RUSH: There’s a lot of health care news out there today. This is from the Associated Press, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar. ‘Most health insurance plans will soon be barred from turning children down due to pre-existing medical problems, the White House announced Tuesday, spelling out how early benefits 
of the new health care law will work. President Barack Obama is marking the first 90 days since he signed the landmark health care overhaul by packaging a series of consumer safeguards into what the administration is calling a ‘patients’ bill of rights.” They’re trying to make up for a big mistake. Remember all these children being able to go on their parents’ health insurance plans? They screwed that up, doesn’t happen ’til 2014, so they’re going to move it forward.
From the Boston Globe today: ‘Thousands of uninsured Massachusetts workers in low-wage jobs are ineligible for state-subsidized health coverage, but they will qualify for these low-cost plans under the new national health care overhaul — in 2014. Now, some consumer advocates, arguing that the wait is unfair and a black eye for the state, want the Patrick administration and legislators to launch a program to cover at least part of this group.’ Now, the SEIU is who the AP means here by consumer advocates, because they represent the health care workers who would benefit from this further expansion. And another story along these lines: ‘President Obama on Tuesday will announce new health care insurance benefits for consumers, marking the first 90 days since he signed the landmark legislation. Consumers who buy their policies directly face increases averaging 20% this year –‘ this is all about premiums going up, people are gonna lose their health care plans. So Obama is out there now announcing new benefits, but the law hasn’t gone into effect on some of these new benefits.
So it’s all PR, here come the giveaways, here come the gimmes, here come the vote buying. This is from the Chicago Tribune, it’s published in the Los Angeles Times: ‘Pressure Rising on Healthcare Long Before Overhaul Takes Effect. Millions will struggle to keep coverage until the law sets up a safety net in 2014. Despite passage of the landmark healthcare overhaul this spring, the nation’s existing health system is continuing to fray, raising the prospect that the country could experience a crisis before the law establishes a new safety net in 2014. Three months after President Obama signed the law, state governments struggling with budgets savaged by the recession are contemplating further cuts in healthcare aid for the poor, despite the promise of more federal dollars. At the same time, several million laid-off Americans and their families who have used federal assistance to hold on to health insurance will lose coverage in coming months as the special assistance program expires. Those with jobs face their own challenges as employers continue to look for ways to pare health benefits and shift more costs to employees, if not drop health coverage altogether.’
How in the world can this possibly happen? I thought we had a miracle piece of legislation signed? None of this was supposed to happen. This kind of stuff was supposed to be stopped. Now, of course, you and I knew from the get-go that this was exactly going to be the result of this. Now, one thing about this — and there are many things about this to say, but here’s one. Remember the budget trick, the gimmick that was used to bring this whole debacle in under a trillion dollars, which, of course, made it somehow affordable. The way that was done was the benefits don’t start for four years, 2014. But the taxes and all the costs commence immediately. Well, guess what? All of these people, the ill-informed who believed everything — well, the lied-to, let’s not call them the ill-informed, the people that were lied to. Obama said, (imitating Obama) ‘You like your doctor, you’re going to be able to keep him. Your premium’s going to go down $2500 a year, and if you want this you’re going to get it,’ and some millionaire was going to pay for it.
We had stories the day after the law is passed of people showing up at the doctor’s office, ‘Okay, where’s my health care?’ ‘Uh, we don’t know.’ ‘What do you mean you don’t have it? The law was signed yesterday, what do you mean?’ ‘No provision here for this to be covered until 2014.’ Now it’s 90 days in and you know what Obama’s doing, he’s passing out benefits. So we’re not going to wait ’til 2014 because the hoi polloi, the masses who were lied to are now ticked off. They didn’t catch the part about 2014. Now they’re hearing about it, they’re losing their health insurance, their company is saying, ‘Wait a minute, our premiums are skyrocketing, we’re gonna try to off-load these.’ Here comes the public option, by the way, as a result of that. So Obama has to go out there and say, ‘We’re going to accelerate this and we’re gonna move this up.’ Well there goes the whole budget gimmick, there goes the whole trick to keep this thing under a trillion dollars, which it never was anyway. It’s a mess. It’s a mess and highly frustrating, folks, because everything those of us in the know warned people about is happening right on schedule.
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RUSH: Well, the federal judge for the Eastern District of Louisiana has blocked the Obama offshore drilling moratorium. The offshore drilling moratorium has been blocked by a federal judge, a Reagan appointee. The regime will no doubt appeal this to the appellate level. But this gives me some hope, because if a Reagan-appointed judge is going to side with the regime here, then it would be problematic. Martin Feldman is the judge’s name, and he has stripped, he has blocked the offshore drilling moratorium imposed by the regime. Now, on this health care business: Who is going to pay for these benefits being moved up now from 2014 to the present? You talk about executive power grabs? All Obama’s doing here is deeming the law in effect now instead of 2014. Just deeming it into effect! This was the plan all along. This was a budget gimmick from the get-go.
Everybody in their right mind knew the Democrats couldn’t afford to wait for their voters to wait ’til 2014 for these health care handouts. It was all a giant lie, it was all an obfuscation, it was all a budgetary trick to get the media and some people — and even some Republicans outside of elected office — to go along with this. So what you have here is, once again, the president taking another power away from the courts, ’cause I listened to him this morning talking about this, and part of his announced plan involved setting up a process within the executive branch for adjudicating disputes between insurance providers, health care providers, and consumers. These kinds of disputes were previously handled in court or by binding arbitration. Now you have to go to the regime to have your dispute arbitrated. It’s just another power grab out there, and who can keep track of ’em all?
There’s several new ones every day. In other words, what’s going to happen, here’s the way to look at what Obama announced today. It’s very simple — and that’s what we do here, folks: We make the complex understandable. Essentially what’s happened is Obama is gonna set up health court in the White House or some other executive bureaucracy where some bureaucrat will now be the judge and jury about your insurance coverage — and we’re supposed to believe this is an expansion of our rights as citizens. Yes, it was touted today, yes, as an expansion of our rights, greater access to health care, more affordable insurance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now all of a sudden people are realizing, ‘Wait a minute, my taxes are going up next year to pay for all this but I don’t get the benefits ’til 2014? That’s not good.’ Right on schedule, Obama says, ‘You know what? You’re right. We’re gonna go ahead and move these benefits up to right now and we’re gonna adjudicate all these disputes between you, your employer and your provider. We’re going to do it here at the White House, the executive branch.’ Meaning what? Well, it means if you’re a Democrat, union member, you got a problem, they’ll side with you. Remember, this is all about buying votes. It’s all about creating dependency. It’s all about growing the federal government. It’s all a masterfully set up bunch of gobbledygook failure that the White House now gets to come in, wear the white hat, and solve health care for everybody.
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RUSH: In the New York Times today, Obama also gave the insurers a huge warning. ‘The White House is concerned insurers will blame the law for rate increases,’ and Obama said, ‘You better not blame the law! You better not blame the law for these rate increases.’ The plan is he wants insurers to have no choice but to raise premiums, folks. The plan is for the insurance company to price you out of the market so that you can only go to the government. Public option, single payer eventually, that’s the objective. It always has been.