RUSH: Here’s Obama last Tuesday on the Today Show. Matt Lauer said, ‘Health care reform, health care law now seen as a huge victory for you, your presidency, for Democrats, tough pill to swallow for Republicans.’ You notice there’s no reaction here as far as the American people, they’re just looking at this, ‘Is it good for Obama, did Obama win, did the Democrats win, did the Republicans lose?’ No concern for the actual impact of this on the American people. So Matt Lauer says, ‘It’s been described in a lot of ways. Your vice president described it in colorful terms. How do you describe it?’
OBAMA: I think it is a critical first step —
RUSH: First step.
OBAMA: — in making a health care system that works for all Americans. It’s not going to be the only thing. We’re still going to have adjustments that have to be made to further reduce costs.
RUSH: Uh, further? There are no costs that have been reduced, and it’s just a critical first step, making a health care system that works for all Americans. I thought this was going to insure all Americans? Pelosi has been out there talking about that. So then Matt Lauer says, ‘How are you possibly going to continue with any kind of legislative agenda when your opponents have said to you, ‘I’m not going to cooperate with this president, with these Democrats unless it’s a matter of national security,’ how do you move on?’
OBAMA: First of all, I think that a lot of the rhetoric has been overheated and overblown, and this is what happens in Washington when you have a big debate. Suddenly the passage of this bill is Armageddon. And as I pointed out the next day of — after I signed it, I looked around and no asteroids had hit the planet (chuckling) and no cracks had appeared in the earth. This is a bill that is going to help a lot of people and help to lower costs of health care, but it’s not a radical departure from what we’ve done in the past.
RUSH: Okay, so he’s repeating the theme that I predicted. Hey, we signed it, nothing bad is happening out there, just a bunch of overheated rhetoric. There aren’t any costs that are going to come down. Well, maybe for some people who even now aren’t paying for much of what they spend. They’re going to get it free as far as they are concerned. Folks, I don’t know how to say this. Has the cost of any government program gone down, or have the costs wildly exceeded the original projections that the independent analysts came up with? Is Social Security cheaper than what people thought it was going to be? Is Medicare, Medicaid cheaper than what they were projected to be? The war on poverty, cheaper? How can they say anything is going to be cheaper when we are in debt up to $14 trillion? And I think we do have cracks in the earth, by the way, for people like AT&T who are gonna lose a billion dollars out of their $3 billion profit, that’s a crack in the earth, Obama.
Now, here’s a lie. And of course most of the previous sound bite was a lie. Matt Lauer finally said, ‘A lot of people wonder how a bill could be good for the American public in general when it didn’t receive one single Republican vote, when a recent poll said 50% of people aren’t in favor of it, how do you respond to that?’
OBAMA: When you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas. I mean a lot of commentators have said, ‘You know, this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts.’ A lot of the ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, that originated from the Heritage Foundation.
RUSH: And they are fulminating at the Heritage Foundation because it’s an out-and-out total fabrication, Obama claiming a central tenet came from them. Actually you just heard it, he tried to explain that the insurance exchange he envisions being built by government is an idea that came from Heritage in the first place, and nothing could be further from the truth. Heritage approves of a market-driven approach that allows families to choose their own health insurance, not government bureaucrats. But if Obama was a member of the Heritage Foundation he would have known that all along. I suspect he knows this is all BS, just like he knows that there’s nothing in this that Republicans suggested, nothing at all. The Heritage Foundation never once has proposed government-run exchanges. The Heritage Foundation has proposed all of this kind of stuff occur in the private sector where individuals and families make their own choices. They are a big believer in the health savings accounts, which Obama loathes.
Now, the word’s getting out on this. Some publicly traded companies are starting to project all these losses, hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars. Privately held companies saying they may want to make their employees independent contractors to avoid a future fine. You know how that works. Yeah, the IRS will not let ’em do that. You have to pass a test in order to become independent contractor, but here’s another thing about becoming an independent contractor. If you do this, or if your company tries to force you into independent contractor status, you better go out and incorporate yourself, otherwise you’re going to be paying the full Medicare tax on every dollar you earn, unlike the payroll tax, FICA, what’s the ceiling on that now, $102,000 once you earn more than that, whatever it is, there’s a cutoff point. Medicare, you pay the 2.9% on every dollar you earn. So if you go sub-S, which is what John Edwards did, by the way, John Edwards did this to spare himself all of these Medicare taxes so that he could spend the money on the babe, and the baby.
So what you do — this is a shell explanation, I don’t want to hear from accountants saying I don’t know what I’m talking about, just think of it as April Fool’s. You set up yourself as a sub-S, you pay yourself a salary, a portion of your total income, but you don’t pay yourself all of what you earn as income, you pay the rest of it as a bonus, deferred income or whatever, that way you’ll limit the amount of Medicare tax that you pay. But if your company forces you to go independent contractor, then you pay your own taxes quarterly, they escape the penalty for not having health insurance for you because it’s up to you, then, when you’re an independent contractor — like a doctor, or a contractor or a lawyer, you gotta do everything yourself, pay your taxes, get your own health insurance, nobody provides it for you, or pay a fine, which you might opt to do, because the fine is going to be much less than getting insurance. That is also by design, so that you can go out there and wait ’til you actually have the accident or get sick, and the insurance company has to insure you at that very moment. Well, now we’re not talking about insurance. We’re talking about something totally different. And there’s no insurance company that can stay in business doing that, by design.
Now, back to Heritage for just a second, because if they want to start talking about using Heritage’s ideas, starting with Obama, if they want to use Heritage’s ideas and their name to rewrite history in a way that suggests that conservatives support this bill, it is going to be a tough ride. Ed Feulner runs the place and is not going to put up with this. It’s an outright assault on the integrity of the Heritage Foundation. Just trust me. There’s no way that anything in this bill originated even a germ of an idea from the Heritage Foundation. You can become a member, too, like I am. Sign up at AskHeritage.org, and if you do sign up, you can see their reply to your president.