RUSH: Bob in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’m gonna grab a quick phone call here so that I can say that I took a call the first hour. Bob in Charlotte. Great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Yes, sir. Good to talk to you. Listen, you talked earlier about the invincibles. They’re not the only ones looking at not buying insurance, but also seniors who are in good health and within a year of getting Medicare.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Some of us have gotten bills that are increasing by almost a thousand dollars a month. And if you’re reasonably health and you can go online and get your prescriptions, go to your doctor now while you’re still on a plan, you can get your prescriptions written to cover you up until that time that you get on Medicare. And in our case, it could save you $12,000.
RUSH: You mean your costs are going up out there?
CALLER: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. All over North Carolina. We’ve got 160,000 people who’ve gotten these letters.
RUSH: Yeah, I know. At least you haven’t been canceled yet.
CALLER: Well, not me, it’s her, my wife. I’m on Medicare.
RUSH: Oh.
CALLER: If anybody wanted to see something, they’re posting people’s articles and copies of the letters from the insurance companies for those people who don’t believe this is happening.
RUSH: Oh, I’ve got one. I’ve got a copy of a letter that a female insurance agent wrote, one of the things you’re talking about. She takes the Republicans to task for not standing up and fighting this thing, it is such a disaster, and she wants to know where the hell the Republican Party has been in not trying to stop this and oppose this. It’s really good. Okay, Bob, I appreciate it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to make a point here that I made in the last 20 seconds of the last hour, just spend a little bit more time on it. We had the guy call from North Carolina who talked about all the problems, the glitches there. Now, folks, I mentioned it before, New York’s got its own website that’s not part of Obamacare’s HealthCare.gov. A lot of states do. Thirty some odd states did not sign up for Obamacare or for exchanges and so forth.
There are states out there that are not having any troubles whatsoever on their websites for people to get health insurance. The thing remarkable about those states is nobody’s signing up. New York state, nobody has gone to that website to sign up. I guess we don’t even know if that website works, technically. So my point is whatever you hear reports of glitches in the media, outside of HealthCare.gov, I think there’s a massive effort going on to mask or to obscure the fact that people aren’t enrolling in this. They’re not enrolling in government-run health care one degree or another, they’re just not doing it. And the point is, even when websites work, people aren’t going. They’re not interested.
Now, I’ve heard the number that Obamacare needs seven million enrollees in order for it to work financially. That makes no sense to me, but I’ll just go with what they say. They say they need seven million young, healthy people signing up who are not going to be using their health insurance because they’re healthy. They need those people signing up and paying the freight in order to cover the costs for the elderly and the poor and you know whoever else.
They’re not signing up, no matter where. At HealthCare.gov they can’t sign up ’cause the website’s a disaster. In other states they’re just not signing up. In fact, the regime, the Obama regime is telling Blue Cross and others not to tell the public how many people have signed up for Obamacare. They have issued strong requests, i.e., demands to clam up about the number of enrollees. That’s why Sebelius is not forthcoming with the number. They’re not telling you because nobody is signing up. This is a failure and a disaster no matter how you slice it.
After five years of Obama portraying this as utopia and panacea, I’m sure that they expected a stampede of eager — I know how these people think. They were expecting a stampede of eager Americans, “All right, health care, $2,500 cheaper. I get to keep my doctor, get to keep my plan, health care free!” They thought there was gonna be a stampede to sign up. And even with that they didn’t design a website that could handle even a hundred people at a time. But beyond that, they have no real connection with the American people.
I am convinced that despite what you think of Obama, I don’t think Obama has a person-to-person connection with people. I think people love him because of his race and feel sorry for him, object of sympathy. I think people feel he’s a victim, he portrays himself as a victim of America, he gets sympathy that way. I think he gets plenty of loyalty from Democrat to Democrat, liberal to liberal, people loyal to the cause. I don’t think — and I’m probably a lone actor here — I don’t think that Obama really has a personal connection to people that voted for him.
He goes out to these public appearances of his, they have to assemble groups of people. They have to assemble the people standing behind him. I don’t think that when it’s announced Obama’s going anywhere, that these places are overwhelmed with more people than the room can hold and they want to get close and they want to touch and they want get autographs. I think we’re being fed so many myths about Obama’s popularity. We know the approval rating is well below 50%. The way I describe it sounds like I’m bragging so I won’t do it. So I hope you know what I mean. It’s like a television anchor. I’ll do it this way. I was on the same plane with Ed Bradley and Peter Jennings in Houston coming back to New York from the Republican convention.
Baggage claim, we’re all there, and everybody recognized Jennings and Ed Bradley. Nobody went up and talked to ’em. They knew who they were. Might have liked them, respected them. Those guys, they didn’t really have a connection with the audience. They were faces that were recognizable, and they might have been trusted. But nobody felt like going up to Peter Jennings saying, “Hi, how are you? I care.” ‘Cause Peter Jennings never gave anything of himself in the newscast. He’s reading the news. Ed Bradley, ditto. The same with Obama. There’s really not a connection. I don’t know how else to describe this. And that’s what I mean, they expected because of that there’d be this massive stampede of loyalty and devotion to not only Obama, but health care and making it work for Obama, and there isn’t any of that.
The real point here is that even in states where there aren’t any website problems, there aren’t any enrollees. In New York state, zero. And that is big because if nobody signs up, then it doesn’t exist anyway. If the supposed brilliance and goodness and attractiveness of the law is not gonna attract people, then they’re gonna have to be forced, coerced into signing up and going. Look, even HealthCare.gov, there are not swarms of people trying. It didn’t take very many people to expose this website as an absolute bomb.
So I guess what I’m saying is, don’t fall for the notion that we’re dealing with this universally popular, personally popular guy to whom people are devoted as in a pied piper. It isn’t that way. And this is demonstrating it. I’ll tell you, this whole Obamacare thing, that’s all on him, it’s all on government. This is a Democrat, liberal nightmare that’s happening right in front of everybody’s face and they’re trying to cover that up as many ways as they can, blaming contractors, blaming Republicans, blaming the shutdown. But they’re the ones who sold it. They’re the ones that touted it. They’re the ones who said that it was the greatest thing ever.
They called it revolutionary. They called it advanced. They called it whatever superlatives they used, and it’s none of those. They own this, much as they would like to pawn it off. That’s my point in the first hour. You know, Obama, they design a system that’s supposed to fail so they get to single payer, but in designing the failure you have to design it so that the reason it fails is everybody but you.
The government can’t be seen as the reason it failed. You gotta blame insurance companies. You gotta blame the Republicans. You gotta see to it that the doctors and hospitals, the pharmacists get blamed, insurance companies. But, guess what? Government, everybody is asking, “Maybe this is too big to the government to do?”