{"id":242543,"date":"2017-07-31T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/?p=242543"},"modified":"2017-08-01T16:00:51","modified_gmt":"2017-08-01T20:00:51","slug":"the-republican-obamacare-betrayal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2017\/07\/31\/the-republican-obamacare-betrayal\/","title":{"rendered":"The Republican Obamacare Betrayal"},"content":{"rendered":"

RUSH: Exclusive, right on time, as night follows day, we can always count on a push poll like this. From Reuters: “Exclusive: Majority of Americans Want Congress to Move on from Healthcare Reform<\/a>.” Of course they do!<\/p>\n

So here comes the failure by the Republicans to repeal and replace Obamacare. Fat repeal, skinny repeal, straight repeal, repeal and replace, replace but don\u2019t repeal, whatever it is, up in flames, up in smoke, and wouldn\u2019t you know, Reuters has gone out and surveyed people in New York and Boston and LA, wherever, and found people that think Congress should move on.<\/p>\n

“A majority of Americans are ready to move on from healthcare reform at this point after the U.S. Senate\u2019s effort to dismantle Obamacare failed on Friday, according to an exclusive Reuters\/Ipsos opinion poll released on Saturday. Nearly two-thirds of the country wants to either keep or modify the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, and a majority of Americans want Congress to turn its attention to other priorities, the survey found.”<\/p>\n

Now, here\u2019s the next paragraph in the Reuters story: “Republicans have vowed to dismantle the Affordable Care Act since Democratic President Barack Obama signed it into law in 2010, and it appeared they finally had their chance when Republican President Donald Trump took office in January. But the law, which helped 20 million people obtain health insurance, has steadily grown more popular.”<\/p>\n

Like hell it has. But here we go. Obamacare more popular than ever, Republicans hated and despised. And that may be, but not for the reasons Reuters implies here. Obamacare hasn\u2019t helped 20 million people obtain health insurance. And here\u2019s another thing about this CBO score. I have intended to mention this the past couple or three days and just never got around to it.<\/p>\n

The CBO score. We gotta get rid of the CBO. The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, is one of the primary obstacles to any legislation being passed, but particularly health care reform. You remember when the media and the Democrats were just breathlessly excited when they released the CBO numbers that repealing and replacing Obamacare would cause 22 million Americans to lose their health insurance? Do you know why that would happen? It was because it repealed the mandate that people had to buy it.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t because the government was gonna come and take it away from you. It wasn\u2019t because what you had was going to be canceled. It wasn\u2019t because the insurance companies were then given permission to tell you to take a hike. It was simply the CBO statically, not dynamically, statically concluded that if you take away the mandate, the federal law requiring citizens to buy insurance, that 22 million people would lose their health insurance.<\/p>\n

\"\"In other words, the CBO said that 22 million people would cancel their policy. Well, that\u2019s not what they said. That\u2019s the end result. That\u2019s how it would have had to happen. Because nobody was gonna take anybody\u2019s health insurance away, and nobody\u2019s health insurance was gonna be canceled. And yet the CBO is out there screeching that 22 million people will lose their health insurance. “No, we can\u2019t do that, that\u2019s horrible, that\u2019s inhumane, that\u2019s no compassion.”<\/p>\n

No, no. It was simply the CBO the guessing that if people didn\u2019t have to buy it, they wouldn\u2019t. Which may make sense. How many people have bought this rigmarole simply because the law requires them to? How many people have actually engaged in this and gone and petered around inside one of these exchanges to come up with an Obamacare policy because they had to?<\/p>\n

So the idea that removing the mandate requiring them to buy it is a good thing! It is a reinstallation, if you will, of the degree of liberty and freedom we had before Obamacare. Before Obamacare, you didn\u2019t have to have it. Everybody wanted it, but you didn\u2019t have to go buy it. No matter what it costs, you didn\u2019t have to buy it. So the CBO says 22 million people will lose their health insurance. What a gross misstatement of what would actually happen. And of course with the absence of critical thinking being taught, nobody concluded the correct thing.<\/p>\n

By the way, that\u2019s a wild guess number. The CBO just assumed that people would lose — i.e., that\u2019s the wrong word — CBO just assumed people would cancel their policies if they didn\u2019t have to buy them. What does that tell you? Well, it tells me that somebody in Congress thinks a lot of people are buying health insurance that don\u2019t want it, and the first chance they get they don\u2019t have to buy it, they\u2019ll get rid of it. Which is a good thing. And it ends up being portrayed as heartless and cruel and typically Republican, when in fact it was a good thing. And it didn\u2019t have any relationship whatsoever to people\u2019s health care or health insurance.<\/p>\n

And yet that statistic, released the way it was, with the wording as it was, led to a lot of people not supporting it because they envisioned insurance companies canceling people, because, yes, that\u2019s what insurance companies do. All companies would rather their customers get sick and die than have to cover them and pay for them. Big Tobacco wanted to kill they are customer. Big Oil wants to destroy the planet. Big Pharmaceutical doesn\u2019t want to cure disease. Big Coal, all they want to do is pollute the rivers. Big Box Retail, all they want to do is rip people off.<\/p>\n

\"\"You take your pick. Whatever major industry we\u2019re talking about, the Democrats have demonized \u2019em. And now the health insurance providers are such that if they don\u2019t have to provide it, they won\u2019t, when in fact it wasn\u2019t about that at all. But back to the wording of this story. Obamacare did not and has not helped 20 million people obtain health insurance.<\/p>\n

Now, Reuters writes this as though Obamacare provided a freebie. Obamacare provided an entitlement. Yes. Because people who couldn\u2019t otherwise afford it because insurance companies are mean were given subsidies in order to be able to buy it because the law said they had to, but corporations are so mean that they price it out of people\u2019s reach, and that means that Obama made it possible for people have it, which is a stack of coal.<\/p>\n

You know how many people are on Obamacare right now? What is the number that you know? Pick a number. The number of Americans who are actually on Obamacare. I have a number here that is hard to believe. In fact, I ought not use this number because I don\u2019t think it\u2019s right, but it\u2019s not far off. The number I have here is eight million people on Obamacare. That can\u2019t be right.<\/p>\n

But the point is, Obamacare is nowhere near covering everybody. It\u2019s a giant myth that Obamacare came along and magically created health insurance opportunities for people that didn\u2019t have it. And it\u2019s also not true that the Republican repeal would take health care away from people who wanted it. So many lies and so many just straight distortions here. The majority of people who are on an Obamacare policy had insurance anyway before they signed up for Obamacare. And there are a few million more on Medicaid thanks to the Medicaid expansion. But the Medicaid expansion is not health insurance.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a lie that Obamacare has steadily become more popular. Nothing could be further from the truth. If that were true, more people would be signing up for Obamacare, but they aren\u2019t. If that were true, the insurance companies would be lowering premiums because so many people would be signing up. If that were true, so many different state exchanges would have more than one provider.<\/p>\n

If Obamacare were actually growing in popularity, we wouldn\u2019t be reading stories that it\u2019s about to implode — and it is — and is going to leave several people without even an exchange to go buy a policy. The enrollee number has been stuck at eight million since 2014. In fact, the number of people who have signed up is almost a third of what this CBO assured us would have signed up by now.<\/p>\n

The CBO predicted 22 million people would sign up for Obamacare by this time, since 2010. The number here is eight million, fewer than eight million. What are we talking about? That\u2019s another thing about Obamacare that was always crazy from the beginning. If it was really about providing insurance for those who didn\u2019t have it — that number is anywhere from eight to 12, and at the top 30 (at the very top 25, 30) million who didn\u2019t have it. Obamacare didn\u2019t fix that, didn\u2019t address that because that\u2019s not what Obamacare was about.<\/p>\n

Look, I don\u2019t want to re-litigate all this like we did starting in 2010, 2009 when it was being debated. But I\u2019m telling you: There is so much disinformation out there about this that the Republican Party itself has fallen prey to it. The idea it\u2019s growing more popular, that Americans want Congress to move on from it? Both of those things are not true. Here\u2019s a little cross-tab from the poll that I do not believe:<\/p>\n

“Among Republicans, 75% said that they would like their party\u2019s leaders to repeal and replace Obamacare at some point, though most listed other issues that would give a higher priority right now. When asked what they think Congress should do next, most Americans picked tax reform and then foreign relations and then infrastructure. Only 29% said they wanted the Republicans in Congress to continue working on a new health care bill.” Republicans. That\u2019s what the poll says. I don\u2019t believe it. But I could be wrong. And if it is true that only 29% want a new bill, it\u2019s because their frustrated and don\u2019t think the Republican Party can get it done anyway.<\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: Yesterday… I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve got the audio on this. Doesn\u2019t matter. Jake Tapper yesterday had Bernie Sanders on, and they were discussing single payer<\/a>. It failed in Vermont. The governor of Vermont tried single payer. It failed, wouldn\u2019t work, and didn\u2019t have the money, and Jake Tapper was interrogating Crazy Bernie about this. “If Even ‘Cobalt-Blue States\u2019 Can\u2019t Make Single Payer Work,” then why in the world does anybody think it\u2019ll work in Washington or anywhere else?<\/p>\n