Kaiser Health News Surprised by What Obamacare Will Do?

RUSH: Here's the headline: "A Lot More People Are About to Learn They Can't Keep Their Plans If They Like Them."

I was intrigued. I was really intrigued by that headline: "A Lot More People Are About to Learn They Can't Keep Their Plans If They Like Them." Let's get started here. "It's almost time for Stage Two of the great Obamacare dump, as the truly breathtaking depths of Barack Obama's Big Lie are exposed ... and America is shoved closer to the howling abyss of single-payer health care, the transformation nobody voted for."

Fine so far. "Kaiser Health News explains something that Obamacare critics predicted, with typical accuracy, years ago: Employers have strong incentives to chuck their employees into those hideous Obamacare exchanges, rather than continuing to provide the sort of health insurance we're all accustomed to. For the cost of a modest ... penalty, the corporate world can wash its hands of health insurance entirely."

Now, not news. If you listen to this program regularly, you already know this. You might need to be reminded of it, but you already know this. You know that part and parcel of Obamacare is getting rid of employer-provided insurance, and the way Obamacare does that is incentivize businesses to do just that.

It's expensive to provide health care benefits for people. So if you, as a business, can legally off-load your health care plan to the Obamacare exchange and pay just a small penalty for two or three years, you're going to do it. Everybody's known this; everybody's known it's gonna happen. The thing is, it was supposed to already have been implemented, but it has been delayed until after the 2014 elections.

Now, what is confusing to me about the story is I'm not sure, after reading this, if some employers have already started doing it anyway or not. That's why I can't make head nor tails of it here. To me, that would be the news, if businesses are already starting to, even though I think they actually can't. The opportunity to do that has been delayed.

"'Can corporations shift workers with high medical costs from the company health plan into online insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act? Some employers are considering it, say benefits consultants. "It's all over the marketplace," said Todd Yates, a managing partner at Hill, Chesson & Woody, a North Carolina benefits consulting firm.'"

"'"Employers are inquiring about it and brokers and consultants are advocating for it." Patients with preexisting medical conditions like diabetes drive health spending. But those who undergo expensive procedures such as organ transplants are a burden to the company as well.

"Since most big corporations are self-insured, shifting even one high-cost member out of the company plan could save the employer hundreds of thousands of dollars a year -- while increasing the cost of claims absorbed by the marketplace policy by a similar amount," meaning taxpayers.

"[T]he health law might not prohibit it, opening a door to potential erosion of employer-based coverage." There's no "potential" here. This is going to happen. It hasn't happened yet. That's why the more I read this, the more confused I get about why is this a story now since it isn't happening? Everybody knows that it's gonna happen. It does serve as sort of a canary-in-a-coal mine reminder for you.

The only group right now that has really lost their insurance policies are the self-insured. Those who get their insurance at work as a benefit, they haven't got their cancellation notices yet, but you're coming. It was supposed to be this January that those notices were to go out, and the Regime quickly figured out that would not go well with an election this year. So, there was a delay in implementing that aspect.

They want private business out of this. They want single payer. They want everybody ultimately having to go to the government to get insurance and health care itself.

RUSH: This is why I'm doing what I was born to do. I finally figured this out. I finally figured out why they ran this story now. What happened was the original source for this story is actually Kaiser Health News, and a news website -- and I don't want to name it. This is not to be critical of anyone. I'm just explaining why got confused.

Somebody decided to rewrite the Kaiser Health News release as a news story. They tried to make it look like the website came up with it and that Kaiser's incidentally being quoted here and there. So what I did is I threw that out, and I went straight to the belly of the beast, so to speak, which is the Kaiser Health News, 'cause that's the story.

What is noteworthy about that (and you might even say truly sickening) is that Kaiser Health News -- Kaiser -- has been one of the foremost champions of Obamacare. They're one of the many health-related organizations and hospital groups that got in bed with Obama early on. At the time we couldn't figure it out 'cause we were looking at it the wrong way, stupidly looking at it the wrong way.

Rather than following the money, I was thinking that people would understand that what's going on was not in their best interests and would, on principle, oppose something like this. If you are in the private health business and you got a president who wants to take over, my natural inclination is that you would stand up and oppose it. But no! That's where I was wrong.

Nobody is standing up opposing this guy on anything 'cause they're scared to death of whatever. They're scared to death of being called racist. They're scared to death of what this guy might do to them, Obama, if they oppose him. And, by the way, there's evidence for that. I mean, these people can see what happened to Brendan Eich.

They can see what happened to Frank VanderSloot, the donor to the Romney campaign that was audited four or five times. They can see what happened to anybody having to do with the Tea Party. The IRS was sicked on them. They can see what happened to Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers. There's not a whole lot of bravery out there, folks.

A lot of people scared to death of this guy, literally scared to death of their government. So they've made the decision that it's just easier in the short term -- survivability is the key -- to suck it up and go along, and try to manage your demise as best you can rather than die trying. Of course, since that is so foreign to my attitude and mind-set that I have difficulty in seeing it in people who I think are big, tough, strong, and courageous.

That's been one of the biggest shocks to me, is all the people -- because of the nature of their lives and the success track that they've been on -- the big, tough people who I just assume are gonna stand up to this kind of takeover of their business or mischaracterization. Instead, I've seen just the exact opposite. It's been dispiriting and it's been curious.

So, anyway, the sum total is that Kaiser, an early supporter of Obamacare, is now surprised at what is about to happen to them!

RUSH: All right, here's the nub of this. Kaiser Health News had a piece yesterday. "Hold On to Your Health Care." This is what's confusing. They actually think this is news. Ah, look, I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound braggadocious, folks. But I remember telling everybody about this for four years before Obamacare had even been voted on. All of this has been known. These people were among the big supporters of Obamacare. I'm sure they thought that's the safest route to take, rather than stand up and oppose it.

I talked to somebody the other day, a friend of mine. You'd know his name. I not gonna mention his name. You'd know his name very, very well. He said, "I've never seen democracy fall so fast. I never thought it possible." And a lot of people think that way. This guy is in a position to do something about it and feels powerless. He's involved in work, involved in educating people and so forth the right way. "I've ever seen democracy fall so fast." This whole Obamacare episode is sort of, in a nutshell, a little microcosm of how it's happening.

Here you have the president of the United States, under the guise of insuring the uninsured and lowering people's insurance costs, lying through his teeth about it over and over and over again. The truth was easily ascertainable. It was right there in the Obamacare legislation. Anybody that took the time to read it or took the time to read others who had read, it was easy to understand the president was lying. And in this objective was to totally take over one-sixth of the US economy.

Now, I always believe that the people in a segment of the economy targeted for takeover, particularly by the government, would stand up and oppose it, and it didn't happen. Not universally. The people that you would think would be most outraged at an effort like this would be at the forefront of standing up trying to stop it, to protect their businesses, to protect their life's investments, everything that they've worked for. But, no, there was acquiescence here from insurance policies, acquiescence from Kaiser Health News, some hospital groups, even the doctors in the white coats in the Rose Garden or the fake doctors in the fake white coats in the Rose Garden. And it's been a head scratcher.

So the headline their piece: "Hold On to Your Health Care -- Big companies are flirting with dumping high-cost employees off their private health plans onto Obamacare -- legally. Insurance experts to the rescue." I'm at a loss. This is not news. How many times, those of you in this audience ask yourselves, how many times have you heard eventually your employer's gonna dump your plan on to the exchange? He's gonna get rid of it. He's gonna be allowed to. It's gonna be legal and it's gonna be much cheaper and most employers don't want to mess with it anyway.

Remember the GM of General Motors, the CEO of GM said (paraphrasing), "I didn't know when I took this job I was actually CEO of health care. I thought I was coming into the car business." So it's not a big mystery that this was gonna happen, and it was right there in the bill.

I don't need to read this whole thing to you. "Big companies are flirting with dumping high-cost employees off their private health plans onto Obamacare -- legally. Insurance experts to the rescue. Can corporations shift workers with high medical costs from the company health plan into online insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act? Some employers are considering it, say benefits consultants."

This thing is -- well, I gotta be careful in describing what this is. I can't believe that they -- you know, it sounds to me like what Kaiser's doing, they signed up for it, they eagerly supported it, now they're trying to make people think they're coming to the rescue. So here's the bottom line of this, folks. Bottom line is that the Obamacare legislation empowers, it enables, legally, employers to dump their health care plans.

I went back and I looked at my archives. June 28th of 2012. You can go to the RushLimbaugh.com and search it. "Why Employers Will Dump Health Insurance." We're coming up on two years ago that we first discussed it on this program. And it really wasn't a prediction. It was simply a warning that it was coming, because it's in Obamacare. It was already supposed to have started happening. January of this year is the when the people covered at work were supposed at start getting their cancellation notices. The Regime, wisely for their own benefit, delayed that until next January or maybe later this year, but certainly after the November elections.

We did it again in 2009: "An Employer Explains How You Will Be Forced Into Public Option." October 8th, 2009. If it's on the website, it means we discussed it here in great detail. So the story that I was originally confused by took the Kaiser piece and wrote about it as though it was something nobody'd ever heard of, is a great discovery and businesses are thinking about doing this. They've been thinking about doing it ever since they heard they're gonna have the chance.

So the sum total of this is if you get your health insurance at work, your company can dump you into the exchange and more than likely will. It should have started in January. It's been delayed. They can't do it yet, but they're really thinking about it, and now Kaiser Health News is writing about it trying to make their subscribers think they're gonna come to the rescue and find a way out of this. You thought you were safe, and you aren't. So that's the manipulation here that is taking place.

RUSH: Bill in Newmarket, New Hampshire. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Great to have you.

CALLER: Hey, you were discussing about companies dropping health care. There's something people don't realize. A lot of these companies that are publicly traded, there are investment groups that hold their stock, and the company's first obligation is to maximize the return on the investment of the stockholders. These groups will either demand or ask, you know, why should they be paying $6,000 or $7,000 per employee when they could be paying $300 and the money given back to the stockholder?

CALLER: Right. There'll be court actions. Like, "Well, you're not gonna do it? So we're gonna take you to court. We're the investors." You know, this could cost some CEOs their jobs, all because some of the investment groups hold a considerable percentage of the stock.

CALLER: Well, you've got a lot of these investment groups that hold up to 15% of a company's stock. That's a lot of weight at the table, so to speak. When they want something, they're gonna say, "Hey, we don't want you to pay for your employees' health care. We don't care. We just want the money," and the CEOs --

RUSH: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. That's what I thought you said. I just wasn't sure. Sure, there's gonna be all kinds of pressure on CEOs.

RUSH: All you have to do is go talk to your average CEO. The health care plans that they have to offer are so cumbersome, the human resources department is some of the most biggest distractions they have. Like the General Motors guy. He wants to build and design cars. He wants to get the company back in business. Well, 90% of his day is spent with health care in that stuff. Believe me, they're not gonna need any pressure to offload it. They're gonna do it the first chance they get. They're gonna have, as backup, that it makes perfect fiscal sense to do it.

RUSH: If the law of the land is you can get rid of your employee health care plan and there's no big outcry, there's no problem 'cause they're just gonna send 'em to the exchanges? I mean, you're not cancellation their insurance. You're not setting 'em out in the cold. Theoretically. You're just off-loading them from your responsibility and shifting it to somebody else who wants it (i.e., Obama and the government).

In fact, when you get right down to brass tacks, I think what old Bill here is saying is that not dropping the health coverage could cost some CEOs their job. You get these big investor groups, they want the share price up, and if a company can lower its costs? Believe me, labor costs are the highest costs any business has -- and of those labor costs, health care insurance is ranks right up there near the top.

If they can off-load that legally? (snaps fingers) You don't think twice about it. If the CEO doesn't do it, 'cause he's compassionate and standing up for the employees, then these investor groups are gonna call for his head. That was Bill's point here. But see, Obamacare gives 'em cover, because Obamacare allows 'em to say, "We're not canceling your insurance! We're just transferring you out of our coverage to Obamacare. That's it."

What the investors and CEOs don't seem to understand (and if they don't, it speaks volumes on the side of those who think the talents and savvy of many ‘top level’ business people is overrated) is that even if they dump health care into the exchanges etc., it will still come back to bite them.

It's inevitable that there will be cost overruns and an inability of the government to sustain the subsidies etc. that are counted on now to keep Obamacare afloat. Eventually (probably very much sooner than these people realize) the government is going to go hunting for more ways to pay for the subsidies etc., and they will come after business. At that point, business won't be able to shop around for the best insurance deal for their employees and themselves. They will pay the bill the government hands them, and it will be a lot worse than what they are dealing with now.

Further, if the whole system collapses and the democrats get their way with single payer, it will be even worse for U.S. businesses. I know many of them don't think so, but they will see the light in due course.

I think that you got it about right. This has never really been about health care anyway. If it were, we would have discussed tort reform, health care accounts, maybe increasing competition across state lines. It has been and is about concentrating power into the hands of the government class. Business leaders need to succumb to them just as much as anybody, if not more. Serfdom. Better get used to it.

"Kaiser Health News explains something that Obamacare critics predicted, with typical accuracy, years ago: Employers have strong incentives to chuck their employees into those hideous Obamacare exchanges, rather than continuing to provide the sort of health insurance we're all accustomed to. For the cost of a modest ... penalty, the corporate world can wash its hands of health insurance entirely...."
.... I finally figured out why they ran this story now. What happened was the original source for this story is actually Kaiser Health News, and...Somebody decided to rewrite the Kaiser Health News release as a news story. They tried to make it look like the website came up with it and that Kaiser's incidentally being quoted here and there....What is noteworthy about that (and you might even say truly sickening) is that Kaiser Health News -- Kaiser -- has been one of the foremost champions of Obamacare. They're one of the many health-related organizations and hospital groups that got in bed with Obama early on....

....the sum total of this is if you get your health insurance at work, your company can dump you into the exchange and more than likely will. It should have started in January. It's been delayed. They can't do it yet, but they're really thinking about it, and now Kaiser Health News is writing about it trying to make their subscribers think they're gonna come to the rescue and find a way out of this. You thought you were safe, and you aren't. So that's the manipulation here that is taking place.

PFL

“government is going to go hunting for more ways to pay for the subsidies etc., and they will come after business. “

But businesses do have an option, and that is to move operations overseas and avoid those additional taxes.
The real losers are middle class Americans who will be left with sub-par insurance, and the liability of paying extra for it.

I’m very well acquainted with the new head writer for Kaiser Health News. Just the nicest, sweetest woman you would ever want to meet. Very kind. Always laughing. A big well-intentioned oblivious liberal who makes a LOT of money, lives in an upscale suburb of DC, and has no reality contact at all, at all. No application of logic can persuade her that Obamacare is not a catastrophe. I was warning her five years ago that it was going to be a cluster. I had the data. She just giggled.

“But businesses do have an option, and that is to move operations overseas and avoid those additional taxes.”

There are definitive limitations to that strategy, and it only works as long as you can continue to make money selling to the US, or ‘equivalent’ markets that may or may not exist. Sure, there are ‘emerging’ markets, but China didn’t get its economic footing selling to them. Further, given that many foreign countries don’t respect the patent positions of American companies now, just think how that will go when those companies are out of the U.S., and at the mercy of the same foreign governments that thought it was OK to pirate U.S. technology even when those companies were part of the U.S.

The bottom line is that U.S. business is not impervious to the things that hurt the U.S. public. It will hurt them too. Sooner or later, and my bet is on sooner.

Eventually (probably very much sooner than these people realize) the government is going to go hunting for more ways to pay for the subsidies etc., and they will come after business. At that point, business won't be able to shop around for the best insurance deal for their employees and themselves. They will pay the bill the government hands them, and it will be a lot worse than what they are dealing with now.

The thing is, the middle man never pays the bills and the employer is the middle man.

What happens when the boss gets the bill? He figures out a way to pay it and that way will be to take it from the employees compensation package. That raise you might expect someday won't happen. It's going to pay that government healthcare bill.

The bottom line is that U.S. business is not impervious to the things that hurt the U.S. public. It will hurt them too. Sooner or later, and my bet is on sooner.

Tell that to a CEO who's been incented by a pile of glittering loot on the one hand and a perpetual Sword of Damocles on the other.

The board, not reason or comity or the People of the United States, owns such a guy's attention and compliance preclusively.

Just the nicest, sweetest woman you would ever want to meet.

Well, now, now that the chips are falling, and given that Kaiser and the rest of the Chamber knew very damned well what they'd "fixed" back in 2008 when "the fix was in" already, perhaps you might want to revisit your estimation of this woman.

Airheaded? In her manner, perhaps. Like, wasn't Mata Hari really popular with all the guys who knew her? Alger Hiss? -- he knew so many people who were just impeccable, the right kind of people. Ditto ditto Kim Philby and Anthony Blount, the Queen's art advisor.

Want to think about this woman a while and maybe get back to us?

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