RUSH: Jeff, Mansfield, Texas. Glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. Mega dittos, Rush. An honor and a privilege.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: I used to listen to you in Sacramento, California, in the eighties. I believe you said your golf clubs were in various trees around the Chicago area.
RUSH: Well, not just Chicago. (laughing)
CALLER: I’ve been a listener ever since.
RUSH: You’re right, you’re right.
CALLER: Listen, Rush, I’m a 58-year-old semiretired engineer, and I really don’t need the health care insurance. I’ve saved money through my career, and I would pay for any health care that I might need. So for me it’s the fine or whatever.
RUSH: Well, just for a couple years, and then you are going to have to have it. Well, the fine forever, but the fine is cheaper than the policy for a couple years. After a while, the fine’s gonna be dramatically more expensive.
CALLER: That’s right. And I believe it starts off at $90 a month and goes up to like $500-and-something by 2016.
RUSH: Oh, no, we’re talking thousands. You get to 2018, 2019, we’re into thousands. Look, the point is, did I hear you right, you’re 58, you’re covered, you don’t need it?
CALLER: I don’t need it. I can pay for my own medical expenses.
RUSH: Right. So is your point, why should you be forced to buy it?
CALLER: That’s affirmed.
RUSH: Well, now, what the central planners would say is that you have to buy it to help share the costs of insuring and treating those who don’t have enough money to buy it.
CALLER: But I did that when I was working and putting money away through my career. So, really, this health care plan needs to be redefined, redebated in Congress. It needs to be redesigned completely.
RUSH: You know what? What if they ever had a plan that required everybody to own a gun. And there was a plan that everybody had to learn how to use it. You think there’d be some objections to that on the left?
CALLER: Absolutely not.
RUSH: Oh, yes, there would.
CALLER: I mean, yes.
RUSH: Forced to go buy a gun?
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: What if you had to pay into a plan called “hotel room insurance” to be able to help those who can’t afford a hotel room when they need one to be able to? You would protest, right?
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: Here comes health care, and you don’t want it. You’d rather pay it as you go. Have I got that right? You need to go to the doctor, you pay for it. You need an operation, you got the money to pay for it.
CALLER: In fact, it is cheaper, I’ve noticed, if you’re paying by cash.
RUSH: Oh-ho. It’s not even close to cheaper. I’ve discovered the same thing. It’s massively cheaper if you pay as you go and don’t use insurance.
CALLER: But forcing people to buy something is communism.
RUSH: Well, that’s what the Supreme Court decision was all about, and they found that communism’s constitutional.
CALLER: Well, if it’s a tax, then where’s the constitutional amendment? I thought you had to do an amendment to add a tax.
RUSH: Barack Obama is an extraconstitutional president. If the Constitution doesn’t say it, it should, and he’s gonna order things as though it does. I’ll tell you, what we reported last week, that members of Congress, their staff primarily, were complaining that health care was too expensive, that they couldn’t afford being required to go to the exchanges and they complained about it. And so Obama said, “Okay, we’ll subsidize you from the Department of Personnel Management.” So members of Congress and their staff are exempted from Obamacare.
Their subsidies are not gonna come from qualifying at an exchange. Their subsidies come because they’re members of Congress, and their subsidies are gonna equal 75% of what it costs. So ruling class, country class. Elites versus rabble. And members of Congress make anywhere from 70,000 to $174,000 a year, and they said they couldn’t afford it, and they whined and moaned. They wrote the bill. Some staffers actually wrote the bill. And Obama heard their complaints, and they’re gonna get subsidy. I told the story on Friday, and to me, this is scandalous.
It’s a classic illustration of the chosen versus the unchosen, and how people in the ruling class of Washington get to write rules for all of us that they exempt themselves from. When I reported this, Snerdley said, “This is gonna blow up. There’s gonna be blow-back on this. The people and the pitchforks are gonna storm Washington.” And I said, “No, they won’t because they’re never going to hear about it.” And they haven’t heard about it. The mainstream media didn’t pick this up. It hasn’t been talked about on television. It hasn’t been talked about outside of the conservative media.
So where you, Jeff, by force of law, have to go buy something you don’t want in order to spread fairness, members of Congress are being subsidized when they buy it, because they say they can’t afford it. You and I, there are subsidies for the American population at the exchanges, but you have to qualify for the subsidies. But, see, that’s a dirty little trick, too, because at the outset everybody’s gonna — in fact, I just remembered, at the outset, they’re in such a mess that there is no qualifying. Everybody’s just gonna get the subsidy. All you have to do is show up and say you qualify and they’ll rubber stamp it and you get your subsidy, because Obama wants people enrolled, folks.
That’s one of the reasons he’s out selling this thing left and right, these campaign appearances. They want as many people signing up for health care at these exchanges as they can get, because that’s the equivalent of the tentacles of this entitlement getting woven deeper and deeper into our society, making it harder and harder to untangle it and repeal it. And that, my friends, is the objective. And that’s why everybody’s gonna qualify for the subsidy, at the outset.