RUSH: Here’s Richard in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s great to have you on the program, Richard. Hello.
CALLER: First-time caller, Rush. I’ve been a union Democrat since McGovern, my first election.
RUSH: 1972.
CALLER: Yes, sir. My union called me and asked me to vote for a young lady here to run against Mitch McConnell, and I said, “Look, you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting a different result.”
RUSH: That’s right, yeah.
CALLER: Well —
RUSH: That was Alison Lundergan Grimes or some such thing was that ran.
CALLER: That was her name.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: She’ll do well one day, but it wasn’t for me, so I voted straight line Republican first time ever.
RUSH: Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. You did?
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Hoo-wee!
CALLER: Well, you consider everything: Benghazi, running the borders, what’s going on with the jihadists. I’ve got two grandsons.
RUSH: Why doesn’t that matter to…? You may not have the answer to this. Why don’t things like this matter to other Democrats, be they union or not? Why doesn’t open borders matter? Why doesn’t the fact the Democrat Party doesn’t take jihadism or militant Islam seriously as a threat. Why doesn’t that matter to other Democrats?
CALLER: Well, when Obamacare come out and they said you could keep your doctor.,
RUSH: Yeah. “You can keep your doctor, keep your plan, and get a $2500 cheaper premium every year.”
CALLER: Well, I’ve got a couple procedures that I put off because of that.
RUSH: Why, because Obama was gonna be cheaper? Obama was gonna be cheaper?
CALLER: Well, we can’t afford it.
RUSH: Oh, you’ve put ’em off now because you can’t afford it? Did you happen to wait to do these procedures because you thought it was going to be cheaper?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: That’s not a factor?
CALLER: The procedure was supposed to have been done in October last year.
RUSH: Have you had your tires slashed yet? You know, that happens to union guys that abandon the cause.
CALLER: Well, I’m not new to standing up in front of my union.
RUSH: Oh.
CALLER: And, yeah, it cost me my job before, but you gotta do what’s right.
RUSH: You hung in there. All right. So you are delaying two procedures ’cause you can’t afford them. You know, I’m glad, Richard, that you called. I hate your news. I hate hearing your news. But since I’ve got you here, I want to share a couple of Obamacare stories I have. The first one is from the UK Daily Mail, which, you know, the British press is doing more honest reporting on a lot of things in America than the American media, and Obamacare is one of them.
The nut and bolt of this particular story: Obamacare Program Costs $50,000 in Taxpayer Money for Every American Who Gets Health Insurance, Says Bombshell Budget Report — Stunning figure comes from Congressional Budget Office report that revised cost estimates for the next 10 years.” That number now is the government “will spend $1.993 trillion over a decade. So it’ll cost $2 trillion when they told us the original cost was $1 trillion. It’s now officially at $2 trillion over a decade. It’s gonna take in “$643 billion in new taxes, penalties, and fees.
“The $1.35 trillion net cost will result in ‘between 24 million and 27 million’ fewer Americans being uninsured,” and it’s goinig to cost $50,000 per person to insure them, “at best.” Given these new costs, “The law will still leave ‘between 29 million and 31 million’ nonelderly Americans without” medical care, and this number does not include the insurance premiums and out of pocket health care costs by Americans. This number is only factoring the government’s role in implementing the law.
So it’s gonna be well over $2 trillion of this cost, and it’s now amortized out at $50,000 per American. That’s the cost, the real-world cost of Obamacare, $50,000. Now, the next story comes from the New York Post, and it is story by a man named Justin Haskins. H’s a writer. He’s an editor for the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free market think tank, and it’s a detailing his experience with Obamacare. It starts this way: “‘I’m sorry sir,’ the polite HealthCare.gov customer-service agent said.
“‘There’s nothing I can do. You’re either going to have to enroll in Medicaid or you’re going to have to pay the full health-insurance rate.’ ‘The rate you quoted earlier?’ I asked. ‘That’s nearly 30% higher than my current insurance bill, I just can’t afford it.'” They tell him he has to pay 30% higher than his current premium or enroll in Medicaid. “‘You’ll have to pay the full rate, yes,’ the agent replied. ‘I don’t understand,’ I explained. ‘I have plenty of money to pay you a reasonable rate, but I can’t afford to pay the same rate a millionaire would be asked to pay.
“‘Why can’t I just receive a partial subsidy? I’m willing to pay more than what Medicaid offers.’ ‘Sir, that’s just not how the system works.’ Right. That’s not how Obamacare works; it doesn’t work at all. I was 26 when my graduate school informed me in 2013 that thanks to ‘usage rates of the plan, changing health-insurance regulations, and the administrative workload that is involved in managing a plan’ after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, [as a consequence of Obamacare] students could no longer buy health coverage through the school.
“So much for President Obama’s promises of ‘if you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan.'” It’s BS. “I had health insurance. I liked it. But that plan disappeared.” How many people have you heard this story from? It’s more and more and more every day. “[C]ollege officials confirmed my suspicion that Obamacare was the culprit. ‘It’s just too expensive to operate under the new health-care regulations,’ I was told. So there I was: A struggling grad student with no health insurance, and unable to afford unsubsidized Obamacare plans I’d hardly, if ever, use.”
He couldn’t get a subsidy. The system didn’t permit it. He had two choices: Pay what I didn’ have the money to buy, or go on Medicaid. Those are his only two options. “Call me crazy, but in my book Medicaid is a last resort, not a first option. Faced with the choice of either violating a strong conviction by going on Medicaid or signing up for Obamacare insurance I couldn’t afford, I chose a third option: Short-term insurance. Unlike traditional health plans, short-term plans are generally available only to healthy buyers and last for a set period. …
“What is incredibly frustrating, however, is that I now have to pay Obamacare’s tax (or is it a fine?) for last year, because my short-term plan (like most) doesn’t count as buying ‘adequate insurance’ under Obamacare’s mandates.” What an abject, absolute mess! And I’m sure, Richard, that that’s one of the things that you’ve encountered as so many millions of Americans are. It’s an absolute mess.
I should point out that I’ve got a story in the Stack here how the Republicans have really no intention of rolling it back. In fact, there’s a story McConnell and Boehner — it may be about immigration, or maybe both or one or the other. But it’s basically how they’re backtracking from their campaign promises. They’re backtracking. They just give up. Obamacare is gonna be fully implemented. They’re not gonna make any effort to stop it and it’s gonna be an absolute mess. And ditto, immigration.