RUSH: All right, here is Dingy Harry yesterday afternoon at a press conference in Washington.
REID: The best way to move forward is to include a public option with the opt-out provision to states. Under this concept, states will be able to determine whether the public option works well for them and will have the ability to opt out if they so choose. Believe that a public option can achieve the goal of bringing meaningful reform to our broken system, will protect consumers, keep insurers honest and ensure competition and that’s why we intend to include it in the bill we submitted and will be submitted to the Senate.
RUSH: All right, now, he’s provided nothing specific. This is typical. He’s come up with a theory on this public option state opt-out, and he sent it over to the CBO to have it scored. I don’t trust the CBO, for one thing, but that’s not the point about this. I want to reiterate again that there will no way be any possibility you can opt out of a public option and there’s no way your governor or your state legislature or assembly will be able to opt out of it, either, and I’m going to explain why. As a side illustration, do you recall when Jimmy Carter declared a national speed limit of 55 miles an hour and states could opt — you don’t remember that? Okay, I’ll tell you. That’s when the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit got started, Jimmy Carter declared it, and there was a state opt-out. Now, the Catch-22 was that if states opted out, they lost all federal highway funds, they lost any participation, but that’s a side point. This is much more than that.
Here’s the truth. The citizens of this country, regardless of what state they live in, will have to pay for, that is, subsidize through taxes and higher private insurance policy costs that the public option the government will set up. No citizen will be able to opt out of that whether you are an employer or an employee or on your own. It’s an illusion. You’re gonna pay for it no matter what. Furthermore, the government’s imposition of bankrupting regulations on private insurance companies are gonna put ’em out of business. We now know that contrary to what Obama and his people are running around saying, that the insurance companies are making obscene profits, the usual attacks on the business of the day, we now learn that the profits of private health insurers, two to three percent. Even the AP reported that. They are not flush with money. They are not among the most profitable businesses in the nation. They’re nowhere near it. What’s going to happen, what everybody seems to forget, you know, Pelosi’s out there saying, (paraphrasing) ‘Public option, that’s a bad word, we need to change the term. We need to call it competitive option.’
That’s even worse. Because the objective of the public option is to drive private health care insurance out of business. There are a number of ways that will happen and Dingy Harry’s latest sleight of hand is one of them. Here’s how it’s going to work. These regulations that will bankrupt insurance companies, that will be imposed on them, will consist of compelling private companies to take all comers. Private insurance companies will have to insure everybody, including those who are going to have a heart attack tomorrow and die. They’re going to have to take ’em when they have not purchased insurance earlier, only when they need a major operation or an expensive drug. Now, by compelling these companies to do that, they are going to destroy the ability of any private entity to protect its other customers who have acted responsibly and purchased insurance when they were not sick. So the people who again play by the rules, follow what they’re supposed to do, are going to be paying for the insurance policies of people who sign up at the first sign they got a big operation or need an expensive drug or what have you, the government will set benefit requirements for the insurance agency, they will set price limits.
All of this is in the legislation. There are five bills, and all of this is in the five bills that are being discussed. The government’s going to set benefit requirements, price limits, meaning they’re going to tell the insurance companies how much they cannot charge for this, basically do whatever it wants to with private insurers. The purpose is to destroy them. Obama, Chuck-U Schumer have all but said so with their support for single payer and government-run plans. Obama has said it over the years. We’ve had it on tape. We’ve aired it a number of times. Public option, single payer, that’s his objective, that’s what he tells his buddies. It may take five, ten years to get there, but that’s what his objective is. Schumer said the same thing. Barney Frank’s out there saying, ‘We want a bigger role for government in virtually everything.’ We have this sound bite coming up.
If any of you think that you’re going to have to an option to get out of the public option, forget it, there’s going to be nowhere to go. Private insurance is going to be put out of business. It is going to be regulated out of business. The profit margin is two to three percent and these new regulations that are going to be imposed on them, it’s all designed to run ’em out of business and force everybody over to the public option, meaning the government. So the plan, the plan is to force citizens of states who do not participate in the government option to subsidize those who do, making it nearly impossible for any governor to say, ‘I will not allow my citizens to participate in the federal insurance program,’ and to eliminate private insurers in a few years’ time which makes the government option the only option available in the end. This is a single, sinister, duplicitous scam and it’s happening not because of the Republicans, it’s happening because the Democrats are losing their far left-wing base by saying there isn’t going to be a public option. So now they’re trying to make it sound like, ‘Okay, we’ll put a public option in but you can opt out.’
You can’t opt out. You’re going to be paying for it one way or the other, and eventually there is gonna only be the public option, meaning the government. That’s why they’re doing it. Folks, common sense. The only reason they’re reforming health care is to put the government in charge of it ultimately. You have to ignore all of this talk about opting out of the public option. You have to ignore the sales technique, ‘Well, the public option, Mr. Limbaugh, it’s just there to add to competition.’ It is to eliminate competition. You cannot, you will not be able to opt out of paying higher premiums and taxes to subsidize the government plan. You can only opt out of making the government plan available to your state citizens. And by wiping out private insurance, who’s going to opt out in the end? Look, even conservative governors will have no choice. They’ll have to relent because of the elimination of private alternatives in their states by the federal government.
So any so-called moderate Democrat who votes for this is voting for a single-payer government run health care system while cynically pretending to their constituents that they are not, and I say again to you Blue Dog Democrats, you better pay attention to what’s happening here because you can’t vote for this, any form of it, and go back to your districts next November and say, ‘I’m fiscally conservative, I voted to opt out of the public option.’ You vote for this, you are voting for single payer national health care and a further bankrupted country. Meanwhile, predictably, the dunces in the liberal media are reporting this as a grand compromise offered by the great compromiser himself, Dingy Harry. So they continue to carry the left’s water on this. So much for that.
By the way, Newsweek, in a blog today say Reid’s public option not exactly a shoo-in. There will be no opting out. These people are just, I don’t know, sometimes it does get to me. You know, one of the things that is the most frustrating to me is stupidity, ignorance, among intelligent people, the lack of critical thinking, lapdog sycophants, brownnosers, apple polishers. Now, Betsy McCaughey, who did yeoman work in destroying HillaryCare, has been paying a lot of attention to this, and she has a piece today in the New York Post: ‘Treating Seniors as ‘Clunkers’ —
Everyone knows that if you don’t pay to maintain and repair your car, you limit its life. The same is true as human beings age. We need medical care to avoid becoming clunkers — disabled, worn out, parked in wheelchairs or nursing homes. For nearly a half century, Medicare has enabled seniors to get that care. But ObamaCare is about to change that, by limiting what doctors can provide their aging patients.’
Are you sitting down? ‘The Senate Finance Committee health bill,’ the Baucus bill, ‘released last week controls doctors by cutting their pay if they give older patients more care than the government deems appropriate.’ Can you say death panels? It’s right there, ‘Section 3003(b) (p. 683) punishes doctors who land in the 90th percentile or above on what they provide for seniors on Medicare by withholding 5 percent of their compensation.’ So the government is going to determine how much care older patients can get. If a doctor exceeds that, he gets his compensation cut 5% and I assume it won’t end there. ‘This withhold provision forces doctors to choose between treating their patients and avoiding government penalties. HMOs used the same cost-cutting device in the early ’90s until it was deemed dangerous to patients and outlawed. Now, lawmakers want to use it against the most vulnerable patients, the elderly.’
Now, as I read this, I’m just speculating here, it sounds like the government’s very sensitive here to this death panel stuff so the Finance Committee is going to make the doctors the death panel, even though the government is actually inspiring this kind of behavior.
I gotta take a quick break here, folks.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Jeff in Austin, Texas. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. It’s an honor. It’s actually Jeff from Wimberley, Texas, just working in the liberal mecca here on the weekdays. In your first hour you were talking about the states opt out and what a farce that is. This is a dangerous farce because if the governors elect to opt out of this, what does it do to the unemployment in their state and the business in their state, where my business operates in this state and produces in this state, if Texas, which I hope they do opt out of this if it gets that far, my business is going to move to a state that does not opt out because when they can abscond from their responsibilities to their employees either pay for their benefits —
RUSH: No, but, well, wait. Again, conservative governors won’t be able to opt out of this —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: — because there’s going to be no place to opt out to.
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: This is the thing that I must continue to hammer home with the anvil that is my tongue, and that is there isn’t going to be a place, and even if for a while — you know, this stuff’s not going to happen overnight — even if there is a temporary place to opt out, the taxes of the people in that state and whatever else, charges they’re going to face going private to subsidize the people who have not bought insurance, it’s going to cost everybody. It’s all a smoke screen. There is no opting out if this thing goes through. All this is is Dingy Harry and the Democrats realizing they’re in trouble. When Pelosi says, (paraphrasing) ‘We need a competitive option, we need to call it a competitive option, it’s not a public option,’ they know they’re in trouble on this. There is a big poll today in the public option, well, that’s a smoke screen, too. That’s going to be the second fraudulent poll with no doubt a rigged sample that the public wants a public option.
I’d like to know what public, who they are, where they’re asking them, and in what state of sobriety they’re in when they are contacted. And whether they have health insurance or not because I guarantee you, to a lot of people, public option means free. Public option’s associated with government, and people think what they get from the government is free, the kind of people we’re talking about. Oh, yeah, your food stamps come in, you didn’t pay for them, yeah, government gave them to me, Obama’s stash, the poor people in Detroit. ‘Uh, Obama giving me the money. Obama from reserve funds or from his stash.’ You can find people like that, you say, ‘You support the public option.’ ‘Is it free?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Fine. Count me in.’ And then some reputable polling organization puts the news out there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Pelosi. This is back to health care, by the way. We got two sound bites. This is yesterday in Sunrise, Florida, Nancy Pelosi.
PELOSI: I do think that when people think of it as their option, their consumer option, because public is being misrepresented as being something that is paid for by taxpayer dollars. Which it is not.
RUSH: See, Snerdley, you pooh-poohed me. I didn’t even know she had said this. You tell me there was some stupid poll out there that the majority of people support the public option and, yeah, you run around and tell people it’s free, of course they’re going to support it. You can find the right bunch of people that will believe that. By the way, Lieberman just said he’ll join the filibuster unless Dingy Harry pulls his public option out. Olympia Snowe is sayonara, she’s outta there. Blanche Lincoln in trouble on this. Ben Nelson, Nebraska, in trouble on this. If they don’t get this, folks, if they don’t get this, this is going to be a bigger monument to failure than even Bill Clinton when he failed health care because at least he could blame it on his wife. Obama cannot blame it on anybody. He can’t blame it on the Republicans, although they’ll try. Now, this afternoon on the Live Desk, Trace Gallagher was talking to Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, and Trace Gallagher said, ‘Speaker Pelosi says the public option is just a competitive option, not government-run health care, but it would be government-run option because it would be funded by the government. Where would the money come from?’
SCHULTZ: No, it wouldn’t be funded by the government, Trace —
GALLAGHER: The government right.
SCHULTZ: — which would be fully paid back and —
GALLAGHER: We hope it would be fully paid back, but right now the numbers don’t square like that. I mean what you’re saying —
SCHULTZ: Well, they sure do.
GALLAGHER: Okay. Go ahead.
SCHULTZ: No, with all do respect they do square, that’s why CBO has scored our bill at less than the $900 billion threshold that President Obama has called for that we are going to make sure that it doesn’t add to the deficit one dime. And we make sure that by using a competitive option, we provide for more competition and choice with the other private choices because otherwise you’ll continue to have the private insurers basically give substandard policies —
RUSH: Yeah, they’re showing a profit of two to three percent. Do you know that Hershey’s candy makes a bigger profit than the insurance business? It won’t be funded by the government. The public option, competitive option won’t be funded by the government. It’s going to be free. It’s not going to use taxpayer dollars, it’s all going to be paid for, it won’t add a dime to the deficit. People are loony. I know the House plan is still over a trillion dollars, they’re hiding money, hat’s why they came in with this revised figure of 800 and some odd, 63 billion. It’s all smoke and mirrors. This is going to cost $2 trillion.
How this movement can have any sane people still involved in it is beyond me.