Posted on 10/25/2013 4:50:35 PM PDT by Kaslin
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here's Deborah in North Carolina. I'm glad you waited. Great to have you on the program. Hi.
CALLER: It's an honor, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: My question is about Obamacare, for people who have health insurance already.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: And they already have a pre-existing condition. If dropped from their insurance company, then let's say Obamacare goes away, will they be able to get health insurance from a private company again?
RUSH: Well, if I understand it, the question is what does a privately insured person with a pre-existing condition do if they're dropped and Obamacare goes away? Because you're under the impression Obamacare covers or requires people with pre-existing conditions to be covered. So if Obamacare goes away, then what happens to you, right, or those people?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Well, in that specific sense, the one variable there is Obamacare going away. I don't think anybody has yet concluded that that's going to happen. But if it did, what would people with pre-existing conditions do? What did they do before?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, our previous caller, she could have been talking about one of two things. She could have been talking about people who were already covered on their pre-existing condition because their insurance preceded Obamacare. Then they dropped it when Obamacare came along and got on the Obamacare pre-existing insurance plan, policy, what have you. Then if Obamacare somehow goes away, where do they go? What do people do who had pre-existing coverage and then dropped it to go to Obamacare? Can you just force insurance companies at that point to take those people again? Now, I am not sure about this.
I'm kind of conflicted about pre-existing conditions. See, folks, I'm the mayor of Realville. Pre-existing condition insurance, it isn't insurance. If you don't have to buy homeowners insurance until your house is halfway destroyed by fire, we're not talking about insurance then. If you want to buy insurance against your house burning down, you go buy insurance and then you make a bet that your house will not burn down. The company's making a bet that it won't, and whatever, and if it does, then you make a claim and then they pay you back. But if you can wait until the house is on fire and then go buy an insurance policy, that's not insurance, that's something else.
It's the same thing with pre-existing conditions. If you have a terminal disease and an insurance company is forced to provide you essentially payment for treatment, we're talking about something other than insurance. And there's no insurance company in the world outside of coercion that would do that. So the coercion has been employed. And in many states -- this what I'm not sure of. I don't know how many, but in many states, pre-existing conditions have to be covered. And this came about by virtue of public pressure and sympathy for people who didn't have the money to pay for their treatment, and it was the result of ours being a compassionate society.
Now, Obamacare's got the high-risk pools and the pre-existing condition coverage, and if it were to go south, I assume that a market would exist, be created somehow, some way -- the market's an amazing thing. Somebody would come up with a way and figure out a way for those people to be taken care of. I know I'm speaking esoterically here, maybe generically, philosophically, but the market is a wonderful thing if you just leave it alone. I know you have to have certain regulations against predatory behavior, criminal behavior, and this kind of, but the market is a beautiful thing. The market responds to practically every need and desire if there is a compensatory willingness to pay for it, by somebody.
Markets work. It' is when government gets involved that markets get gummed up and screwed up and convoluted, corrupted, perverted, and don't work because the government is not an equal player in the market. The government doesn't have to make a profit. The government's an unfair competitor in an otherwise free market. We're in this mess because the government's already gummed up the insurance market. It's gummed up the health care and treatment market. And that's why everybody's going through hoops here.
It's been reduced to, "What about me? What about what happens to me?" Everybody's acting as individuals in a victim sense. I think it all predicates on the fact that, is Obamacare ever going to go away? We all want it to. But that better happen because the longer this goes on, the more people -- that's why they're sweating, folks -- the more people that do sign up at HealthCare.gov, the more people that they can get registered at these exchanges, the tougher it is ever gonna be to get rid of this thing. That's why the defund and the delay movement, either one of them, were so crucial.
That's why it would be so great if you could delay the individual mandate for a year, you'd come close to dealing a deathblow to this. And then the private sector insurance market would come back in to clean up the mess and pick up the pieces and take steps to make sure that there's plenty competition in that market, you'll have every circumstance pretty much. Not all. Nothing's perfect. But you'll have a lot of circumstances that will be accommodated by the market taking care of if there's a willingness to pay. And we are a compassionate society. We always have been. Truth of that's in our daily existence here. Sometimes we have been overly compassionate.
I firmly believe this. And I know people on the left listening are laughing themselves silly with this kind of faith in the market. They think that's what's wrong with America. They think the market's predatory. It preys on people, it rips 'em off, it kills 'em, it steels from 'em and it kicks 'em out of their homes and kicks 'em out of their cars. It's a crock. The history of the country is all the proof you need that that's not true. Anyway, I don't know specifically what would happen, but I have the ultimate faith that those people would have a solution. They would have multiple solutions, should that eventuate.
Look, a major future fault line in politics is going to be between those who don't want their Obamacare taken away versus those who want it gotten rid of. We don't want to get to that point. You don't want that battle. You don't want that battle among people in the country. That battle, you can foresee that by imagining trying to take away food stamps. What would happen? You saw the other day when a glitch caused there to be no limit on food stamps for one day, you saw what people did. Can you imagine telling them that one day it doesn't work, you can't use it. There would be riots in the streets.
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Yeah, yeah, oh yeah
What condition my condition was in
I woke up this mornin’ with the sundown shinin’ in
I found my mind in a brown paper bag within
I tripped on a cloud and fell-a eight miles high
I tore my mind on a jagged sky
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in
She had insurance and she had an illness. She bought the insurance before the illness, so it wasn't really pre-existing. Now that her insurance company dumped her because of Ubamacare, she has a pre-existing condition for any other insurance she buys.
Either way, we have all be raped by the evil scumbag democrats and RINOs who let this travesty continue.
John Prine?
This is a case of trying to get the toothpaste back in the tube. Which is exactly what was intended by this hideous administration.
Yes. I believe that’s correct. Maybe it’s the rear guard action of socialism - create a class of voting adults who didn’t have any insurance problems before but, due to Obamacare, can’t get insurance anywhere. Are the dems banking on those people agitating for insurance coverage and the gov throwing up it’s hands and saying, “Well. Only single payer is fair....”
Allow me to finish the sentence...
Now that her insurance company dumped her because of Ubamacare, she has a pre-existing condition for any other insurance she buys...
...but in most likelihood she would now be uninsurable.
Hint: He sang “You picked a fine time to leave me, loose wheel.” I don’t think he wrote it.
She's insurable... it's just that the premiums will bankrupt her.
She had insurance and she had an illness. She bought the insurance before the illness, so it wasn't really pre-existing. Now that her insurance company dumped her because of Ubamacare, she has a pre-existing condition for any other insurance she buys.
Exactly! What happens if the insurance goes away that's currently covering a chronic illness, and that person later needs to try getting insurance.
A friend of mine once tried to get insurance, even though he did have a pre-existing condition. He was willing to waive any coverage for his condition: He just wanted coverage in case he got hit by a truck! But he was unable to get a policy from any broker he went to.
Mark
Beat me to it. My first thought.
Kenny Rogers and the 1st Addition.
yup. ditto.
How about a class action suit against HHS?
First recorded in 1967 by Jerry Lee Lewis
I’d love to hear his version of it.
Prine had a song with similar lyrics/theme. I would have never guessed Kenny Rogers..
If you want to buy insurance against your house burning down, you go buy insurance and then you make a bet that your house will not burn down. The company's making a bet that it won't, and whatever, and if it does, then you make a claim and then they pay you back.That's not true. When you buy house insurance, you're actually betting that your house WILL burn down, because that's when you get paid back for all the premiums, plus additional value.
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The basic flaw with "pre-existing conditions", as he states correctly, is that you're not buying "insurance", you're trying to buy magic money where your (smaller) premium entitles you to (larger) payments to the doctors. How the heck does that work? You're looking for charity from a for-profit insurance company. Best of luck with that, Bucko.
I have some pre-existing conditions. I'm 61, single, live by myself on a hill in rural upstate New York. I'm basically screwed if I get seriously ill or injured in a way that's related to my existing status.
Such is life. Every morning, first thing I do is thank God for another day above ground, and go about doing the things that make up my day. And every night, I thank God for another day without killing myself doing something stupid. :)
Thanks for the lyric, tumblindice. I always enjoyed that song.
Here’s my dumb question, if we put the 1.3 trillion dollars that Obamacare will cost (I actually think that’s quite low) into underwriting state-run high-risk pools for pre-existing conditions, how far would that money go? And how far will it go with Obamacare?
There has to be workable solutions to our problems outside of socialized medicine and death panels. Because here’s the dirty little secret, the death panels will prevent cancer patients from getting new techology (too expensive) and will run some chemo then put them on hospice (cheap).
The death panels have only one directive, save money.
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