RUSH: Linda Douglass, the… Sheez, what would we call her? She’s the Health Care Minister of Information. Minister of Propaganda of Health Care Information. She was on CNN on Sunday during 
Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources. And he spoke with her. And Howard Kurtz said, ‘What did you make of Rush Limbaugh saying the health care logo in the administration resembles…’ (laughing) I didn’t say it ‘resembles a swastika.’ I said that the whole Nazi logo there and Obama’s health care logo looked similar and we morphed them on the website. He asked Linda Douglass about this.
DOUGLASS: I just don’t even know what to say about something like that. I mean, you know, eh — and people are saying crazy things right now. You know, the — the — here’s the thing. Americans are suffering under the rising costs of health care. They are paying 30% more out of pocket than they did. It’s threatening their jobs. They are being denied insurance coverage by —
KURTZ: And we’re debating that.
DOUGLASS: — all these crazy rules.
RUSH: They are, let’s see… Threatening their jobs? They don’t have any jobs. Then Kurtz literally destroyed her on — on the whole notion that Obama’s not for single-payer and that there is no snitch website.
DOUGLASS: They took pieces of sound bites from different periods of time. They put a Chyron — that’s the words on the screen — that said, ‘wants to eliminate private insurance,’ to go along with these sound bites that they cobbled together, and our point is that he’s saying exactly the opposite. His current plan —
KURTZ: But apparently he had a different position when he was a senator, and that’s legitimate to throw out there.
DOUGLASS: He didn’t have a different position when he was a senator.
KURTZ: What do you mean he didn’t have a different position?
DOUGLASS: But the point is, the president —
KURTZ: He talked about — first he talked about single payer supporting that. That was years ago. And then he talked about making a transition over 10 or 15 years to fully government insurance.
DOUGLASS: What he talked about early on was, look, if he could start all over again, maybe it would be fine to have a single payer system but we’re not going to start all over again.
KURTZ: Right.
DOUGLASS: There’s a lot of misinformation and there, as I said in the video, a lot of disinformation, that’s information that’s meant to mislead you.
RUSH: Ms. Douglass, your guy is hanging you out to dry here. You’re on the flagpole and you’re nearly nude, Linda or your clothes have been off. You have no cover left. Well, you’ve got Jan Schakowsky out there saying this is the prelude to single payer. She’s the Democrat from Illinois. You’ve got Barney Frank saying it and you’ve got Obama saying it numerous times in the campaign and all the way back to 2003 when he was in the Illinois Senate talking about it! Folks, I have right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers — while everybody is sidetracked here discussing Nazis (and, of course, that’s me, too, but I’m going to get it back on track here. What Obama has on the back burner here is this: Page 16 states: If you have insurance at the time of the bill becoming law and change your insurance, you’ll be required to take a similar plan. If that is not available, you’ll be required to take the government option.
Page 22 mandates audits of all employers that self-insure. Page 29. It admits on page 29 that your health care will be rationed. Page 30: A government will decide what treatments and benefits you get, and unlike an insurer, there is… Well, there’s an appeals process that you don’t even want to mess with that. Page 58: Every person will be issued a national ID health card. Page 59: The federal government will have direct real-time access to all individual bank accounts for electronic funds
transfer. Page 239: The bill will reduce physician services for Medicaid, meaning there will be Medicaid cuts. The president is out there saying that there won’t be. Page 427: Government mandates program that orders end-of-life treatment. Government dictates how your life ends. The Washington Post read the section, Section 1233 and came to the same disturbing conclusion.
Page 429: Advanced care planning consult will be used to dictate treatment as patients’ health deteriorates. This can include an order for end-of-life plans. The order will be from the government. Now, Ms. Douglass, you can go out there and say that the president’s not for single payer, despite the president saying so. See, this is the problem, Linda. The problem is we don’t know what to believe because the president is saying everything. He doesn’t have a plan so when he says something’s not in the plan, we don’t know what he’s talking about. The only plan out there is the House plan and the president hadn’t said that that’s the plan he’s talking about. He keeps talking about his plan. I haven’t seen his plan; I don’t know what it is. If his plan differs from the House plan, he better say so, because he’s contradicting himself, and you’re out there being forced to say things that can be factually disproven simply looking at the House bill.
I mean, if there’s a provision in there that says, ‘If you have a private plan and there’s the slightest change in it — change of coverage, change of fee, change of premium — then you are out of it and you gotta go government option…’ Without even having that, Linda, you know and I know that if this debacle ever happens, the first thing that’s going to happen is a lot of businesses are gonna off-load their health care plans to the public option. They’re simply not going to make it available to their employees. Most employee health care coverage comes from the employer. If the employer says, ‘I’m outta here,’ they have no choice but than to go government option. So these Democrats — Barney Frank, Jan Schakowsky, a number of others say — who say, ‘Yeah, we can’t get it all at once. Ten to 15 years, it is the objective,’ and everybody who’s looked at this knows it. So when you get sent out there as the Minister of Health Care Information Propaganda to deny all this, it’s not good for you. Now, here’s this on the snitch website. Howard Kurtz says, ‘Republican Senator John Cornyn has asked the White House to stop the snitch website, says this could raise the specter of a data collection program.’
DOUGLASS: There’s no list being compiled. The information is not being retained. The sources are not being tracked. But if there’s a rumor going around, as there have been many rumors going around, we say, ‘Let’s take a look at the rumor and see what the truth is.’
RUSH: Yeah. Mmm-hmm. There are people that don’t believe this. By the way, let’s go back and listen to Obama, a flashback here. This is 2007. We’re going to go ahead here and stay in order, Mike — 2007 in March at the Service Employees International Union health care forum. These are Obama’s buds. This is his group. These are the people he wants to know what he really intends to do. This is 2007.
OBAMA 2007: My commitment is to make sure that we’ve got universal health care for all Americans by the end of my first term as president. I would hope that we can set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.
RUSH: March 2007. I mean if you’re going to eliminate employer coverage, where else you gotta go? Obama, public option. Let’s go back to 2003 at an AFL-CIO conference.
OBAMA 2003: I happen to be a proponent of single payer universal health care.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
OBAMA 2003: I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, is spending 14% — 14% of its gross national product on health care — cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim’s talking about when he says, ‘Everybody in, nobody out,’ a single payer health care plan, universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see bu,t as all of you know, we may not get there immediately because first we’ve got to take back the White House and we gotta take back the Senate and we gotta take back the House.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
RUSH: All right, now, he’s not a community organizer here. He’s not elected official both times, in the Illinois Senate in 2003 and the United States Senate in 2007. And you’ll note that three things had to happen and they all three have before he can start. He had to take over the House, had to take over the Senate, and had to take over the White House. So Linda Douglass, when you go out there and say, ‘He’s not for single payer! He is if he could start over…’ I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know how I would react if my job was to have to lie for somebody. I don’t know how my conscience could deal with it.