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RUSH: I told you, folks. You know, I hate to come here with this know-it-all attitude. I don’t mean to portray that. But, I mean, this is a giant nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah, see, I told you so. And it’s not something difficult to predict. All it took was the courage to do so. In fact, the first time I made this prediction goes all the way back to Hillarycare. Back in 1993-1994, I made the prediction, a prediction based on what the whole purpose, the real long-term purpose of Hillarycare was, and I made the same prediction again once Obamacare surfaced.

And the prediction, by the way, is not singular to me. Anybody with a modicum of understanding of liberalism and history could have easily made the same prediction, or maybe thought the same thing. They might not have gone out on a limb to make the prediction, but it was, and is, that all of this is a smoke screen for the real coup de grace. The real purpose of Hillarycare, the real, ultimate goal, the end point is single payer, government-run, cradle to grave, no insurance company, no insurance industry health care.

That has been the objective from day one. Fifty years ago when the left first began talking about health care, that’s where they ultimately want to go. And all of this chaos that is part of Obamacare is part of the design. All of the rapid cost increases, the inability of average, ordinary people to afford it. The inability of average, ordinary people to even find out what it is and to get the best policy for them. The increasing difficulty in getting treatment. The increasing difficulty in actually having health care, much less health insurance, is all part of the grand design to get to total government control of health care.

Call it whatever you want — single payer — I don’t like that term because the low-information crowd thinks, “Hey, single payer, government pay, oh, wow, cool, that makes sense.” It’s not cool, it doesn’t make sense, but, you know, single payer sounds simple. Which is why I don’t like the term. It’s misleading. Socialized medicine, government-run medicine, government-run health care is the preferred term, and we’ve just taken a dramatic step closer to it, again by design.

And right here it is in the Associated Press: “NY Assembly Votes for Universal Health Coverage.” Now, we’re not there yet, but this is the next step. This is the next phase, and in a liberal Mecca like New York, you can’t miss it. Just being very open about it now. “The New York Assembly voted 89-47 on Wednesday for legislation to establish publicly funded universal health coverage in a so-called single payer system.” This is an AP story.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, the New York Assembly is the lower house of the bicameral legislature, and it is heavily Democrat. The New York Senate is the other half, the upper house, if you will, of the New York legislature, and it has just become majority Republican. But that fact no longer guarantees that the Senate will kill the bill. It wasn’t that long ago that the Republicans existed to kill ideas like this. Democrats come along and propose a massive expansion of government. The Republicans would move right in to stop it.

But now, because it’s health care, and because Obamacare’s tentacles are now woven deep like a huge web of deceit, Republicans everywhere — New York, Washington — are feeling scared to death at the prospect, “Oh, no, we don’t want to take anything away from people. Oh, my God, they’ll hate us if we’re seen as taking away a benefit or an entitlement.” And that’s part of the plan, too, don’t care how it operates, don’t care whether it works, just implement it, Obamacare, just start. It doesn’t matter if it works or not. In fact, the more it doesn’t work, the better for the long-term goal.


My only point, just because the Republicans run the upper house in New York state does not automatically mean that they are going to stop this. And, of course, we have a governor, New York Democrat, the son of Mario “The Pious,” the late, Mario the late pious — (interruption) I know New York can’t afford to do. Nobody can afford to do it, but it’s not stopping anybody. It’s not stopping us from anything that we want to do. It’s not stopping anybody in Washington from doing anything they want to do, the fact that we don’t have the money for it.

The Senate is poised to kill the bill in New York, but if you read to the end of the story, what you find out is that the Republicans in the New York Senate are working on their own version of the bill, not killing it. They’re working on their own version, and it mirrors the Republicans in Washington who are making these public claims of opposition to Obamacare, threats or promises to repeal it and so forth. But in truth, they’re scared to death of this upcoming Supreme Court decision.

So it’s not axiomatic that we have a Republican Party that wants to ditch Obamacare, and it’s not assumable, axiomatic in New York state that Republicans in the senate there would kill universal health care in New York state.

Back to the AP story. “All New Yorkers could enroll. Backers said it would extend coverage to the uninsured and reduce rising costs by taking insurance companies and their costs out of the mix.” Yes, exactly according to plan from decades ago, except, ladies and gentlemen, Obamacare already theoretically did all of this. Everybody was supposed to be able to enroll. Backers said that it would extend coverage to the uninsured, which it did, but now we learn the uninsured can’t afford to use it ’cause they now have insurance but they can’t afford the deductibles. So for all intents and purposes, they don’t have it because they can’t use it. And we were gonna get rid of the evil insurance companies.

Remember how that was a big part of the sales pitch from Obama? Because they had, after all these years of attacking capitalism and corporate America, the Democrats had succeeded in convincing many Americans the insurance companies were thieves, and of course some insurance companies convinced people of that on their own. They’re not totally innocent here. But the Democrats certainly piled on.


But all of this has already happened. Obamacare already did all of this and there hasn’t been any reduction in costs, and there hasn’t been any broad-based sign-up. I mean, we’re not better off with Obamacare. It’s an absolute disaster, and here come the people in New York to fix it, part of the plan, by saying, “You know what? You know what? Let’s just scrap everything. We’ll just simplify everything. Just sign up everybody. If you’ve got a Social Security number, you’re signed up. And we’re gonna cover you from the state, and that’s it, single payer, go to the doctor, whatever you want, and that’s it. Let’s just cut to the chase.” That’s what they’re saying here.

But, folks, Medicare and Medicaid were built on the same premise. Obamacare was built on the same premise. But nevertheless, everybody saw this coming. This is why they were so hell-bent on passing Obamacare without any concern for what it actually ended up being, because that wasn’t the point. Just get the entitlement going, just get the benefits being paid out. That’s all they cared about, because they realized, the Democrats, that once that started, it’s gonna be next to impossible, despite all this talk from the Republicans about repealing, there hasn’t ever been an entitlement repealed except for one little change to Medicare that the seasoned citizens nearly scalped Rostenkowski over back in the eighties. Outside of that there has not been one that died. There has not been one that’s been repealed.

They didn’t want the glitches ironed out. The glitches were there on purpose to create chaos so as to establish the scenario where a benevolent governor or a president or any other politician, “You know what? Let’s just get rid of all of this complicated stuff. Let’s just go single payer.” And the masses are supposed to go, “Yay!” I’m just telling you, New York is the proving ground or the test case.

Listen to this next from the AP on this. “With no patient premiums –” oh, wow, what a panacea. No premiums? Are you kidding me? No deductibles? Wow, you mean there are no deductibles, single payer? No, there aren’t. “With no patient premiums, deductibles or co-payments for hospital and doctor visits, testing, drugs or other care, New York Health would pay providers through collectively negotiated rates.”


With no patient premiums, no deductibles, no copayments for hospital or doctor visits, testing, drugs, New York Health, that’s the single payer system as it’s been titled here, New York Health would pay providers through collectively negotiated rates. “It would be funded through a progressive payroll tax paid 80 percent by employers and 20 percent by employees.”

There’s no mention here what the tax rate’s gonna be. Now, that’s a little detail that they’ll hit you with later. So while you’re thinking, “Wow, no patient premiums, no deductibles?” Yeah, wait ’til you see the new payroll tax. Somebody’s gonna pay for that, and it’s always going to be us. No matter how many times they say the word “free,” no matter how many times they concoct misleading names like “single payer,” “universal health care,” whatever, you are going to pay for it one way or the other.

Did you see what the FCC guy did today? Or maybe it was yesterday. Tom Wheeler, FCC, right on clockwork, right on schedule, said (paraphrasing), “We need emergency funding for people in rural areas who do not have broadband Internet. We need emergency funding for people in the sticks who are not able to log on to the World Wide Web.” Well, look, why don’t we take the confiscated tax revenue that’s been taken from every phone customer for the last 75 years to pay for phone service for people in the sticks and just take that and move it over to Internet.

Why a new bunch of money? Why not take the money we’re already spending on phone service, ’cause they don’t need that anymore. Everybody’s got phone service one way or the other. We don’t need to be subsidizing phones for farmers. We don’t need to be subsidizing phones for people that live out in the sticks. We’ve taken care of that. But now we’ve got a new reason to keep the program alive. For some reason there are just a bunch of poor people and rural people and hayseeds and so forth that do not have the Internet, and, by God, we can’t expect them to pay for it, why would we? That would be mean-spirited, so we have to come up with a plan.

They’re just gonna be asking for more money left and right on the basis the poor don’t have enough, they can’t get enough, the rich have too much, the middle class has too much. So here comes the first push for socialized medicine, right on schedule, happening in the state of New York. One more little tidbit here says, “Waivers would be sought so federal funds now received for New Yorkers in Medicare, Medicaid and Child Health Plus would apply.” Well, hello complication. This is a simple little accounting thing that these two bureaucracies, the governments in New York state and Washington will totally screw up and make an even bigger mess, and this money will all go missing someday.

But here is Assemblyman Richard Gottfried. Ready for this? “Employers are shifting more and more health care costs to workers or are dropping it entirely. The only ones who benefit are the insurance companies.” And so because these employers are not playing ball, we’re gonna have to fix them. All of this is exactly what Obamacare was designed to make them do.

And, by the way, this notion here, the new payroll tax where the employer pays 80% and you pay 20%. No, you pay 100% of the payroll tax. I mean, you may think that the employer’s paying half today and you may think that the payroll tax is you being taxed and your employer matches it. You may think that’s what’s happening, but it’s not. You are paying 100% of your payroll tax. And I’ll be glad to explain that again if anybody needs it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT


RUSH: Yeah, just like clockwork, here come the e-mails. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Rush. What do you mean, the employees pay 100% of the payroll tax, it’s just silly. It’s another one of these things that you say, it sounds good, but it’s just not true. You shouldn’t lie to people like this.”

Okay, let me go through this again. And it’s useful, my friends, only in the sense that it will help you understand how you’re being taxed, and the purpose of that, of course, long term, is to have as many people educated to the fact that we’re all overtaxed right now. We do not have an under-taxation problem in this country. We are overtaxed. The government has no spending discipline whatsoever. They always come back to us for more money, and blame us in either direct or indirect ways. But I’m gonna use the payroll tax. I’m not gonna use the existing percentages because they’re convoluted. I’m just gonna use a payroll tax at 10% in this example.

You believe — and payroll, by the way, is FICA on your pay stub if you even see one of those anymore. But the popular belief is that FICA’s for Social Security. That’s your money, your Social Security. And you are taxed a certain amount up to $120,000, your first $120,000 earned every year, and the employer in his benevolence matches your contribution to your own Social Security plan. When in truth these are mandated taxes no different than the income tax, no different than any other tax, they’re mandated, but the fact is you are paying all of it.

The idea that the employer is matching your 5% for a total of 10 is simply PR to make you think that you’re not paying all of it, because one of the jobs of government is to somehow keep people from understanding just how overtaxed they are. The way to understand this is, let me use another number that may not be all that applicable. Let’s say you make a hundred thousand dollars a year. That’s your negotiated salary. Okay, that is your take-home pay, and you are taxed on that gross amount, and at the end of the year you’ll take home, again an arbitrary number, but close, 75, let’s say $70,000.

You never see the $30,000 that you’ve also been paid. It’s just taken off the top and sent to the government first. All you see is your net, but it’s actually costing the employer not $100,000 to hire you but probably, depending your health care package and your Social Security, it might be costing that employer 115 to $20,000 a year to hire you. But you only see $70,000 of it. Think about that

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right. So you work for a place and they’re paying you a hundred thousand dollars a year, and let’s change the table. Let’s say you’re taking home $75,000. I’m just gonna make the numbers up to get close. So you see of what you think you’re being paid $75,000. You know that federal taxes are what they are and so you understand that there’s deductions and this and that happens. You know that when you are paid a hundred grand, that’s not what you get; you get 70. But you’re actually being paid a lot more than that, you don’t know it, because they’re lying to you about how it’s all categorized.


Let’s take your health care package and whatever other benefits that you have where you work. You think that you’re being paid a hundred grand, but the truth is, it probably costs, in my example, $120,000 to employ you. And out of that $120,000, the employer has to pay, I mean, it’s not his, either, you just never see it. Out of the $120,000 it costs the boss to hire you, you see $75,000 of it.

Now, the health care benefit is not entirely free anymore. There are costs to you, but it still costs the employer whatever it is that he’s been able to negotiate with his insurance health rates or what have you, or however you now get your health insurance. Maybe you don’t get it at work anymore, but in the days when you did, it worked this way.

Now, let’s go to FICA. You believe that you are paying 5%, in my example, and the employer is paying and matching 5%. But the fact is you’re paying all of it because it’s what it costs the employer to hire you. You just never see it. You’re paying every bit. So when New York comes along and says the way we’re gonna fund our new single payer health plan is with a new payroll tax where the employer will pay 80% and the employee will only pay 20, you’re gonna pay a hundred percent of it, folks.

It’s gonna cost the employer that much more to keep you employed. It’s money being paid to keep you on the payroll. A lot of money being paid, but not to you. It’s going straight to the state of New York in this example. All the money that all Americans are paid that they never see that first goes to taxation, and then the government comes along and tells you little fibs about, “Well, yeah, you have Social Security, but that’s your insurance account, that’s your retirement account,” which you now know is not true, either. “And the employer, we are gonna make the employer match your contribution.” There’s no matching. There’s a total FICA payment due, and all of it is deducted from what it costs to hire you.

My only point here is, what if you figured out you’re being paid 125, or 130 thousand a year, when you think you’re being paid a hundred? Would you rather have all of that yourself and be responsible for your health care and for your Social Security, or are you content to let 30, $40,000 be taken away from you before you ever see it for all these government-run programs which have been demonstrated to be totally inefficient and they don’t work, and now, I just saw this the other day, too. This is starting to percolate again. That is, more and more unions and more and more private sector companies are announcing that they are not gonna be able to meet their pension requirements.

And this is another dirty little secret. Underfunded pensions all over this country are in the trillions of dollars, but there still is a lot of money in those accounts being managed by somebody, and governments, state, local, and federal, have their eyes on that pension money, and they just can’t wait to get their hands on it. And one of the ways that’ll happen is if either the company you work for, the industry you’re in, the union you’re a member of will finally say in frustration, “We just can’t continue this because we are underfunded. We’re gonna have to off-load the pension here because we can’t guarantee everybody is gonna get what they were promised when they retire.”

And the federal government’s gonna come in, “Oh, we’ll take it, we’ll gladly take it.” And then they’ll tell you that you’re gonna get 50 cents on the dollar for it when you retire. There’s no end to government grabbing your money, money that you’re working for and money that you are earning. Now, you add to all this the 93 million Americans who are not working but who are all living off of all of these others who are somehow producing wealth and income that is being taxed and redistributed by the government.

When you stop to think how much of what you really earn is being taken from you before you ever see it and before you even have a chance to decide how it’s spent — in fact, it really isn’t yours except for tax purposes, and then of course it is. You pay taxes on all this money you never see, including FICA, including Medicare, which is it’s own separate department now, just like FICA is, its own separate deduction. So just maybe a little long and drawn out here. But when I saw that the way they’re gonna pay for single payer in New York is with a new payroll tax and the employer is gonna pay 80% and the employee only 20, and I stop and think how many employees are gonna be duped into thinking, “Wow, what a cool deal, I’m gonna get universal health care for only 20% more payroll tax.”

You might lose your job if the employer is required to pick up 80% of the new payroll tax on everybody. He might not be able to afford that. The odds are he won’t be able to afford it. Twenty percent of nothing is zero. But the left continues to act like it’s just a bottomless pit. The golden goose is just continuing to produce money and wealth no matter how many assaults on the goose, no matter how many attacks on the goose. No matter how much money is taken away from the goose, the goose is still always gonna be golden and plentiful, and it isn’t. They’re in the process of wiping it out. So just keep a sharp eye.

Now, they tried single payer in Vermont, you might recall, and they gave it up after three months. “Governor Abandons Single Payer Health Care Plan.” This December 17th of last year. “Calling it the biggest disappointment of his career, Gov. Peter Shumlin said Wednesday he was abandoning plans to make Vermont the first state in the country with a universal, publicly funded health care system. Going forward with a project four years in the making would require tax increases too big for the state to absorb, Shumlin said.”

What do you mean tax increases too big for the state to absorb? What he means is the people. His citizens don’t have the money to pay in taxes what the single payer health system would cost, and yet it’s all being presented to everybody as a way to cut costs, a way to finally drive down that cost curve. That’s the new lingo. “Yeah, we gotta get that cost curve going in a different direction. We gotta get that cost curve pointing down.” When has it ever, when health care is involved, health care and government equals costs going down? When have you ever seen that? You haven’t, and you won’t.

But it doesn’t mean New York is gonna give it up and stop trying to. And it doesn’t mean that Obama and the Democrat Party, because, remember, it is the utopia, panacea that they see for it.

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