RUSH; I’ve got a series on CNN, two or three sound bites reporting all the glitches and all of this. The final sound bite is the CNN anchor saying, “What have we just become, Fox News here? Why are we ripping this?” Let’s go do those first. We’ll start here with number 14, 14 through 17. This is last night on Anderson Cooper 19. He’s got his correspondent there, Drew Griffin, reporting about the experiences people are having with Obamacare, and there’s a woman here named Christy Metzger. She’s a part-time teacher. That’s female voice that you hear.

GRIFFIN: After a week of trying, finally figured out just what kind of insurance she could get under the Affordable Care Act, and for her, it seems unaffordable.

METZGER: And when I logged on I was like, “No, this is very bad.” This is much higher than we were currently paying.

GRIFFIN: Their current plan costs $450 a month with a $5,000 family deductible. The bronze plan she found under HealthCare.gov will cost her $650 a month with a deductible somewhere between $3,500 and $6,000. Christy says she has yet to find out if she qualifies for any subsidy.

RUSH: Yeah, good luck with that. Do you believe those numbers? Look at those cost increases. There’s another aspect here we haven’t even gotten into. You people in New York, you know, they’ve got their own website. New York’s got their own exchange. They haven’t signed up one person! I kid you not. No sign-ups in New York state. And that’s not glitches. That’s not HealthCare.gov. They have their own state-run exchange website. You can get on, you can navigate it. It’s a little slow, and if you make any changes, you have to back up several steps.

Now, on the New York state exchange, there are 90 plans offered, and none of them — get this, now, this goes right to what you heard this woman say here. There are 90 plans offered on the New York state exchanges. None of those 90 plans allow payments to out-of-network doctors. Not even the most expensive platinum plans, which run over $1,300 a month for somebody 50 years old or so, features payments made to out-of-network doctors, which means doctors not participating in Medicare-Medicaid or Obamacare.

Now, if a plan, one of the 90 offered in the New York exchange, if it won’t pay for out-of-network doctors or services, you can get very screwed very quickly, and here’s how. You can be in a car crash, you can get treated in the ER, and let’s say only one of the doctors treating you, only one, is not in the insurance plan, you can end up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, and this is something nobody’s telling anybody.

This is not a glitch, and it’s gonna happen all the time. It is happening more and more as more and more doctors drop insurance altogether ’cause they can’t make any money. The payments, the copays are not quick, they’re not sufficient enough to guarantee the doctor profit. That’s why doctors are dropping out. This is a major problem with Obamacare. It’s not a glitch. This is how people are being penalized if they do anything that’s called out-of-network.

Okay, so now we’ve got these numbers. You just heard Christy Metzger on CNN. She logged on, said, “Oh, no, this is very bad. This is much higher than we’re currently paying.” Their current plan, $450 a month, $5,000 family deductible. The bronze plan that she found under Obamacare will cost her $650 a month, $200 more, with a deductible between $3,500 and $6,000, and she doesn’t know if she qualifies for a subsidy ’cause she’s damn well gonna need one or she can’t afford it. So we go to the next sound bite. This is another example of a small business owner who has insurance and expected to find something cheaper.

GRIFFIN: The results, no matter which way he goes, he will be paying much more.

JOSHUA STRICKLAND: What I found was that the plans made available were almost twice as expensive.

GRIFFIN: His renewal under his current plan will increase by 9.8% to a monthly cost of $540. His deductible will jump, too, actually doubling from 500 to a thousand dollars. Under the Affordable Care Act, he says, the most comparable plan for himself and his three children is much worse. He was quoted $838 a month, with a $1,000 deductible, and that is after taxpayers kick in a $150-per-month subsidy.

RUSH: So what’s happening here? CNN has gone out and found people for whom this Obamacare mess is gonna cost them much more, and they all thought it was gonna be cheaper because they all believed when Obama said it was going to lower their premiums by $2,500. By the way, Obama is no longer even saying you get to keep your doctor. That’s gone now. He doesn’t even say that anymore. That was an original lie, but it’s gone. So here are two examples so far on CNN.

I wonder, could they not have found one person who was gonna benefit from this and make a big hullabaloo about that? You know they musta tried. So, okay, here’s two examples of people who expected it to get cheaper. It’s wildly more expensive than they thought. Finally the next example CNN offers, last night a 56-year-old who makes $24,000 a year.

GRIFFIN: She has chosen to have no health insurance. She currently needs health care, she goes to a hospital and pays the prorated cost for uninsured patients. “You must have been somewhat excited?”

HELEN CUMMINS: Oh, my God, I was so totally excited.

GRIFFIN: When she finally got through, signed up, and found out she would not qualify for a subsidy or Medicaid. She learned her cheapest option under the Affordable Care Act is between $357 and $387 a month with a $6,000 deductible. It’s just too much, she says.

HELEN CUMMINS: I was hurt. I was truly hurt because of the fact that I was expecting better. I was really expecting better.

RUSH: Poor people. I mean, I don’t know, folks. All these people were lied to. I don’t know what in the world they’re thinking when they go sign up and they find out all these numbers — I don’t know — all we know is they’re disappointed. All we know is that they’re hurt and they’re shocked. What, are they blaming the shutdown? That’s what Obama says. This is all glitches ’cause of the shutdown. Carney said there are winners and losers in this. And, by the way, that’s true. You know who the losers are for the most part? Millennials.

The losers are healthy 26- to 40-year-olds who don’t get sick who are going to be paying most of the freight to cover the elderly and people like this woman, 56-year-old, making 24 grand, who doesn’t have insurance. “Fine, I’ll keep paying as I go,” found out she couldn’t. She’s gotta pay at least $357 a month with a $6,000 deductible on 24 grand a year. She’s in a state of shock.

So after those three reports, we now head back to Anderson Cooper, who has a guest named Cornell Belcher. He’s a Democrat pollster, and Anderson Cooper wants to know what he thinks about all this. He says, “This is the regime’s signature piece of legislation, Cornell. They had three years to set it up. I know that you’re obviously an Obama supporter. You worked as a pollster in the campaign. You gotta admit, this is a huge misstep on their part, right?”

CORNELL: I’m a little disturbed by that story. I think that story we just ran was a story more deserving of Fox than CNN, where you’re cherry-picking cases where it doesn’t work. You have CNN saying, who is supposed to be sort of the in the middle guy saying these are people who won’t be able to afford it. You know, we got Republicans on the other side sort of making that case. I don’t like CNN making that case on — you know, making that case for the Republicans. That’s my push-back.

RUSH: Yeah, my push-back is what the hell you guys doing to us? You’re CNN. You’re on our side. This kind of crap ought to have been on Fox. What hell are you doing? You’re not supposed to be giving the game like this. That’s my push-back. You’re making the case for the Republicans. Who the hell are you? He doesn’t once address the substance of the report other than to say, “Yeah, I’m a little disturbed by that story.” But he’s only disturbed because it ran on CNN. If it had run on Fox, they could discount it because Fox is partisan. They could discount it ’cause Fox hates Obama. They could discount it ’cause Fox lies and makes things up or what have you.

So Cornell Belcher, what are you saying, Fox is more deserving of truth? CNN is where propaganda originates? You don’t like Fox because they do the truth? These people are real people. Here are real people supposedly right in the demo that vote Obama. These are the little guys the Democrat Party is supposedly looking out for, and they’re getting savaged. They are being ripped to shreds and the Obamacare rep gets mad at CNN for pointing it out. This is what I mean, I’m telling you, throughout the Drive-By Media, they’re worried about this.

They’re very worried. They’re worried about what it all means for Obama, as they always are. It may be a stretch to say they’re not concerned about these people, but I think that the conclusion here is inescapable. This is an abject disaster. It isn’t a glitch. This is the way it is designed. And now people are finding out for the first time, even though they’ve been warned, even though they were told.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Those bites on CNN are probably the first truthful reports on Obamacare in substance that they may have ever done. It’s fascinating. And also, I didn’t see it, ladies and gentlemen, but I am told that once again — I think last night — I don’t know. The days run together since I was not here yesterday. Maybe last night. Apparently The Daily Show, Jon Stewart again, just lambasted this whole thing, just blew it to smithereens, ripped it for like 20 minutes or so.

Now, I don’t know, didn’t see it, getting a third hand report, and I’ve learned to be really suspicious of those just because of human nature. But if that’s true to any extent whatsoever, I mean, that’s where low-information central hangs out and gets what they think is the news. It’s not looking all that hunky-dory because there’s no way they can fix this inside of three weeks, which is what Obama said, and Sebelius, “I want that A team in here. I want ’em giving us 150%, damn straight, that’s what’s gonna happen.” Stewart said, “They cannot spin this turd.” Talking about Obamacare. They can’t spin this turd.

So the thing that I really think is going on is what I have thought was going on from the get-go, and that is an absolute mess that is going to cause people to clamor, because it’s health care, and you know as well as I do, wrongly or not, that most people think it’s the most important thing in their life. Most people think if they don’t have health insurance, that they could go bankrupt within an hour, that they could lose everything tomorrow, that they might not be able to get it back next week. They’re just petrified. This is how people have been conditioned to think of life in America without health care, without health insurance. I mean, it just is.

And so, if this thing is such a boondoggle, and it’s so irreparable, can you imagine three weeks, a month from now, Obama in a press conference, “We’ve worked so hard. Our A team was in here. We told ’em to go 150% and they want 175%. What they’ve advised us to do is to get rid of the insurance companies and just go single payer,” and then have the public clamor, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, do that.” I wouldn’t put it past ’em because that’s what Obama has said that he wants. So has Pelosi; so has Reid; so have all these people.

This is what they’ve really meant when they’ve talked about national health care. This single payer, government-run is what they’ve really meant all along, and that’s again why Obama doesn’t care about this minutia that’s happening now and forever how long it takes to get to single payer. Doesn’t care about all of that, the pain, the suffering, doesn’t care. It’s all part of the mix to get us where he wants to go.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, folks, a couple things. I’m getting lots of e-mails about the CNN sound bites that we played. And they all make a really great point. Those sound bites, that report last night on CNN on Anderson Cooper was more truth about Obamacare than anybody can remember anybody in the Republican Party making, other than Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.

I just want you to remember something, folks. Whenever you hear these truthful horror stories about the massively increased costs that everybody is going to encounter, or the vast majority of people, I want you to remember it was Ted Cruz and Mike Lee who tried to stop it. It was Ted Cruz and Mike Lee who tried to defund it, or at least tried to delay the individual mandate.

Now, remember, we’re supposed to hate Ted Cruz and Mike Lee for doing that. The Republican Party says so, the media says so, the Democrat Party says so. They tried to stop it. They tried to marshal support to stop this. They worked very hard. They put themselves out there.

By the way, Ted Cruz went home to Texas this past weekend. He made a series of appearances and speeches, and the man got an eight-minute standing ovation in San Antonio. I want to ask you something. When is the last time you saw an elected Republican get any kind of a standing ovation? Have you ever seen John McCain get one, for example? Now, some of you might be shouting “Sarah Palin” at me. She was governor of Arkansas. I don’t mean to be diminishing her with this. I’m talking about elected, in-office Republican or somebody in office campaigning. When’s the last time you can remember seeing that?

My point is, the idea that Ted Cruz has marginalized himself out of any influence or power or out of the Republican Party is flat-out absurd. I’m reminded again of the Pat Buchanan column that I quoted extensively to you from, in which he drew some analogies to the Republican Party convention in San Francisco in 1964, and all the establishment types who did their best to kill Goldwater off and wouldn’t have anything to do with him and wouldn’t campaign for him, and their futures were sealed, doomed. They never amounted to anything in the Republican Party. Nelson Rockefeller, Bill Scranton, George Romney, they never amounted to anything.

Richard Nixon was the one guy, aside from Reagan, Richard Nixon and Reagan were the two people that stood with Goldwater and actually campaigned for him harder than he did for himself. And they both ended up being rewarded. It was Buchanan’s old saw about history repeating itself. If you don’t remember it it’s doomed to repeat itself or whatever that phrase is. He was trying to make a point here that down the road the people who are going to be rewarded by their party, their party’s voters, are the people who were out fighting for them.

I think the people who have written me about those sound bites were surprised. Nobody watches CNN, and I played these sound bites and people were just stunned. And then again this guest, this Cornell Belcher guy, the regime official, was on CNN and gave Anderson Cooper grief for having run those stories. He was getting tweets all over the place from Obama supporters going, “That’s right, you hammer Fox, Cornell, you tell ’em the truth, Cornell.” So he was very satisfied in terms of he got his support from his people, but most people watching that were learning for the first time what a boondoggle this is. People that watch CNN, obviously.

But the point is that those three stories, three citizens, three people, their stories, the Republican Party coulda found those people, coulda put ’em in ads, coulda done any number of things. Didn’t do it, don’t know why. Could have, but didn’t. And outside of CNN, there weren’t any Republican — and this is true, that you don’t find Republicans ripping into it. In fact, Jeb Bush today, I think we’ve got the sound bite, is out saying that what Ted Cruz needs to do now is come up with his own alternative to Obamacare. And that’s exactly what’s wrong, with all due respect. That’s why we end up in this mess after mess.

The Democrats propose a mess, the Democrats propose government expansion, and the Republicans think they’ve gotta have their alternative. There are a lot of Republicans that think this way. They’re reactive. They believe the Democrats run the show so when the Democrats come up with an idea they automatically conclude people will want it so they’ve gotta come up with their own alternative. Like immigration. We’ll do it, but we’ll do it smarter. We’ll do it, we just won’t call it amnesty, although it will be but we won’t call it that, or whatever. Instead of just saying “no.”

So now the pressure is on Cruz. “You just can’t be a naysayer. You just can’t say ‘no.’ You’ve got to have an alternative.” No, you don’t. The alternative to what the Democrat Party wants starts with “no.” And the alternative is to start getting rid of government-run things. I mean, we’ve got right in front of us again the best evidence in the world that government can’t do these things, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how big their hearts, no matter how big their desire, they just are not capable. They do not have the best people. The best people are in the private sector. The theoreticians and the people that gum up the works are in the government. And it’s just the way it is.

So the alternative to a Democrat proposal starts with “no.” And then you say what we’re really gonna do is we’re gonna reduce government’s role in health care, and we’re gonna reduce government’s role in airport security. We’re gonna reduce government’s role wherever. We’re gonna contract it out to the private sector, where it can be done right and cheaper, more efficiently, as it always is in the private sector. It’s always done better, it’s always done cheaper and it’s always done more efficiently.

The problem is the Democrats have demonized the private sector so much that average people think that private sector companies want to kill them, their customers. They want to steel from ’em; they want to kill ’em; they want to make ’em sick; they want to make ’em fat, wanna destroy their lives. This is what the Democrat Party has been for 50 years. Take a look at its enemies list. So why do we need an alternative to bigger government that is itself bigger government? Just say “no.” We’re not going there.

How about instead of waiting for the Democrats to propose something, why don’t we? Just out of the clear blue propose something and make them react and follow along. “Well, we’ll never get covered and they’ll rip us to shreds,” and forth and all that. “Can’t” never did anything. The evidence is clear, you can’t have a better illustration than what’s happening right now of government incompetence. Folks, it’s not a godsend, but I’m telling you, we’ve got this notion that government can do it better because government cares. The thing that is in many people’s lives the most important thing to them, their health care, is being screwed up royally. An opportunity to teach has been presented here and we get crickets from the GOP. We do.

I’m not saying this to be critical. I’m trying to be helpful. But I’m just an entertainer, never forget that, and I’m just trying to, you know, pied piper you, ’cause I really don’t mean anything I’m saying. You’ll hear that in the sound bites.