RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, now that we have health care reform, we should expect Obama’s approval numbers to skyrocket, right? Not just get a bump. Everybody’s talking about a ‘bump’ that he might get ’cause he got it done. We should expect them to skyrocket because of health care reform. This is what we were told. We should expect the budget deficit to immediately start going down. This is what we were told. And employment should shoot straight up, right? These were all the promised benefits that we are breathlessly sitting around and waiting for. Now, about this preexisting condition stuff. I feel like it’s time to hit you between the eyes with some reality here, to continue doing so, which we’ve been doing for the last year on this.
The truth of the matter is that at the end of the day, when all of this is implemented — if it is — preexisting conditions will not be covered. Everybody will not be treated. We already have the federal government as the largest insurance company in the country: It’s called Medicare, it’s called Medicaid, it’s called S-CHIP and it’s called the VA. And everybody does not get covered. Everybody does not get paid for. Everybody does not get reimbursed, and everybody does not get treated. They, Medicare and Medicaid, refuse (decline) more cases than any private insurance company in this country, expressed as a percentage. The only way, the only way that this can possibly happen in our health care system, is for care to be rationed — which it already is with Medicare and Medicaid and the VA and S-CHIP.
When rationing begins, depending on what illness or disease you have or contract, you may well not get health care. It may be determined that you are not suitable to be treated based on your age, based on the severity of the disease, and based on whether or not it’s worth it to the government to keep you alive and to keep you healthy, in terms of dollars and cents. Pure and simple. You may not get your health care, or you’ll get it so late as to not matter. This is what happens under these systems. It’s right before our eyes. It’s happening in Canada. It happens in the Great Britain area. It happens everywhere there is socialized medicine. They can say that you have coverage, but you will not get care like you do today.
Starting today, the best health care system in the world is history. The health care that you want, the health care that you’re able to get is history. There are some people saying that this is an entitlement. Technically speaking, I guess you could say it is. But in reality, it’s not an entitlement. Because whereas everybody gets their Social Security, or everybody gets the other things, they’re not going to get health care as they want it, when they want it, and how much of it they want. It can’t possibly happen, not when the government is managing it, not when the government will be the sole provider — and not when it’s the American people, via high taxes, who are paying for it. You had the real number of uninsured in this country at 12 million. That’s the number of people who want health care insurance but couldn’t get any.
It’s not 32, it’s not 40, it’s not 47, never has been, it’s 12 million. We’ve run the numbers. And for barely a smidgeon of the stimulus package we could have insured those people every year. We didn’t need this. This is not about health care. This is not about insurance. This is about fundamentally wrecking and destroying the United States of America as it was founded. This is about turning as many people in this country as possible into dependents, not for their wants, but for their very needs. You know, 280, 275 million people in this country had health insurance, they were happy with it, they had their coverage. Prices were skyrocketing, that was a vacuum that wasn’t quite filled when the Republicans had a chance, but that’s a discussion for another day. Poll after poll after poll, there was not this clamoring for massive fundamental change such as we’ve had. But rationing is the only way this can happen. Depending on what kind of cancer you get, depending on your age, depending on the cost of drugs, et cetera, you may not get any of it, and it’s not going to be your doctor who decides. It’s going to be some government panel using actuarial tables that look at you as a budget number, pure and simple. Not as a human being.
Now, I’ll tell you where this is headed. It’s great to talk about repeal, that must happen, but the people talking about it, if they’re going to run for reelection on that, they better be serious about meaning it. Already there are some Republicans talking about, ‘Well, you know, we can make this workable if we just take some things…’ no! This is not workable in any way, shape manner or form. It’s destructive totally. And anybody talking about how, ‘Well, we can take this out of it, we take that out of it and replace it…’ no! This whole thing has to be broomed and swept away and blown up and started over with. I said last week that Barack Obama came to divide us, and he’s done that. He has also come to conquer us. When Barack Obama leaves office, if he does, he wants more people on the welfare state than are funding it.
I keep hearing the liberals say, ‘But millions and millions cannot afford health care.’ That’s what Medicaid was for and it’s not really working all that well, is it? Is any government program fulfilling its promise? Why are people so damn unhappy all the time about it? Yet they keep trusting government to do more, except in this case the American people have awakened and did not trust the government to do more. This has been shoved and rammed down our throats. Medicaid is breaking the states. The State of Arizona has just canceled its S-CHIP program, they just broomed it. They don’t have the money. California’s next. We are bankrupt and nobody is talking about — $940 billion they say, that’s maybe if it ended in two years, but it’s going to go on in perpetuity if it’s not stopped. The cost of this is incalculable to our character, to the relationship citizens have to their government, to freedom, to liberty. The destruction here is totally predictable, and that’s why this is so frightening. Medicaid has essentially just been expanded, and it’s a 45-year failure.
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RUSH: How can anybody who is focused on freedom, American exceptionalism and the individual and the consent of the governed, how can anybody propose a plan which the House did, their reconciliation package, that adds 16,000 new IRS agents to examine the tax returns of the American people? The IRS is the collection agency, the enforcement agency now for all of these mandates, the taxes or fines that all of us must pay, businesses, small and large, to have insurance or the fine if we don’t. And, by the way, paying the fine will be fine. They’ll be more than happy for you to pay the fine. Let me tell you why they’ll be happy for you to pay the fine. A, it’s a brand-new tax, they are pricing these fines much less than an insurance policy would cost you or your business. As long as there’s no jail time, people will choose the fine and then only insure themselves the moment they have the car crash or get sick, and that’s perfectly legal under this bill. The end result of that is that private insurance will cease to exist and the long desired public option will blossom.
The whole purpose of this, despite all the lies told, the whole purpose of this was to put the federal government, Barack Obama, the Democrat Party in charge of everybody’s health care. There’s no other way to look at this, and there is no evidence that they do any of this kind of thing well, and there’s no evidence that a free society remains free when its government assumes this much responsibility for what the private sector takes care of just fine.