RUSH: As I mentioned, four different stories here on Obamacare and the CBO. Let me just give you the headlines first, and in no particular order.
“CBO to Employers: Obamacare has $4B More in Taxes than Expected.”
Next headline: “CourtÂ’s Ruling May Blunt Reach of the Health Law.” That’s the New York Times.
From TheHill.com: “CBO: Supreme Court Decision Cuts Cost of Healthcare Reform by $84 Billion.”
Well, how does that work? “CBO to Employers: Obamacare has $4B More in Taxes than Expected.” And yet The Hill: “CBO: Supreme Court Decision Cuts Cost of Healthcare Reform by $84 Billion.”
This is a repeat. This is a dupe. So it’s three different stories. It isn’t four. I’ve got the New York Times story in here twice. So let’s start here with the Washington Examiner first. “Business owners will pay $4 billion more in taxes under President ObamaÂ’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) than the Congressional Budget Office had previously expected. ‘According to the updated estimates, the amount of deficit reduction from penalty payments and other effects on tax revenues under the ACA will be $5 billion more than previously estimated,’ the CBO reported today. ‘That change primarily effects a $4 billion increase in collections from such payments by employers.’ … In short, CBO revised the Obamacare tax burden upward by $4 billion for businesses and $1 billion to $1.5 billion for individual workers. CBO couldnÂ’t help but bump into Chief Justice John Roberts controversial decision uphold the individual mandate,” as a tax. Okay, so we have that, we’ll put that over here. (shuffling papers)
And then the next story we will do is from TheHill.com. “The Supreme CourtÂ’s decision to uphold most of President ObamaÂ’s healthcare law made the law less expensive but will result in 3 million more people without health insurance, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Tuesday. The report from the nonpartisan budget scorekeeper was the first estimate of the lawÂ’s cost since last monthÂ’s court ruling.” Now, just so you know, the nonpartisan budget scorekeeper, CBO, is being headed at present by a woman, Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin. She has been the deputy assistant director of the CBO’s health services department since the middle of 2011. She has donated more than $26,000 to Democrat candidates, $2,300 of that going to Obama in 2008. Before Obamacare was passed, she was cited as an Obama spokeswoman. In 2009-2010 she visited the Obama White House eight times. She is the nonpartisan budget scorekeeper at CBO. She’s an Obama hack.
Now, this is a testament to how corrupted our government bureaucracies have become, if you ask me. TheHill.com is reporting that the nonpartisan budget scorekeeper at the CBO’s made their first estimate of the cost since the Supreme Court decision. And, lo and behold, now it’s gonna cost $84 billion less than what we thought. Now, they do note that this is largely due to the Supreme Court allowing states to opt out of expanding Medicare, as was required under Obamacare. The states can opt out. But what does that mean? The states opt out of Medicare, it means that this savings is only due to fewer people getting free health insurance from the government, quote, unquote. But you would never know that from The Hill’s headline or any of the other headlines in the mainstream media about this.
The only reason there are cost savings is because fewer people are gonna get access, fewer people are gonna get covered. You know, we spent a lot of time shortly after the Supreme Court ruling — I hope you were here. I hope you remember it. We spent a lot of time explaining all of the intricacies of the exchanges. The states are required by Obamacare to set up their exchanges, but they don’t have to. The states get subsidized by the federal government, they set up the exchange. The federal government cannot fund its own exchange. It was a mistake that the writers of the law made. They goofed up. And the states — people are reading this literally — the states, with the freedom they have to opt out of Medicare and to not set up exchanges, have the ability to deal Obamacare a serious blow. Because the law does not permit the federal government to come in and take over and do what the states might refuse to do.
So one of the original purposes of Obamacare was to off-load additional costs to the states by having them pick up Medicare increases. But the Supreme Court ruling said that states can opt out of that if they want to, and I think 26 or 27 states will, or have said they’re going to. So in the middle of all of this, we now have a new score from the CBO which says the bill’s gonna cost $84 billion less. Eighty-four billion dollars, when compared to the total cost of this debacle, is a nickel or a dime anyway. Its importance is rooted in the fact that the savings, $84 billion, are derived from the fact that the money’s not spent insuring the currently uninsured. Which, if you want to take everybody involved in Obamacare at their world, if you want to extend to them their best intentions, the whole point of the program was simply to cover uninsured people, the number 30 million is the number they used.
Now, this is just an exercise in thought, because we know that’s not the purpose of Obamacare. The purpose of Obamacare has nothing to do with health care, really. It is the largest expansion of government ever. It is the greatest encroachment on individual liberty ever. That’s why it has to be repealed, and that’s what this election’s all about. If all we wanted to do was insure the uninsured, we could have done it for far less money with far less government, far less bureaucracy.
The real number of uninsured that want insurance and don’t have it is around ten million. The 30, 40, 50 million number — it changes — that they throw around, includes people who don’t want it because they don’t want to spend the money on it because they’re young and vibrant and they’re not thinking about dying, they’re not thinking about catastrophic diseases, so these are the people that now have a new name, the free riders. Prior to Obamacare, these people, oh, they were the poor, assaulted victims of an unfair and an unjust country. The richest country in the world, and all of these gazillions of people didn’t have health insurance. Now they’re a bunch of free riders and we’re gonna fine ’em, or we’re gonna raise their taxes, or we’re gonna make ’em pay through the nose if they don’t have health insurance, ’cause now it’s mandatory. Thank you, John Roberts.
So over here, Obamacare, $4 billion more in taxes, $4 billion more than expected, and if it’s $4 billion they’re admitting, you know it’s going to be higher. Over here, $84 billion less in overall costs, but only because fewer people will be covered. Right now in Congress — and this is the Obamacare exchange problem — right now in Congress, the GOP’s trying to fix a typo in a bill that they are offering, but Steny Hoyer will not let them fix the typo. Now, even though the Democrats admit that there’s a clear typo, this could come back and bite the Democrats when they try to fix their typo about the exchanges. In their last report back in April, the CBO reported Obamacare could cause as many as 20 million people to lose their employer-covered health care coverage. So when you add this six million from Medicaid to the 20 million losing employer provided insurance, you have 26 million people without health insurance. Now, what was Obamacare supposed to do, again?
This is an utter joke. I don’t know what the typo is off the top of my head. Find that quickly. But neither The Hill nor any other mainstream news outlet has picked up the news the Daily Caller reported yesterday. And that is the news of this scorekeeper, Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin, who is the Obama hack but is now supposedly the nonpartisan scorekeeper. (I’ve given you her details.) So the bottom line here, folks, is that we still don’t know what’s going on with all of this.
It’s still a nightmare, and I shudder to think that it’s just the foundation. It’s just the thing that is gonna be what is built upon as we go. Because as is the case with every federal program and every piece of legislation of any significant size: Once it’s implemented, it’s discovered that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work as advertised. It doesn’t work as intended. So a new law is required to fix a mistake in the original bill. It gets out of hand, and it becomes a vicious cycle when the government screws up and creates a problem.
Everybody demands that the same people who made the original mistake go in and fix it, and it just repeats itself. And you end up with out-of-control entitlement programs that nobody can understand, that the only way to fix is increased funding every year, pure and simple. The typo: “House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer says his party won’t agree to fix a typo in a GOP regulations bill that significantly alters the meaning of the measure.
“The bill calls for a moratorium on ‘significant’ regulations (defined as costing the economy more than $100 million) until the unemployment rate hits 6%. Instead of unemployment, the GOP printed the word ’employment,'” and Steny Hoyer won’t let ’em go in and fix it. So again, “The bill calls for a moratorium on ‘significant’ regulations (defined as costing the economy more than $100 million) until the unemployment rate hits 6%,” but the word is now “employment.” It says “until the employment rate hits 6%.”
Well, that will never happen.
The employment rate will never be 6%.
So there will never be a moratorium on “‘significant’ regulations,” which is exactly what the Democrats want. They don’t want a moratorium. It’s a simple typo. They meant to type “unemployment.” Instead, the word “employment” is in there. Now the New York Times story says, “Court’s Ruling May Blunt Reach of the Health Law — The Congressional Budget Office said [yesterday] that the Supreme Court decision on President ObamaÂ’s health care overhaul would probably lead to an increase in the number of uninsured and a modest reduction in the cost … when compared with estimates before the court ruling.”
It’s just the Times version of this whole mess. But the headline, “Court’s Ruling May Blunt Reach of the Health Law,” is simply the New York Times with some tears. “Oh, no, there are gonna be fewer people covered! The bill is actually not gonna cover as many of the uninsured as we thought!” It’s a debacle. It’s an absolute embarrassment, and it’s so typical of big bureaucracies. They have no idea what they’re doing. Everything gets messed up and screwed up. And we’re right in the middle of it, and the things that will not be screwed up — the things that will not be misunderstood, the things that will not be overlooked — are those that expand the power and reach of the government.
Every one of those will be found and every one of those will be utilized.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me strip this all down to the basic element here that you need to know. All of this confounding data that’s been dumped on us from the CBO, New York Times, TheHill.com, Reuters — it doesn’t matter who — they are trying to say something. They’re putting out a story. They’re not “trying,” they are saying that Obamacare is now, because of the Supreme Court ruling, gonna save us money. Yes siree! Obamacare just got cheaper. Obamacare is gonna cut health care costs.
Obamacare is gonna really save us money, ’cause they say that the revenues from the new taxes and the penalties and the fees will offset the $1.7 trillion cost. Before we had Obamacare, we were chugging along at a fine old budget deficit and a fine old national debt that was big enough. This thing comes along, and it’s easily $1.7 trillion (or, hell, it’s gonna be $2 trillion). And so now, “We save $84 billion! You know what? We’re gonna say $84 billion! Whoa, shazam, $84 billion savings on $1.7 trillion!” It’s like saying you got $50,000 budgeted for a car.
You go out and you find one for $40,000 and you tell yourself you saved ten grand when you spent 40. We’re talking about a thimble filled with pennies, and they’re trying to tell us that this is savings. Folks, it’s more journalistic malpractice. That’s all this stuff adds up to. They’re trying to tell you that the Supreme Court decision was excellent ’cause now this new nonpartisan scorekeeper has just figured out it’s gonna cost $84 billion less. So take $84 billion from $1,700 billion. That’s not even… You couldn’t even see it if you lined the dollars up.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, I want to go back and close the loop here on our discussion of health care and the various CBO reports and the confusing numbers.
I want to go back to TheHill.com report specifically. They said in that story the Supreme Court ruling will lower Obamacare costs. And their headline in that story is incorrect. “Supreme Court Decision Cuts Cost of Healthcare Reform by $84 Billion.” The headline’s false. Here’s why. The ruling reduces the scope of Obamacare. The costs to taxpayers fall because there’s gonna be less Obamacare. Meaning, the states can opt out. There’s gonna be less people covered, fewer people covered, so there’s gonna be less Obamacare. Now, this contradicts the claim of the regime that Obamacare was gonna reduce costs. Reducing Obamacare is what reduces costs, not Obamacare. This is where The Hill gets their headline wrong.
If you look at the details of their story, what they’re essentially saying is that the cost to taxpayers is falling because there’s gonna be less Obamacare, there’s gonna be less health care. I’m sorry for not catching that. It was right in front of my face and I was too focused on all the different stories, the different numbers, the different interpretation. The bottom line is, to whatever extent costs are falling, it’s because there’s less Obamacare. It’s not because of the Supreme Court ruling. It’s not because Obamacare is reducing costs. It’s because less Obamacare, fewer people are being covered. Medicare is what’s reducing the costs.