Is This Gross Incompetence or the Planned Path to Single-Payer Health Care?
This is his signature deal. This is what he's really wanted. This. Universal single-payer health care. This is what he's really wanted. The Democrat Party's wanted it forever, for 50 years, but he's the guy that really wanted it. Now, in a circumstance like that, when you have the president or the CEO, whatever the top dog is called, that person's passion for it lights the fires under everybody else to make it happen. This is how Steve Jobs worked, or any successful CEO. A CEO cannot have hands on every project that is going on in a business.
But the one thing at the moment, at the time that matters most to that CEO, everybody knows about it. Everybody working there wants to impress the boss, but you add the liberal political aspect to this, the true believer, big government's the solution to everything aspect to this, and there's no reason why this shoulda happened except one thing. And that is these people are genuinely incompetent. They haven't the slightest idea what they're doing. They don't know what to do. And their arrogance and their condescending view of people outside of government makes it -- they're only gonna hire people who've worked in other governments. You know, they'll use private sector people as props, bring 'em in for photo-ops. Buffett in now and then whenever you need him, get a photo op having lunch with Steve Jobs, but that's as far as it goes.
Now, the fact that this thing is an utter disaster is evidence Obama doesn't care about this beyond the day it was signed into law because the only thing that matters about this to Obama is that one day the government's gonna be in charge of everybody's health care, and whatever happens between now and then is simply what has to happen, good or bad, that's the price. It doesn't matter. He doesn't care about individuals and their problems with insurance, availability, cost, actual treatment. He doesn't care, doesn't matter. Not what this is about. All that is nothing more than salesmanship. That's nothing more than a photo-op itself, like yesterday.
You go out and act like you're Billy Mays or whoever the latest Ron Popeil is with the Ginsu knife, and you go sell it, and you ratchet it up. Then you make sure everybody understands that you are upset with it, too, which continues to just amaze me that he gets away with this, this Limbaugh Theorem, that he gets away with this. It's his plan, and the fact that it is bollixed up like this can be traced right back to him. I'm telling you, whoever is the leader of people in a group, be it a business or any organization, once that leader comes up with something and if there are true believers in that organization, and there are throughout this regime, they are all true believers. They are true believers blinded by reality.
They haven't the slightest idea what they're doing. But they believe that only they are equipped to do this, only they care enough, that only they are compassionate enough, that only they are the ones that can make this work. They're the only ones. And the fact that this thing had three years and is an utter disaster goes right to the top and shows absent leadership. Now, when I say that Obama doesn't care, I don't want you to misunderstand me. It's not that he doesn't care whether it works or not. He's not worried about it not working. He's not worried about it being repealed. He's not worried about it being defunded or delayed.
He got it signed into law. He signed it. His signature's on it. It's gonna happen. The Supreme Court's backed him up. Whatever goes on between now and that magic day of single payer, he doesn't care about. There are gonna be times he has to go out and act like he does. Yesterday was one of those. But he doesn't care. The irony of this is that this guy's supporters think he cares more about them than anybody ever has, and the people that voted for him, ditto.
But you know as well as I do, if you are a CEO or if you're a general manager, if you're a leader of a group and you have true believers, people that love you and want to look good to you, want to impress you, and also want you to succeed because they go along with you, they're gonna bust their rear ends to get what you want done. The fact that that didn't happen here is a testament to so many things. A, you've got nothing but glaring incompetence. People are just incapable of doing this. And there's no evidence anywhere that the people involved know how to do this.
Kathleen Sebelius doesn't know how to do this. She doesn't know how to do one thing that she's doing, not one. Neither does Obama. I betcha they didn't know they had a problem until it went live. They think magic happens because they did it. They might have been aware there would be glitches, I don't know. I think they're so incompetent and they love themselves so much, they have such a vaunted self-image and self-view of themselves that whatever they touch is gonna turn to gold.
Now, our old buddy Jim Pethokoukis. We interviewed him, by the way, for the upcoming next issue of the Limbaugh Letter, and he had a great observation about what Sebelius said last week when these problems erupted. I don't know what Stack I put it in, but let me paraphrase. She said, "I got hold of the IT team, and I told them to double down and give us 150% effort to fix this." And his point was who in the world talks that way? In fact, his exact quote: "How people who've never run anything talk," and he quotes Sebelius. "I called on the contractor to get its A team here and give us 150%."
He said Democrats speak this way. Obama speaks this way. Sometimes due to the fact they haven't run anything. Sometimes it's because they know the audience has never run anything. It's the difference between a young wild-eyed Buffalo Bills fan saying, "We're gonna beat the 49ers by 30 and Vegas oddsmakers favoring the 49ers by 13." That's one way of looking at it. But they don't know what they're doing, folks. There's not one of them that does.
I used Steve Jobs as an example. Apple at one time had this Internet services division called MobileMe. It was the forerunner to what they now call iCloud. I was a customer and it was many things. It was a sync service for all of your contacts, calendars, e-mail address, and account settings that would keep 'em synced from device to device, from computer to computer. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn't. It mostly never reached its full potential. One day Jobs called the whole team in, and they think they're in there to get some praise and a couple of attaboys, and Jobs says, "Can somebody in this room tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?"
And one of these bright-eyed team members raises his hand, Jobs called on him, and the guy spells out exactly what it's supposed to do, and Jobs says, "Can you tell me why the hell it doesn't do any of that?" And he let everybody go. He disbanded the team. And it was working 150% better than what this is. Those of you, again, who have led groups of people who know they're working on your baby, this is your deal, this is your life, this is what you want more than anything in the world right now. I'm talking about people loyal to you. Not everybody is, but the people that are loyal to you want you to look good. They want to look good in your eyes. They want you to succeed because they will go with you as that happens. They might also make a name for themselves.
It's an all-in for a great potential positive outcome. Everybody is hoping to please. They're just working overtime, whatever it takes. And that's how greatness happens. Hard work and people just busting their butts with passion, that could not have been present here or this wouldn't have happened. If all of that was present, if there was everything I just described, then the only explanation is glaring incompetence, which is entirely possible and is probably the real cause. There just isn't anybody. They are the equivalent of people in the faculty lounge at Harvard sitting around theorizing on how the private sector screws up and cheats everybody and lies to everybody and rips everybody off, and if they ran the show this how it'd be better. And they find they're running the show and they don't know what they're doing.
Nobody in this regime's got any private sector experience because they hate the private sector. They despise it. They think it's the problem. Just like the United States is the problem in the world, the private sector is the problem in the US economy. The private sector is the root of inequality. The private sector is the root of unfairness and racism and sexism and inequality. It's where all the bad stuff is, is the private sector. So why would you get anybody from there? You know better anyway because you have a bigger heart, you have more compassion. And the private sector would never try to give insurance to everybody, and the private sector would never try to make it affordable, and the private sector, they don't do anything but kill their customers anyway. We're better people.
They don't know what they're doing. But don't you find it strange that after three years of this you can't find one person, not one person who apparently cared enough about this to make Obama look good? Not one person. But that's not even possible, either, because bureaucracies just split things up into so many different groups. It's just not possible to achieve what they tried to accomplish.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, let me, ladies and gentlemen, offer a counter theory to my just-explained flawless theory, because there is another possibility. Do you remember in the debates when Romney said to Obama, "Why do you always pick losers?" He was talking about Obama's green tech choices, like Solyndra, all of the wind and solar energy companies that Obama chose to give money to that went belly up, and they all did. They all went belly up. And Obama, as a side note, ended up getting some of that money back because those people then became donors. They all got rich, but the companies went belly up. Romney was talking about Obama's green tech choices, but you know it's true about everything Obama does.
This is just a counter theory, a countervailing theory. With incompetence, every now and then you would get something right. But Obama never does. I'm not talking about legislation. I'm talking about when Obama attempts to take over something in the private sector on the theory that he knows better or that he's in touch with the future and he's gonna move us forward, everything he picks goes belly up. Obama, Sebelius, Pelosi, Reid, they have all talked about their desire to go to a single-payer system. And I'm telling you, that's where Obama is confident this is gonna end up. That's why he doesn't care about any of this minutia. It is why he doesn't give a darn about it because he knows where it's gonna end up, and what if that, as I've even said so myself on previous programs, is not the plan?
Now that the government is legally in charge of health care, what's so bad about it screwing up so bad, so much, that people demand it be simplified? And what would simplify it? Get rid of these insurance companies, for God's sakes, that's where all the confusion is. You have this company here and that policy there and this deductible over here. Just get rid of that, let the government do it. What if that's what's going on? It could very well be, 'cause you know they all want single payer. And Obama has told his union buddies it's gonna take five, 10, maybe 15 years to get there, that the American people wouldn't accept it if it were just legislated on 'em, but if they end up demanding it out of a mess like this, that's what they're gunning for.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We're already here into the third hour and I already fall behind in where I intended to be in alerting you to some of the reports in the Drive-By Media that reflect anger, panic, sadness, disappointment over the state of Obamacare and particularly HealthCare.gov. It really is stunning. We sit around and we think that all these media people, they're just on the same page as the Democrats, and they are. They're all the Democrat Party. They're all hacks. Just some of them act as journalists. Others are in the cabinet. Others in the regime. Others in think tanks. They're all Democrats and they're all oriented toward one thing, and that's the advancing of the leftist agenda.
And then we also assume that they're all competent and that they're all strategic, and they're all on the same page, all coordinated, and that they all either get marching orders or they're so like-minded they don't need marching orders, and they're all true believers. So we all assume that they really do believe that tax increases on the rich are not going to affect them but they're gonna hurt the people they don't like. They actually end up believing this, for example. They think that just because Obama's their guy and really is god, there really is messianic attachment, that if he comes up with a health care plan, it's desperately needed, and only he could have done it, and if he did it, it is going to be flawless.
Then the real world shows up and they scratch their heads yet again and don't get it. And that's where we are. They have these arrogant, almost, expectations, combined with a condescending attitude toward people that disagree with 'em. People that say, "No, it can't work," are automatically rejected as kooks, extremists, entertainers, or what have you, and they are set out to be destroyed, criticized, ripped to shreds, what have you. And the critics are always borne out to be right. Yet the critics are never acknowledged, and the true believers end up having to report some things they just don't understand. Then they get really worried, which is where they are now. Not worried that it isn't gonna work; worried that it might be a setback for the advancement of the agenda.
They're not worried they've done the wrong thing. Don't misunderstand me. They don't think they've screwed up. They don't think their dream is unrealistic. It's not that. It's just they can never believe that their philosophy doesn't work. Despite all the historical, empirical, worldwide evidence, they just can never believe it. So that takes me to the Stack, and we'll go to some sound bites to illustrate this.
Ron Fournier, National Journal, White House correspondent and AP bureau chief, " Why Obama Should Be Freaked Out Over Obamacare." It ran yesterday. He has five points here. "President Obama said Monday he's 'frustrated' by the disastrous launch of an online computer marketplace for Obamacare. Here are five reasons why frustration isn't enough. He should be frightened. 1. It's worse than his team has let on." See, Obama hasn't even been told how bad it is.
"The White House has tried to position the failed first days of Obamacare as mere hiccups caused by the site's popularity. Obama called them 'kinks.' An administration spokesman told the Washington Post on Sunday that the 'main driver of the problem is volume.' This is intentionally misleading.
"The White House has heard complaints from insurance companies, consumers, and health policy experts about issues embedded deeply in the online system. ... The administration refuses to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange, the key metric for determining how well the online service is working. ... There are two possible explanations for the Obama administration's unconscionable lack of transparency." What do you mean, unconscionable lack of transparency? This is common!
Anyway. There are two possible explanations for it. "Their process is so screwed up that they don't have the data, which would be embarrassing. Or they have the data -- and it's embarrassing." And it's the latter. They know how bad it is and it is embarrassing but they say just give us three weeks and we'll take care of it.
"2. This is the easy part. Finding and motivating people to take action online is the founding strength of Team Obama." See, this takes me back to the beginning. This is exactly what's wrong with this. This is what is not present. I'm gonna say this again, and those of you who lead groups of people know this, or if you work for a leader of people, you know that if you are the leader or if you work for the leader, that leader is hell bent on something happening, really wants it. And if you respect that leader, if you're on that leader's team, and you want your team to surpass all the other teams, you bust your butt to get it done. You do it because you're devoted to the project. You do it because you're devoted to the cause. You do it because you're devoted to the guy, or the girl, the leader. You do it because your heart is in it, this is it.
That's what's missing here. And all the while, we've been assuming that this is the kind of leadership Obama inspires, and it obviously isn't. This finding and motivating people to take action online is the founding strength of Team Obama. This is what they do best. Obviously it isn't. Obviously it's not. That's what's really missing here. "Managing a complex law is a different matter, and it's fair to question whether the president and his team are up to it."
So what Fournier is saying is, they're perfectly motivated, these true believers are there. They've been busting their rear ends to make Obama look good. Maybe they just can't. Maybe it just can't be done. (interruption) Whose decision was it to make it so complex? Are you thinking Obama? Well, wrong question. He doesn't care. He doesn't care. Obama didn't get into details. Obama said, "Give me a national health care plan." This thing had been in a drawer of some staffers for 20 years. This health care plan was already -- how many pages is this? Over 2,000 pages, they didn't start writing this when Obama was elected. This thing's been a wet dream in somebody's drawer for 20 years, waiting for the right time to implement it.
I mean, this is a bureaucrat's orgasm. All these departments, all these regulations, all these whereases and ifs, ands, and buts and therefores and why nots and "as the secretary shall determine." It's an absolute mess. It was already written. Obama doesn't care about the complexity. He's not a detail guy. He doesn't care. The only thing that mattered to him was getting it passed and signed into law, and after that everything takes care of itself while he's on the golf course. So these glitches, yeah, he may make somebody's head roll over this but that's not even a -- all of this is so much smoke and mirrors.
Number three in Fournier's list. "It reflects poorly on the president. Nobody expects the chief executive to be reviewing computer code or hosting East Room 'hackathons.' But this falls on him." Exactly right. It goes to my point at the beginning of the program. It reflects poorly on the president. It reflects poorly on the leader. Why couldn't the true believers make it happen? My point is, he is not inspirational. He is not what they've been telling us he is. I'm not making a big deal of this. He's not running for election, can't campaign against him anymore. I'm just interested in truth here. He's not all of these superhuman things he was portrayed to be. He's just another incompetent liberal. That's all he is, with a little radical thrown in and a lot of Alinsky thrown in, and he's a dangerous incompetent radical.
We don't even have any successful stories of Obama as a community organizer. I mean, this whole thing, all of this, is giant buildup, great expectations, and, of course, the reality is it is a dud. Reflects poorly on the president. Yes, it does.
Number four, "It reflects poorly on government." Yeah, I'd say so. And, see, these are the things that worry these people. It looks bad for Obama. It looks bad for government. It's worse than they've let on. And number five: "It could hurt Americans. For decades, politicians in both parties pledged to ease one of the leading causes of anxiety in the post-industrial age, the lack of affordable health care." This was supposed to end that anxiety, and it has not ended it. It's made it more expensive and added to the anxiety. Why, you mean like most of liberalism does? Most liberalism hurts the people it sets out to help. That's what's so flummoxing to all of us who pay attention to this.
Liberalism hurts people. Liberalism inflicts a lot of pain on people. It destroys ambition; it breaks up families; it creates destitution; it creates dependency; it destroys dignity, all in the guise of compassion. Liberalism assumes everybody else is incompetent. "How sadly ironic it would be if Obamacare is denied a fair shake because of its namesake's mismanagement." The final concern of Mr. Fournier, how sadly ironic it would be if Obamacare is denied a fair shake. What is a fair shake? They've had three years! Because of its namesake's mismanagement. So it's all on him.
AP, Julie Pace: "White House Lying About Obamacare Enrollment Numbers." And she really lays into 'em here about how they're totally lying about the enrollment and how few it really is and about how it's nowhere near enough to run this program. There aren't nearly enough people who've enrolled who have committed to buying insurance. There's not nearly enough money coming in. This is gonna end up forcing people into the system. That's the endgame, I think, for this, obviously.
UK Daily Mail. "'Stay away from Healthcare.gov for at least another month': Obamacare loses major cheerleader as Consumer Reports mag issues scathing advice." Now, Consumer Reports, I don't know why, but it's where people go to figure out what washer and dryer to buy or what car to buy or what this or that. Not gonna question it. I could. Not gonna go there. Wouldn't be prudent. They're big Obamacare boosters. Consumer Reports, big Obamacare everywhere. And they're saying stay away from it.
I mean, Consumer Reports, I don't want to insult any of you people out there, low-information Mecca. Well, maybe not. I don't know. I shouldn't say that. Why do I get myself in these messes? Just leave it at Consumer Reports says don't go there. Fine. If they are gospel for you, you keep looking at 'em that way.
And this in the Washington Post. They have a poll. "Majority believe health care Web site problems indicate broader issue with law -- Most Americans say the rocky start for HealthCare.gov is a harbinger of bigger problems for the Affordable Care Act, according to results of a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Fifty-six percent of Americans say the Web site problems are part of a broader problem."
I don't know how they fix this unless this is all smoke and mirrors and we're being set up for a massive fix in three weeks that looks miraculous. What do you think of that possibility? You give them that kind of -- (interruption) No? Okay. All right.
And then Politico: "5 Obamacare Questions Kathleen Sebelius Won't Answer." I can't even believe the Politico thought of 'em. I really can't. "5 Obamacare Questions Kathleen Sebelius Won't Answer." One, what's actually wrong with this? With HealthCare.gov. What's wrong with the website? Just tell us that. When will it be fixed? Will the regime delay the individual mandate? That's question three for her. Question four: How many people have actually enrolled? They will not answer that. Number five: Why didn't you have a good backup plan? They're the government. They don't have to have a backup plan.
So, according to reports, five million lines of computer code has to be fixed in Obamacare. That's more than a few glitches. Five million lines. And those five million lines are gonna have to be coordinated with all the different software writers? Oh, my goodness. As Rumsfeld would say, "Oh, my goodness, why, that's just unbelievable, Dick." (laughing) Five million lines, three weeks.
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