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May 3, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
17:57
Ep. 295 - Can Trump Focus On What Matters?
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Hillary Clinton is back.
She announced on Tuesday that she takes responsibility for losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.
Well, sort of.
According to the newly defanged former Democratic leader, she takes quote, absolute personal responsibility for her loss, but she adds that quote, I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey's letter on October 28th and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off.
If the election had been on October 27th, I would be your president.
But aside from that, she takes responsibility.
She also added that places that didn't vote for her couldn't get, quote, cell coverage for a mile.
Um, no.
What does she have going on next?
She says, I'm now back to being an activist citizen and part of the resistance.
Really?
What exactly is she resisting?
Is this Rogue One?
She dragged her party down almost single-handed in the last election cycle.
Now she wants to be part of the cool kids crowd again.
This is precisely what's wrong with Hillary Clinton and what her husband understood.
You can't hijack a popular movement with which you had nothing to do.
Bernie Sanders?
Maybe.
Hillary Clinton?
No.
But perhaps Hillary still has 2020 ambitions.
Those rumors are still floating out there, and right now the three leading 2020 candidates for the Democrats are all around her age.
Elizabeth Warren, who's a young...
67, Joe Biden, who's 74 years old, and Bernie Sanders, who's 75 years old.
She is a youthful 69.
What's to stop her from running again?
Herein lies the problem for the Democrats.
All of their top names are old fogies with no youth appeal, other than the geriatrics nutso socialist who isn't technically a Democrat.
Their youth movement, however, has no exact target.
It's just a lot of people angry about a lot of different things, complaining about the evils of patriarchal, heterosexist, cis-normative society.
Hillary cannot lead that bunch.
Republicans should be very excited to see Hillary back in play.
Just as they should be excited that Barack Obama is making a comeback.
Obama and Hillary helped raise a generation of Democrats.
Now they'll salt the earth.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, tons to talk about today.
I want to talk at length about Jimmy Kimmel's pitch for Obamacare last night on his program and what it meant to me, because I think I have some personal experience in this area that is relevant.
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Okay, so the talk of the town yesterday was Jimmy Kimmel late night and he was telling a story about his son.
He has a newborn son who tragically has a heart condition and he was brought to Children's Hospital.
He had to have emergency heart surgery.
I guess he was born maybe at Children's Hospital or at least they transferred him over there.
And Jimmy Kimmel tells this story and then he turns it into a pitch for Obamacare.
And I want to talk about this because I have some personal thoughts on the matter.
A little over a week ago on Friday, April 21st, my wife, Molly, gave birth to a boy, a baby boy, and he appeared to be a normal, healthy baby until about three hours after he was born, when a very attentive nurse at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, her name is Ninoosh, was checking him out and heard a murmur in his heart, which is common with newborn babies, but she also noticed he was a bit purple.
They did an x-ray, and his lungs were fine, which meant his heart wasn't.
So now more doctors and nurses and equipment come in and it's a terrifying thing.
You know, my wife is back in the recovery room.
She has no idea what's going on.
And I'm standing in the middle of a lot of very worried-looking people, kind of like right now, who are trying to figure out what the problem is.
It's Friday night, and so they call a pediatric cardiologist, Dr. Eben Zahn.
They did an echocardiogram, which is a sonogram of the heart, and found that Billy was born with a heart disease.
Something called Tetralogy of Fallot with Pulmonary Atresia.
It's hard to explain.
Basically, the pulmonary valve was completely blocked, and he has a hole in the wall between the left and right sides of his heart.
And then they brought my wife in, and they wheeled her in, and Dr. Zahn told her what was going on and what our options were.
And we decided to take him to Children's Hospital, where there's a world-renowned cardiac surgeon who is, by all accounts, a genius.
His name is Dr. Vaughn Starnes.
So we put the baby in an ambulance to Children's Hospital Los Angeles.
And on Monday morning, Dr. Starnes opened his chest and fixed one of the two defects in his heart.
He went in there with a scalpel and did some kind of magic that I couldn't even begin to explain.
He opened the valve, and the operation was a success.
It was the longest three hours of my life.
And I have a list of people I want to thank for making that happen.
And I hope I have my list.
These are just some of the people who played a part in this.
It was an enormous team effort.
It really was.
And I want to say one other thing.
President Trump last month proposed a $6 billion cut in funding to the National Institute of Health.
And thank God our congressman made a deal last night to not go along with that.
They actually increased funding by $2 billion.
The people who have been affected by those cuts in the National Institute of Health are children, and it would have a major impact on a lot of great places, including Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, which is so unbelievably sad to me.
We were brought up to believe that we live in the greatest country in the world, but until a few years ago, millions and millions of us had no access to health insurance at all.
You know, before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you'd never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre-existing condition.
You were born with a pre-existing condition.
If your parents didn't have medical insurance, you might not live long enough to even get denied because of a pre-existing condition.
If your baby is going to die, and it doesn't have to, It shouldn't matter how much money you make.
I think that's something that, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right?
Okay, so, I have some experiences here and I want to talk about them.
And I don't really talk about this a lot because I don't like to make my family life An issue on the show and in politics generally.
Okay, a couple of years ago.
This would have been mid of 2015.
My daughter was born in January 2014.
Mid 2015, like July 2015.
My daughter was born in January 2014, mid-2015, like July 2015.
My daughter, who is a beautiful little girl, she has the flu, and she starts throwing up.
And when she's throwing up, she's fainting.
And we don't know why.
And so we take her into the... It's very scary.
I mean, she's like keeling over, literally fainting dead away while she's throwing up.
And it turns out that it was breath holding.
We didn't know that.
So we go to the ER.
And they do a bunch of tests on her.
And one of the tests they do is they run an EKG on her.
And they say the EKG looks basically normal, but we just want to have some follow-ups and send us to a cardiologist.
And the cardiologist takes a second look and does an ultrasound and then tells us that She has a heart murmur, not just a heart murmur, it's actually such a large hole in her heart, she had an atrial septal defection, ASD, and she had a heart murmur that was so, you couldn't even hear it because the hole in her heart was so large that you couldn't actually, normally the heart murmur comes from, you hear the blood flowing the wrong way through the heart, you couldn't hear it because the hole was so large in her heart.
So, in August of last year, she had to, or August of 2015 rather, she had to have open heart surgery.
The surgeon was Dr. Vaughn Starnes, exactly the same surgeon who worked on Jimmy Kimmel's kid.
It was at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.
Could not be more grateful to Children's Hospital LA, or Dr. Starnes, who is indeed the master of his craft.
There's a reason he's the best in the world, and we were lucky enough to be able to work with him, and he obviously did the work, and saved our daughter's life.
I mean, she wouldn't have died immediately.
It wasn't like an emergency situation quite as much as Jimmy Kimmel's kid, it sounds like.
But she would have had failure to thrive as she got older.
She would have had to have open heart surgery.
If they hadn't detected it, it would have shortened her lifespan to, you know, 30 or 40.
Now they fixed it.
She's good as new.
Thank God everything is fine and she's great.
The reason that I tell this story is because when Jimmy Kimmel starts talking about the National Institutes for Health and federal funding and health insurance and all the rest of this, the reason that I was able to get great coverage for my kid is because I was employed and also because my wife and I had health insurance long before we had a kid.
He's missing a couple of key points here and I wanted to establish sort of the bonafides here.
So when I'm speaking about this, I'm not speaking from the perspective of someone who hasn't experienced nearly identically what Jimmy Kimmel has experienced here.
It was absolutely terrifying.
I mean, you go and you meet with the doctor and the doctor tells you your kid, you know, even if the doctor says it's a surgery that's done regularly, it's still frightening as all hell because they're cracking open your kid's chest and cutting her open and, you know, it was hooking her up to tubes.
It was really terrifying and horrifying.
And thank God she's okay.
But the point is that when he immediately connects that to federal funding, when he immediately connects it to Obamacare, I don't like the process as a general rule.
I don't like the process of using personal stories like this to push for legislation or to push for public policy because it doesn't necessarily follow.
And what I mean by this is, again, Dr. Starnes, great doctor, Children's Hospital, great hospital.
Most of the people, when we were in Children's Hospital during the recovery, when we were in the ICU for about a week, when we were in Children's Hospital, most of the people who were in Children's Hospital, and I know this because my wife rotated through Children's Hospital because she's a doctor in the LA area, A huge number of the kids in Children's Hospital are not kids who have great insurance.
Many of them don't have any insurance.
The fact is that in the United States of America, if you have an emergency situation like Jimmy Kimmel had, let's just assume this happened at Cedars-Sinai, again, where my wife gave birth.
Let's assume that the exact same situation happened, but there was no insurance.
And the doctor spotted that there was this emergency surgery that had to happen in order to prolong the child's life.
They don't ask insurance.
They immediately send the kid over to Children's Hospital and Dr. Starnes works on the kid.
And then somebody else fills the gap.
Children's Hospital is very lucky and the Children's has enormous sums of giving.
People give tons of money to Children's Hospital.
I'm sure Jimmy Kimmel will too.
We've given charity to Children's Hospital.
People, there's a whole wall, an entire wall in Children's Hospital that is just names of celebrities who have given money to Children's Hospital to help support Children's Hospital.
People are generous with their giving.
People want to save people who are in need.
The problem with the argument that we have to cover pre-existing conditions, which is basically what Jimmy Kimmel is saying here.
Number one, when it comes to children, it is the job of the parents to have health insurance when the kid is born because the parent's health insurance covers the kid, right?
The fact is that my kid was not buying her own health insurance when she was a year and a half old.
We had health insurance.
It covered her.
That doesn't mean that if there's a gap that we as a community shouldn't step in.
That's what charity's for.
That's why hospitals cover the gap.
That's why costs are passed on very often through a backdoor method via the hospital to people who do have insurance.
But it does say that it is a mistake as a society to simply say to people that there is no moral responsibility to get health insurance while you're healthy and while you don't have health problems.
Because if you don't do that, if you just say whenever you get sick you can immediately take advantage of the system, People will wait to get sick to take advantage of the system and you'll end up bankrupting the system.
The reason the Children's is so great is because children get paid lots of money.
They get paid lots and lots and lots of money to do these sorts of things.
Dr. Starnes, I'm sure, earns millions of dollars a year, and he deserves every penny that he makes.
And he's able to do that because there are people paying voluntarily into health insurance to cover themselves.
So when something bad happens, he gets paid.
Dr. Starnes is not somebody who should be working for $60,000 a year like a postal worker.
If you do that to the health system, you're not going to be able to get the kinds of surgeries that Dr. Starnes provides or the kind of care that Children's Hospital provides.
And I think it's deeply important that when we talk about everybody getting the sort of care that Jimmy Kimmel's kid got or that my kid gets, in order for that to happen, you have to make it affordable and quality.
The only thing that does that is a free market.
And again, that doesn't mean there shouldn't be a safety net provided by a society.
I'm not even talking about through government now.
I'm talking about through charity and through communities and through charity hospitals.
All of that is true.
But to use a personal situation that is really difficult and heartbreaking in order to promulgate a public policy that actually doesn't achieve what you're seeking to achieve.
Children's is not worthwhile.
Children's Hospital could not be what Children's Hospital is if it existed as a public sector hospital unless you were willing to tax people up the wazoo and that sort of taxation scheme bankrupts countries and doesn't provide the same care anyway.
Look at the National Health Service in Britain or the Nationalized Healthcare Service in Canada.
This is... I have nothing but sympathy for Jimmy Kimmel because I've been through, as I say, exactly the same thing.
And it's heartbreaking.
And that heartbreak should not be used as a political tool in order to push a political agenda.
And I'm sure that Jimmy Kimmel believes every word that he's saying.
But funding for the National Institutes of Health has nothing to do with what happened here.
Again, the American people are insanely generous.
The amount of research that goes into the sorts of techniques that Dr. Sarnes used is tremendous, and it's not from the public sector in the most part.
It's actually from the private sector.
Okay, so I wanted to get that out of the way.
Before I go on here, I want to talk about May Day and what the left is showing of itself, and then I want to talk about the Trump budget.
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Okay, so, yesterday was, of course, May Day.
The winning internet meme of the day goes, of course, to Justin Timberlake, who immediately tweeted out, hey guys, it's May.
Which is amazing for people who don't remember the days of NSYNC and it's May, then you've missed out.
In any case, the communists on May Day decided that it was a perfect time to go out and rampage and loot things, demonstrating, of course, that tolerance is the greatest attribute of the people on the left.
Here's what it looked like at the protest in Portland.
Breaking news, May Day protests going on right now in several cities including Los Angeles and Washington State.
Things have started getting violent in Portland.
We're seeing pictures of several disturbances just in the last several minutes.
We should tell you, the official protest there, May Day protest, was actually cancelled by police because, police say, of the presence and the behavior of what they described as anarchists.
We've been watching now over the last several minutes a group of anywhere from a hundred or more People, many of them dressed in black.
Some have been setting fires.
There you see police trying to put out some of those fires.
Good times right there.
So the May Day folks, all the communists really demonstrating what kind of society they would like to build if they had the opportunity or the society they would like to destroy if they had the opportunity.
Every year in Seattle they have May Day violence and people throw things through windows and they protest against capitalism.
May Day I think is a good time for us to remember Let's say the hundred million people who died due to communism over the course of the 20th century.
I thought that the most amazing picture was from Venezuela on May Day.
There was some woman holding a May Day bag while waiting in line for a loaf of bread, which pretty much sums up the entire May Day thing.
The left keeps paying tribute to May Day.
It's absurd.
May Day is not a holiday.
May Day is a day of tragedy if we're talking about the rise of the communist left, which Has killed more people than all the religious wars in history.
So, uh, that is, uh, that is worth noting on the day after May.
Okay.
Well, I want to talk about President Trump and whether he is being effective, but we'll get to that.
You have to go over to dailywire.com right now.
I have a lot to talk about.
So we're gonna talk about the handmaid's tale.
We're going to talk about.
A piece of music that is obviously ripped off for Star Wars.
We're going to deconstruct the culture a little bit.
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