RUSH: To Chicago, this is Travis, and welcome, sir. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Good afternoon. How are you?
RUSH: Very well, sir. Thank you. How are you?
CALLER: Pretty good.
RUSH: Excellent, glad to hear that.
CALLER: All right. Well, I’ve been kind of looking at all sides of this health care issue here, and from my understanding, the laws that we have in effect right now are basically they can’t drop you if you’re sick, they have to spend 80% of their money on care, and you can’t have children turned down for previous conditions. Aside from the mandates and the lack of a public option because of that mandate, I’m really having a hard time seeing what’s a bad thing about this. Why do we want to get this taken away?
RUSH: You just listed things that are wrong with it. Everything you just listed is a negative. What right does the government have to tell an industry how much it must spend of its revenue on anything? Imagine you own a business or are running an industry and Barack Obama says, ‘You have to spend 80% of whatever you make on certain categories,’ how you gonna react?
CALLER: Isn’t that the business they’re in, we give them money to care for our health insurance?
RUSH: The business they’re in is health insurance for a profit. They are trying to insure as many people as they can as affordably as they can so that they make a profit and so that the patients get covered. Obama is wiping the profit out. Obama is purposely trying to destroy the private health insurance industry so that government’s the only option people have, five, ten years from now. That’s the objective. And by telling them that they must devote 80% of their profits to X? He’s got no right to do that. It’s totally unconstitutional. The government telling an insurance company you can’t drop a kid or the preexisting condition, that’s not even insurance. Let’s not even talk about the individual mandate, which is unconstitutional. I can’t think of anything about it that’s any good because the government’s running it, the government wants to incorporate all of health care under its umbrella in 5 to 15 years.
CALLER: Well, the thing is, see, I’m paying over 700 bucks a month for my insurance, and if I get sick I’d really hope that they wouldn’t drop me. That seems like it would be really unfair because I’m pretty healthy now and I’m paying them a lot of money.
RUSH: Well, have you ever been dropped, has your health insurance company ever dropped you?
CALLER: I haven’t gotten sick, really, really sick yet so I’m hoping that doesn’t happen to me because that would be kind of unfair. I’ve paid a lot of money all these years.
RUSH: How often does it happen? They don’t drop people for getting sick. If they dropped people for getting sick, people would be dying. If they dropped people from getting sick you could be able to get in the hospital any day you wanted, there would be beds galore, where are you coming up with all this?
CALLER: I just thought that was the new law, that you can’t be dropped once you’re sick. That sounds like a pretty good idea. That’s their business, they shouldn’t do that.
RUSH: But it’s already the case.
CALLER: As long as that’s the case, that’s a good thing to me. I don’t think they should be dropping anybody.
RUSH: What business are you in?
CALLER: I’m an electrician.
RUSH: What would you do if Obama dictated how much you can make in your business? What if Obama told you —
CALLER: I don’t know. It’s kind of weird right now with how we make, with the whole union deal right now, kind of limited what we can make until we get to seniority.
RUSH: Forget that, forget that, forget all that minutia. If Obama came along and passed a law and said you have to do electrical work for people that will not pay you —
CALLER: Well, that’s not gonna work.
RUSH: Well, it’s happening in the health insurance business.
CALLER: Well, all right.
RUSH: In fact, you may have heard that McDonald’s does not offer health care. Dirty, rotten company. Stinking, rotten company. Poisoning people with cheap, fast food, using toys to coerce kids to come in there and eat and die, and they don’t cover their employees with health care, stupid piece of rotten company. Turns out that 30,000 McDonald’s employees have health care coverage, and in order for McDonald’s to stay in business after providing mandated coverage from Obamacare, they needed a waiver from Obamacare. McDonald’s needed a promise that they would not be held accountable to the law. McDonald’s and 232 other companies were granted in the first year of Obamacare an exemption from the law so they wouldn’t go out of business during an election year. Now, you called. You wanted the answers. These are the answers.
You got 233 companies who said to the government, ‘If we have to do this, we’re gonna have to lay off a bunch of people and maybe go out of business.’ Obama can’t have that during an election year so they granted them exemptions, waivers, if you will. More than 50 unions have already gotten waivers. Most of the waivers have gone to unions. Your union might have gotten one itself. There’s an axiom. Nine times out of ten the private sector — 999 times out of a thousand the private sector can do it better than the government. The only thing I’d say is military would be the exception, nine times out of ten, 99 out of a hundred, 999 out of a thousand. The government wants to take over health care, you’re instinctive reaction should be, ‘No way.’ That ought to be your default reaction, ‘No way.’ The government is gonna tell X company how much — no way. They don’t have that authority, power, or constitutional right.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: That guy said he was an electrician. I don’t know if he was IBEW, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, but if he was, they were granted a waiver from Obamacare. Yep, IBEW granted a waiver. Some of those guys are board ops at radio stations, is where they used to be, if still are, not sure.