RUSH: Here’s the piece by Steven Hayward in Forbes magazine. “Prediction: Even if HealthCare.gov is fixed by the end of the month (unlikely), Obamacare is going to be repealed well in advance of next year’s election.

“And, if the website continues to fail, the push for repeal — from endangered Democrats — will occur very rapidly. The website is a sideshow: The real action is the number of people and businesses who are losing their health plans or having to pay a lot more. Fixing the website will only delay the inevitable. It is important to remember why it was so important for Obama to promise repeatedly that ‘if you like your health insurance/doctor, you can keep your health insurance/doctor.’

“Cast your mind back to the ignominious collapse of Hillarycare in 1994. Hillarycare came out of the box in September 1993 to high public support according to the early polls,” and it did, by the way. It was a source of great consternation among us, because the national polls in support of Hillarycare were very, very high. But it “was not a surprise. Opinion polls for decades have shown a large majority of Americans support the general idea of universal health coverage.
“But Hillarycare came apart as the bureaucratic details came out, the most important one being that you couldn’t be sure you’d be able to keep your doctors or select specialists of your choice.” I remember this like it was yesterday. Hillarycare comes out and Betsy McCaughey was the first I knew of to read the bill, and she was the one who uncovered the aspects of Hillarycare that became repulsive to people. You couldn’t keep your doctor, maybe. You couldn’t keep your plan, maybe.

But for doctors, they were gonna be assigned hospitals. They were gonna be assigned states. They were gonna be assigned specialties. Medical students were gonna go to medical school and be told what their specialty was gonna be, under the terms of Hillarycare. When all of this became known, it began to unravel at a rapid rate. In fact, Hillary scheduled a nationwide bus tour to promote Hillarycare, and we had people at every stop waiting for that bus to arrive.

They were protesting it, mocking it, laughing at it, making fun of the bus — and in some places, the bus didn’t even stop where it was scheduled to. It just kept going to the next location. I mean, it was a great, great, great success story. But Hayward is right here, as he recounts the history of Hillarycare. When the details became known… When you just say, “universal health coverage,” 100% of people support it. But when you tell ’em what it means, they change.

Can I interrupt myself for a minute? This is one of the things that constantly perplexes me. I know 1994 was a long time ago to some people, and 1994, a lot of people were infants and don’t remember it. But for people who were alive, this is my question: Why do we have to keep reminding people that Democrat ideas fail? Why does it not become apparent? Hillary, 1994, universal health coverage. Obamacare, same thing.

If people accept the lies that they’re told in both instances — if you like your doctor, you can keep it; if you like your health plan, you can keep it — they have to lie in order to get this thing originally supported, and when the truth comes out, why does the truth have to come out each and every time? Why don’t people remember the absolute abhorrent nature of things that Democrats try? I know the answer to my own question, but I’m still asking ’cause it still frustrates me.

Contrary to what you mean might think, I am not that smart, but I can tell you this. I don’t have to learn things twice. I know that liberalism is rotten and horrible and devastating and inhumane and doesn’t do anything that it promises, and I don’t have to be reminded of it. The world is filled with history of this. You know, I have asked the same question about the eighties and Reagan. Now, I understand how they’ve set out to revise the history of that era, but why don’t people remember how great it was?

I mean, we had a booming economy. We had patriotism that was flowing from every pore. The love of country, the economic rebound, all of the things that were happening in the eighties during the Reagan boom, and they lasted into the nineties. It’s amazing to me how people can be talked out of how good things were and can have their minds totally remade and their memories will be shaped in such a way that they’ll think the 1980s were the absolute worst period of time in their lives. It’s a relentless drumbeat. I know how the left does it. That’s not my point. Obamacare, Hillarycare, universal health coverage, it isn’t possible. You have people clinging to the hope and you have a likable, charismatic, messianic-like guy telling you this time it’s gonna work, maybe people will buy into it.

It just continues to flummox me, and I don’t mind admitting it. When I say I’m not smart, all I mean by this, I live through things like other people do. Why… (sigh) Ah, it’s a pointless exercise. Never mind. I relive this Hillarycare business, and we’re going through it again here. It’s tearing the country apart, like it did in 1994. We keep recycling the same old failed liberalism from The New Deal forward. You name it, we’ve tried it. It never works. How in the world can anybody call what’s going on now a success story? Ninety-one and a half million people not even in the labor force. All these people on Medicaid, 48 million people on food stamps and climbing. And it all equals compassion?

But if you do think back to how the details of Hillarycare became known, Hillarycare fell apart, and when all of this became known, when the bureaucratic details came out, the most important one again being that you couldn’t be sure that you would keep your doctor or plan, the Clintons at the time refused to consider a compromise. It was all or nothing on Hillarycare. Now, remember, too, that this was Hillary’s baby, and it was her payoff for essentially staying married to Clinton and therefore keeping him viable. Her payoff was running Hillarycare, and she was tone deaf, and they were unwilling to make any compromise.

Remember the Harry and Louise ad? That’s what did it in. One of the many things. And that is why Obama lied, because he remembered the Harry and Louise ad. Obama remembered that ad, which is why he portrayed Obamacare as simply expanding coverage to the uninsured, improving coverage for the underinsured, and leaving everybody else undisturbed.

But it was all a lie. The redistributive arithmetic of Obamacare’s architecture could never add up, which is what the bureaucrats knew early on, as early as 2010, according to the Federal Register. They knew that 93 million Americans were gonna lose their insurance. They knew it, and they were lying on purpose.

“Now that people are losing their insurance and finding that they may not be able to keep their doctor after all, Obamacare has become the domestic policy equivalent of the Iraq War: a protracted fiasco that is proving fatal to a presidentÂ’s credibility and approval rating. The only thing missing is calling in FEMA to help fix this Category-5 political disaster.” This is Steven Hayward writing in Forbes.

He eventually predicts that this thing is gonna be repealed. They won’t call it that. They’ll call it delay, but he thinks it’s gonna be repealed. Let me take a break and I’ll come back and give you the details on how he thinks that’s gonna manifest itself.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, here’s how it’s gonna happen. This is Steven Hayward again at Forbes. He’s a blogger at PowerLine, well known gadfly think tanker. He’s written some books on Reagan. “Senate Democrats endangered for re-election will lead the charge for repeal perhaps as soon as January, after they get an earful over the Christmas break.” They already are, really, when they troop up to the White House and ask the individual mandate to be delayed. This is his argument. They’re really arguing for repeal. They may not know it.

“TheyÂ’ll call it ‘reform,’ and clothe it in calls for delaying the individual mandate and allowing people and businesses to keep their existing health insurance policies,” and that’s happening. There’s all kinds of “Let’s just let people reinstate what’s been taken away.” But can’t, they’re gone. Anyway, Hayward says, “It’s too late to go back in many cases,” and the reason it’s too late is because the plans don’t exist. They don’t qualify. You’d have to cancel Obamacare in order to reinstate your old plan, and then you’d have to get the insurance company to offer it again. It sounds really good. “Well, let’s just reinstate what people have lost, Ethel.” Well, yeah. I don’t know, folks.

I’m sorry for my frustration here. My little kitten woke me up at six o’clock biting my nose. That’s much earlier than usual. The little cat wanted its food. I introduced it to a new kind of food the cat’s addicted to it. Absolutely nuts. It’s just canned cat food, soft food, but it just loves the stuff. Now, it’ll eat the other hard food, too, but this little kitten — and I love it. I just love this little thing — but it’s biting my nose, and if that doesn’t work it goes under the covers and bites my big toe. Not hard. I mean it’s a smart little kitten. It knows. But the point is it harasses me until I finally get up. These things are smart. Anyway, I’m a little irritable because of that and I’m irritable because of the news anyway.

So Hayward says, “But it is probably too late to go back in many cases. With the political damage guaranteed to continue, the momentum toward repeal will be unstoppable. Democrats will not want to face the voters next November with the albatross of Obamacare. The politics of the repeal effort will be a game theoristÂ’s dream. Tea Party Republicans will resist ‘reforms’ to Obamacare in favor of complete repeal. Democrats will try to turn the tables and set up Republicans as obstacles to reform, hoping to inoculate themselves prospectively from mayhem at the polls next November.”

So it’s gonna be fascinating to watch this, because the very people who voted for this, the very people who gave this garbage to us are the first ones in line to be really hurt by it, electorally and politically. It’s gonna be fascinating to see how they try to massage this into getting rid of it without getting rid of it, making you think they’re going to but not doing it. That will be the trick.