RUSH: Tim in Jefferson, South Dakota, I guess. Welcome to the program. Great to have you.
CALLER: Well, thank you for taking my call, Rush. I really appreciate it.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: On this health care plan I’ve got a question. I make around $52,000 a year, and I will end up paying $455 a month per month for health care on the Obama plan.
RUSH: Have you run that out for 12 months what that’s gonna cost you a year?
CALLER: Over $5,000 a year.
RUSH: Yeah, and you make 52, five grand a year for health insurance, under Obamacare, right?
CALLER: Okay, first of all, that’s not my cell phone plan, like they said it would be less than my cell phone plan. You know?
RUSH: It’s not. They said that your premium would be falling $2,500.
CALLER: Yep. And how come someone making three times I am making gets 75% of theirs subsidized?
RUSH: Because they complained. And Obama needed their votes.
CALLER: Well, I guarantee you he didn’t get mine or my wife’s or any of our friends, for that matter.
RUSH: Folks, it’s a great point. Here’s a guy in Jefferson, South Dakota, makes 52 grand and his health care premiums are $5,000 a year, basically, and he doesn’t get any of it subsidized. Members of Congress and their staff who earn up to $174,000 a year are gonna get up to 75% of their premium subsidized, by him and other taxpayers. Because they complained. They said, “What? We can’t afford this. Not on what we make.” And Obama personally said that the Office of Personnel Management will subsidize them, not through the exchanges. Well, it will be through the exchange, but the subsidy’s not gonna be the normal exchange pattern. It’s gonna be paid for by the Office of Personnel Management. Tim, are you still there, by any chance, or did you hang up?
CALLER: No, I’m still here.
RUSH: Okay. ‘Cause I want to make sure. You might be confused because we were told that the average premium was gonna be a hundred dollars a month.
CALLER: I didn’t figure out my own premium, Rush. I had someone that knew what they were doing figure it out for me.
RUSH: Who?
CALLER: A local tax professional.
RUSH: Oh. Local tax professional.
CALLER: Hm-hm.
RUSH: Well, Kathleen Sebelius told us the average premium was gonna be hundred dollars a month.
CALLER: Evidently I’m above average.
RUSH: Yeah, but your income is right at average. I mean, I’m not being facetious. I’m just trying to ram home how you’re getting screwed, along with everybody else. Tim, before you go, quickly, before all this started, did you think that your health insurance premiums were going to reduce? Did you think they were gonna get smaller?
CALLER: Well, I don’t have health care, Rush. I pay my own medical bills. I have a job that does not offer health insurance because we don’t have enough employees. So I’ve been paying my own.
RUSH: Oh, so you’ve been cash for service. So you didn’t have anything to compare it against. Okay. Well, guys like you were the targets. People who can pay this, people that can pay for their own medical care without insurance, we’re not gonna have that. That totally skews the system. It’s another example of how we’re defining the country down and building a country for the lowest common denominator among us.
Tom in Huron, Ohio, you’re next. Glad you waited. Great to have you on the program. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. Glad to be on the program. I listen to you very often.
RUSH: Thank you. Appreciate that.
CALLER: I was reading an article, I don’t know if it was in Breitbart or on Fox News or something about how they laid off 15,000 EPA workers and they only kept a thousand that were essential. Well, the first thing that occurred to me is, if you only need a thousand essential to keep it running, what are the other 15,000 doing for their time. You know, I worked in a factory —
RUSH: They are paying dues to the Democrat Party.
CALLER: Yeah, I understand that, but then I read the comments, okay, underneath the article, which I love to read because it gives me a sense of how people are thinking about this, and I don’t think the mainstream media is actually conveying it because they were saying for the 800,000 that got furloughed, they ought to permanently furlough ’em and see how long we can last. You know, that’s what private industry would do. They’d cut down to the bone to see how long they could last without having people doing stuff that they didn’t need to have done. You know, non-effective or non-contributory type work. I think everybody has the understanding that that’s really what’s going on. And if you read all the comments through all the blogs, and, for instance, like on Jay Leno last night, he said, you know, in his ten-minute pre, he said, “How many people in the audience were affected by the shutdown?” No response. Dead silence. He said, “How many people want to get the government up and running?” And still no response. The third one was, “How many are glad the government’s down?” and the crowd roared, just to give you an idea.
RUSH: Yeah, but you keep in mind Leno is being fired.
CALLER: Yeah, I know, but he got the opinion of the people in an audience that, you know, just happenstance to be there. You know, so the mainstream media is not reflecting how we out in flyover states feel about this.
RUSH: Of course not. They never will.
CALLER: Yes, I know. And I think that this total misrepresentation is gonna come back to bite ’em right in the rear end, but that was my only comment. Thank you very much.
RUSH: You’re welcome, you’re more than welcome. Yeah, this notion of justice, that all this is gonna come back and bite ’em in the rear end. I know how you feel out there, Tom. I’ve been waiting for that to happen for 25 years. Well, I have. They keep getting away with it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Alex in Topeka, Kansas. Hi, great to have you on the program. How are you.
CALLER: Thank you. I’m well. I just wanted to tell you about an experience I had on Monday when I went to see a doctor who I’ve been seeing for probably 15 years. I got there 20 minutes early and —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I need a little bit more information. Did you have a medical need? Is that why you went?
CALLER: It was a follow-up appointment.
RUSH: Follow-up. You’ve been seeing this guy for 15 years?
CALLER: Oh, yes.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: And they gave me a clipboard for the form to fill out. I said, “Well, I filled one out last time I was here,” and she said, “Well, we’re going to a new system, so we have to input everything from scratch.” So I filled out the form; then I had the standard line about 10 minutes to get it back to her, and —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. So you had to re-fill out the form?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: You’d already spent time on a previous visit doing that, but you had to start all over. It took you 10 minutes standing in line to turn it back in?
CALLER: Yes. There was a lady with a cane, and she kinda hollered out at her, “I have to sit down! I can’t stand in line any longer,” ’cause she was using a cane.
RUSH: What in the world was there a line to turn it in for?
CALLER: Because everybody that was coming in was having to fill out a new form.
RUSH: But if you turn it in you just hand it to ’em there at the counter and you go back and sit down and wait for a couple hours for the doctor?
CALLER: Well, there were two women working the desk, and there was no way to get around the people that were in line without getting screamed at.
RUSH: Okay. All right. Well, I don’t want to sidetrack you.
CALLER: Next, I waited for about 20 minutes to get called in to the examining room, and it was not the doctor. It was the nurse. Well, then she started inputting information into her computer, and was asking me all kinds of questions. She asked me if I had children. I said, “Yes, I have a daughter.”
RUSH: Did she ask you if you were a lesbian?
CALLER: Well, that was about the only thing she didn’t ask.
RUSH: But she did ask you about your sex life?
CALLER: Well, no. Not quite.
RUSH: Well, you’re lucky, because regulations now require some doctors to, I guess, depending on your doctor. It’s in the Obamacare regs, some of the questions that people are going to be asked will be —
CALLER: Oh, gosh.
RUSH: — if they’ve ever had sex with the same-sex partner or whatever. The details are quite invasive.
CALLER: She asked me about my daughters, and did she have any health issues, and before I could think, I said, “Yes.” She said, “Is she healthy?” I said, “No, she’s not,” and then I realized I should not have answered that, and she said, “Well, what are her health issues,” and I said, “You know what? If you want to know about my daughter’s health, you’ll need to talk to her,” and she looked at me like she was offended.
Well, then she started asking me about my siblings, how many I had and how their health, and I said, “You know what? I don’t make it a point to give all my siblings’ health information so that I can bring it to you,” and I asked, “Why do you need all of this?” She says, “Well, we’re going to a new system tomorrow, and we need to have all this information,” and then she asked me —
RUSH: Wait. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That’s not satisfactory. You said, “Why do you need the information?” and the response was, “Well, because we got a new system going”? What’s the big…? Okay, they got a new system. Why does the new system need to know all of this stuff about people that are not you?
CALLER: I wish I had asked of this new system was due to Obamacare. I’m sure it is, but I didn’t ask. They were having so much trouble, the two women that were working the front desk.
RUSH: Did the doctor —
CALLER: They had to call someone, and I know he was a programmer.
RUSH: Did the doctor ever come see you?
CALLER: No. I saw a physician’s assistant.
RUSH: Okay. But did you get treated, pretty much, after going back and forth with her?
CALLER: I pretty much diagnosed myself and told her what I thought I needed, and she wrote a prescription for it.
RUSH: (laughing) Oh, my God. Well, so you didn’t even really need to go, other than to get the script?
CALLER: Well, exactly. I don’t think they woulda given it to me over the phone, but bottom line is, I usually get in and out of there within 15 minutes when I have a gone in the past. I was in there over an hour, and that’s with me getting there 20 minutes early just because I had the time.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, get used to it, ’cause it’s only gonna get worse. That kind of thing is only gonna get worse. Well, we’re gonna be hearing these horror stories forever. They don’t want to take the calls. There’s no question about it. I can’t wait to tell you all my horror stories about the problems I gotta go to doctor for. I try to not to go. See that’s the difference. I try not to go to the doctor. A lot of people go every week for the heck of it, I guess. I just try not to go.
But my doctor stories are different than that. I love mu doctor stories. They don’t know what to do when you offer to pay for it. They don’t know what to do. They don’t have a system. They do now, mine do, but they didn’t. Not the doctor, whoever in the chain, you know, when you check out and pay. I say, “Can I give you a credit card?” “Uh, uh, uh…” I know it is changing now. I was on the forefront. It is changing now because people are trying to pay themselves.
They know it’s cheaper and it’s more streamlined, but I can tell you how when I first started offering to pay for it myself, when I did not have an insurance card, they were lost. This is 20 years ago, obviously.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Bill, Bayfield County, Wisconsin. Great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush, for taking my call. I’ll get directly to the point. I am a self-employed business owner that’s currently insured through one of the major carriers, one of the largest in the country, and Monday I just got a letter in the mail stating that they’re no longer gonna be providing any insurance plan in the area that I live and work in after 2014, and my plan is currently in place until September of 2014. they can extend it to December 1st, but after that, they will not offer any plans.
RUSH: Well, you know where you’re headed.
CALLER: I went online, and there isn’t an insurance company in Wisconsin.
RUSH: No. No. You’re headed for the exchanges, pal.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: With all the rest of us.
CALLER: Yeah, there isn’t a company that’ll provide a private insurance that isn’t part of the exchange in my area of Wisconsin.
RUSH: Yeah. That’s by design.
CALLER: Yeah. I’ve seen some other small business owners with employees that have the same company I do.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: They got a letter in the mail about at the same time. I was quite curious that the letter came in the mail the day before the exchanges opened.
RUSH: Yeah, well, you knew this was coming, I’m sure, and it’s coming for everybody. But you can go the fine route, if you want, the first couple years and then just… I don’t know if they treat you or not if you pay the fine. That’s one thing they don’t say.