RUSH: The Congressional Budget Office says that Obamacare is gonna cost twice what he told us. The magic number for Obamacare was a trillion dollars.
They had to keep that number under a trillion dollars in order to get it passed. I’m not gonna revisit why and I’m not gonna go back through all the details and the minutia and the arm twisting and the games they were playing to get Obamacare passed because they eventually got it passed. They tried toying around with the idea “deeming” it to have been passed, not even voting on it, a number of things. But it eventually got passed. One of the reasons they were able to get it passed was the price tag had to be under a trillion dollars. It’s a brand-new entitlement. We were already accumulating mountains of new debt thanks to Obama’s stimulus. And for some reason the magic number was $1 trillion.
Well, the reason was the Iraq war cost about a trillion dollars. So the selling point from the Democrats was that it wasn’t gonna spend any new money. “We’re just gonna get out of Iraq; we’re gonna stop fighting the Iraq war. We’re gonna take that money and put it where it really matters: Health care, affordable health care for all Americans!” And that’s how they brought recalcitrant Democrats on board. It is how they lied to the American people and said, “Basically Obamacare is gonna be a wash. We’re just gonna cancel the Iraq war, which is costing about trillion dollars and replace it with Obamacare, which is $900 billion.” And at the time, for those of you who were here, we told you that it was a bogus number, that there was no way it could come in at $900 billion.
And that the CBO could only score what Congress members gave them.
CBO cannot make assumptions. The Congressional Budget Office can only score the cost of legislation based on the input or the data that they are given from members of Congress. Of course, it’s “garbage in, garbage out.” The data was flawed, and here’s the proof: “President Obama’s national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projection released today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law. Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO’s standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama’s pledge that the legislation would cost ‘around $900 billion over 10 years.'”
It had to be under a trillion. That was the magic number. So, again, to explain the implementation trick: You have a ten-year piece of legislation. The tax increases would happen immediately. The moment the bill was signed, the tax increases would start. Now, theoretically, revenue thus collected would pour into the Treasury. The spending side of Obamacare or the benefits side — (chuckles) which is laughable — was delayed for four years, 2014. There were two reasons for that. One of the reasons was by 2014, Obama’s no longer accountable. He’s not running for election again at 2014. He’s either been defeated or he’s been reelected.
He’s either in office in his second term or out of office when the real excrement hits the fan. And 2014, if it isn’t repealed, is when the real excrement is going to hit the fan. And that was put off. That was delayed for four years so that the excrement wouldn’t hit the fan at the time of the vote or during Obama’s reelection, and also to allow four years of tax collections to be measured against only six years of spending on the benefits side. That is how they kept it under a trillion dollars. That was the… It’s not even an “accounting trick.” It was… Ah, guess you could call it an accounting trick. Basically it was a game that was being played to allow the cost of Obamacare to come in at under a trillion dollars.
Because if at the same time the bill is signed into law and the tax collections start the benefits or spending side started, we’d have ten years of spending that we would have to measure, not six. And thus that $940 billion would have been what we were told yesterday it’s going to cost. All that’s happened here, folks, is that the CBO has essentially said, “Here’s the cost of Obamacare if it all implements at the same time.” That is not technically what happened here. What they have found is that the spending side is going to be far more costly than anybody ever knew, which (wink, wink) it always is. You can go back and look at any liberal social program you want.
You can look at the Great Society, the War on Poverty, AFDC, food stamps — any program — and it always costs far more than what we’re told when the legislation is signed. It never costs less. It never costs the same, major entitlement legislation like this. So yesterday “the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and the results are as [we] critics expected: the ten-year cost of the law’s core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now ballooned” from $940 billion “to $1.76 trillion.” It’s almost doubled, and, “That’s because we now have estimates for Obamacare’s first nine years of full implementation,” the tax-collections and the spending/benefits, “rather than the mere six when it was signed into law.
“Only next year will we get a true ten-year cost estimate,” This is still not the full cost estimate. This is nine years of spending implementation instead of six. That’s “if the law isn’t overturned by the Supreme Court or repealed by then. Given that in 2022, the last year available, the gross cost of the coverage expansions are $265 billion, we’re likely looking at about $2 trillion” for Obamacare in its first 10 years “or more than double what Obama advertised.” And, by the way, I’m gonna be blunt: What Obama advertised was a knowing falsehood. What Obamacare and every proponent said about this was knowingly false.
They knew it was going to cost more than $940 billion. They knew it because they had to delay the spending by four years to get it under a trillion dollars. They knew! Once again the American people were (I’ll be charitable) “misled” about the true cost. And you will then learn later on that you were misled about every aspect of this. You will not be able to keep your doctor. You will not be able to keep your plan. Your plan isn’t going to exist! Your plan is gonna go out of business because your employer is going to off-load your benefit. He’s gonna off-load it to whoever can take it. If Obama gets his way, there will not be alternative private sector health insurance businesses.
They’ll be out of business. The only place you’ll be able to go is one of these state exchanges where you will put into a giant pool with everybody else that essentially will be run from Washington. That’s what’s ahead of us. And with a $2 trillion cost instead of $940 billion, you can imagine what tax rates will do, given the way Democrats operate. This is the greatest single excuse to raise taxes they’ve had in I don’t know how long. They are salivating over this. This news does not make them unhappy. It might bother ’em from an election standpoint, but in the real world, they’re ecstatic with this news. This equals an automatic tax increase, and they think you have no choice but than to agree with it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Yeah, I’m gonna get to the Republican primaries, the elections last night. We’re gonna get… It’s a three-hour program. I’ll get to it. Everything’s playing out exactly as I thought it would. Everything’s playing out as I told you. Relax. Let it play out. It’s all playing out. I’ll explain in mere moments. But I want to stick with this health care, because there are two elements here. Back in March of 2010, right before the vote on Obamacare, we pointed out that the CBO report was a total fabrication, there’s a report that says the cost of $940 billion. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office itself said it was just an estimate since they had still not seen the bill. Do you remember that? They hadn’t seen the bill they were scoring!
They were only given outline figures by the Democrats. It was a total snow job. Folks, it was a giant snow job on everybody, but it was worse than that, even. We had Paul Ryan, Republican budget expert, member of the House, on the phone, and he pointed out how the Congressional Budget Office was double-counting everywhere to try to get this phony $940 billion number. I asked him if they were double-counting Medicare, which rendered the $940 billion irrelevant. And he said, “Correct, it’s not. They double-count CLASS Act premiums.
“They’re double-counting Social Security taxes. They double-count $522 billion in Medicare cuts to make this thing look as if it’s adding up.” So basically what they did… This has not changed, either. The Democrats, Obama, cut “a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare. That’s supposed to go to Medicare and make it solvent. But they’re using it instead as a piggy bank to pay for this new program. So they’re taking it from Medicare, but at the same time they’re claiming they’re extending Medicare’s solvency. So they’re counting those cuts twice, when in fact they’re using this money to create a new entitlement.”
That was Paul Ryan on this program March 18th.
This is a giant scam, folks.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know that I have the utmost respect for all of you: Your intelligence, your ability to follow this, your memories and so forth. I don’t want to create a bunch of minutia here with a bunch of acronyms like CBO (Congressional Budget Office). The bottom line of all this, the real point when you synthesize it down, is that the Democrats — from Obama on down — lied everywhere about health care. They lied about the cost; they lied about how cheap premiums are gonna be; they lied about how the tax increases would be minimal to fund this. They cut $500 billion out of Medicare and then counted that again when they put it back into the health care bill to show that Medicare would not be cut.
It was outrageous what happened here: Delaying the spending side of the entitlement for four years while collecting taxes immediately.
And what’s happened now is that the CBO has more data to factor, and they’ve discovered that with nine years of full implementation, the cost is not $940 billion, but instead it is $1.76 trillion. It’s almost twice. And by the time we’re able to factor a full ten years in, the cost will be double. And we don’t have the money. We do not have the money! We don’t have the money for anything that we are spending. We just don’t have it. It all gets added to the national debt and it all gets added to the income tax rate that your kids and grandkids are going to pay years from now. Your children and grandchildren’s lifetime tax payments have been spent, at current tax rates.
Your kids… This is statistical, now. Some people are gonna earn a lot more than others, but in a statistical average: Your kids, your grandkids’ total lifetime tax payments have already been spent. What do you think their rate is going to be to accommodate the spending above and beyond what’s taken place with that revenue? Now, Daniel Foster, National Review Online, had a great point about all this. He said, “The question has never been whether Obamacare will fail by failing to make [health care] cheaper, or incurring massive per-person costs for its coverage. Rather, the question’s been whether it’ll fail quickly and spectacularly enough that the political will throughout this country is to repeal it.”
And that was another reason for delaying the six years of benefits. Because it’s really a misconception to call it “benefits.” Think of it as delaying the implementation of government being involved in health care. That doesn’t start ’til 2014, although they’re creeping in. They’ve had to give waivers — over a thousand waivers — to companies who would otherwise be out of business today, and that wouldn’t look good for Obama’s reelection. Those waivers are going to end. So what Foster’s talking about here is, if the impact of this (and it’s going to be bad) is felt quickly, then the political will among the people to get rid of it will be very high.
If it’s a slow, gradual implementation such as: You put a frog in a pot of room-temperature water, put it on the stove, and then turn on the heat; the frog has no clue it’s dead. It has no clue it’s boiling to death for many, many minutes. Same thing here. You dump the frog into a pot of boiling water and the thing will jump right out of there. Same with us. If this pot of water that is the health care is boiling when it gets implemented, we’re not gonna put up with it. That’s one of the key elements. And there are, to my mind, enough things happening that will make that possible. We already have, in terms of polling data on this issue, well over 50% of the American people want this health care repealed just on general principles.
You wait until this thing starts being implemented to see what happens. “Did anyone else notice the Department of Health and Human Services rule that was finalized yesterday? It establishes state health-care exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And an abortion premium mandate.” The Hill.com “breaks it down: ‘To comply with the accounting requirement, plans will collect a $1 abortion surcharge from each premium payer. The enrollee will make two payments, $1 per month for abortion and another payment for the rest of the services covered. As described in the rule, the surcharge can only be disclosed to the enrollee at the time of enrollment.
“‘Furthermore, insurance plans may only advertise the total cost of the premiums without disclosing that enrollees will be charged a $1 per month fee to pay directly subsidize abortions.'” This was made active yesterday, maybe the day before. (I was out Monday so the days are running together here.) But Kathleen Sebelius Department of Health and Human Services implemented a rule that establishes state health care exchanges, mandate an abortion premium collection of a dollar a month from everybody. Now how many of you thought during all this that the Democrats and Obama promised that something like this wouldn’t happen?
Remember ol’ Bart Stupak? Good old Bart, Democrat from Wisconsin, a pro-life Democrat, made a big scene out of holding out. He was one of the last votes. He was “following his conscience,” and he was not gonna vote for this unless he was assured that not a federal penny would be used in any way to pay for abortion. And they said, “Okay, well, you want it, you got it.” And whether he believed ’em or not, he had the cover. They gave him cover, he backed bill, and where is he today? They lied to him. He either knew they were lying or he got snookered, but it was implemented yesterday. So two things with the health care bill:
Mandatory abortion premium collections from everybody in the health care system, and we’ve now learned that the cost of Obamacare is going to be more than double. And that’s where we are on that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: When Obama took office, the government was 21% of gross domestic product. Meaning of the entire economic output, government took up 21% of it. In three years Obama has increased that to 23%. That is massive, given the numbers — the overall size — that we’re talking about. And he’s on track to go even higher.
That is the fastest increase in government spending as a percentage of overall economic output since World War II. And he did it, and he continues to do it. And it doesn’t factor — it does not factor — the latest news on all of this new health care cost that we learned. It’s gonna be twice what we were told. So right now government takes up twenty 23% of GDP. It was 21% when he took office. It’s projected to go to 25%. A full one quarter of the US economy taken out. In other words, what Obama’s done since he took office is transfer 4% of the American economy to government.
Where nothing is produced.
Where no wealth is created.
The only thing that happens is wealth is destroyed.
And that is precisely what is happening. Where you hear me say that there are two million fewer jobs in the universe of jobs since Obama was inaugurated, this is why. He simply usurped — he’s just taken, transferred — 4% of the private sector economy and moved it to government. Well, 2% now and it’s projected to go to 4%.