurance.
Now, we haven’t heard that number since March when Obamacare was passed. We don’t know what the number is. We don’t know if that number has gone down. Shouldn’t that be showing up by now? We got the health care law. We got Obamacare! Shouldn’t the number of people dying every day be going down? It’s been almost a year since Obamacare was signed into law. We should have 45,000 more people alive and walking around that we didn’t have before. Has anybody seen a death certificate that says, ‘Cause of Death: No health insurance’? I haven’t. Maybe you in the leftist blogosphere have, but I haven’t.
So what we have here is a guy who had colon cancer, got treatment, recovered from the disease (as best I can tell) and he’s complaining about the system that saved his life. He calls here to complain about it. So he says, ‘If I didn’t have insurance, well, what then? What then?’ It’s called Medicaid. It’s called state pools. It’s called high-risk pools. It is absurd. It offends me as an American to have people believe that this nation’s health care system, and that our own cultural morality, sits around and lets people die. We do more to save lives in emergency rooms every year than most nations do in their normal scope of daily medical care!
We spend a fortune — it’s a literal fortune, folks — on people who don’t have insurance, including illegal aliens. And we continue to get these stories, these hypotheticals about ‘What if?’ and ‘What if? What if that? What if this?’ Now, if we didn’t have Medicaid, if we didn’t have state pools and high-risk pools, if we didn’t have laws that cover the poor and preexisting conditions then they could make arguments like this. But we have all this. We have all of these redundant systems, plans, programs that handle and accommodate people; and yet they still make these arguments. The truth of the matter is President Obama’s health care system destroys our health care system.
President Obama’s health care legislation, his law destroys the health care system ultimately for all of us, including those of us who pay for it — and for those of you who pay for everybody else, too. It isn’t aimed at preexisting conditions. It’s aimed at all of us. Health care quality is going to suffer proportionately to the percentage of this plan that gets implemented over the years. And, yeah, it is extremely frustrating to have to sit here and know that there are gullible people who accept these out-and-out lies, and it’s all political based. They accept it ’cause they’re liberal Democrats.
Liberal Democrats run out there and claim that the repeal of health care is a matter of life and death, and they believe it, and they start calling radio talk show hosts with anecdotal evidence of how it’s true. Maybe what we ought to do is take a page from the ChiComs and their wonderful health care system : Give the patient an aspirin, and then when you run outta aspirin shoot the patient in the head, and then harvest their organs for transplants. Solvy-solvy. Everybody in this country has access to health care. Everybody does not have health insurance. Still, everybody can get health care. Somehow that always seems to get lost in the discussion when Democrats start talking. These people are shameless, folks. These leftists are absolutely shameless.
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RUSH: Would we all agree that Canada has their own version of Obamacare? Absolutely, it’s unquestionable. I looked it up here, ladies and gentlemen, the wait time for colonoscopies in Canada in 2009 was 147 days, just shy of six months. Prolonged wait times for colonoscopies in Canada, according to the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology, 147 days. We’re coming to that. Add to it ‘as the secretary shall determine.’ Obamacare will destroy the great health care system that is the United States of America. Mitch McConnell was unequivocal yesterday. He said, ‘We will repeal it.’ A lot of people on the line here.