Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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brian blase
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michael bennet
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mimi geerges
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robert f kennedy-jr
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donna in texas
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Funding Sources Matter00:03:45
unidentified
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Paragon, I founded it about three and a half years ago, and we are a health policy research institute that is dedicated to evaluating how government programs are working and developing sets of reforms that empower patients and really reform government programs by changing incentives so that people are oriented and sort of all the actors oriented at getting as much value out of the system as possible.
We're a nonprofit, so we're funded by individuals and foundations.
It doesn't matter what you come here and say that isn't true, that's not reflective of what you really believe, that you haven't said over decade after decade after decade, because unlike other jobs we're confirming around this place,
this is a job where it is life and death for the kids that I used to work for in the Denver public schools and for families all over this country that are suffering from living in the richest country of the world that can't deliver basic health care and basic mental health care to them.
unidentified
It's too important for the games that you're playing, Mr. Kennedy.
And I hope my colleagues will say to the president, I have no influence over him.
Yeah, I think one of the main problems in what the government has put out in terms of nutrition advice is the food pyramid.
If you go back to when the food pyramid was created several decades ago, right, it really emphasized the heavy carbohydrate diet.
And it really overplayed problems with fat.
And what we've learned now from nutrition science is that that was the exact wrong guidance to be giving to American families.
We didn't need to have high sugar, high carbohydrate diets, that the excess sugar is really what's problematic.
So I think, you know, if I'm looking at it from a sort of what should they do first, you should look at what is the government initially doing, what information are they putting out so that they're providing Americans with better information about what they put into their bodies.
But going back to the chemicals such as food dyes, preservatives, is that something that you feel that the government should mandate be out of our food supply?
And you agree with him that it should be the same with vaccines, that you should just make whatever choice on vaccines without the government telling you these are the vaccines that are recommended or required.
Well, I think there's differences with like the COVID vaccine and the requirements that the government put on the COVID vaccine and certainly like the mandate to have military members.
We'll start with Catherine in Cleves, Ohio, Democrat.
Good morning, Catherine.
unidentified
Good morning, Sufim.
I'm a longtime listener, and I call pretty frequently.
But my statements are: first, we have plenty of money in our health care system.
The problem is that we have CEOs and stockholders who take all the cream, and then we're left with just whey for the people who pay the bills.
I'm 76 years old.
I'm on Medicare.
I'm handicapped now on oxygen 24 hours a day.
And I see my health care benefits falling apart and not being able to get the things that I need.
We have plenty of money in health care.
It's just that we need to be, what would I say?
It's you make no profits off of health care.
Health care should go all to the people.
And my second one is, I question your views on how you think that Mr. Kennedy is qualified.
If this was 100 years ago, we would say he was a snake oil salesman.
He changes.
We can't really depend on what he says because he won't even admit to the things he said in the past because it doesn't meet his criteria today because he's trying to get a job in the Trump administration.
If he was trying to get a job in someone else's administration, he would be singing a different song.
Yeah, so on topic number one, I agree there is plenty of money in the health care system.
I think that profits are fine.
Profits are actually good.
We want to have a profit motive and suppliers that can make a profit by providing better health care services, by developing innovative products to get them to consumers.
But the profits that many in the health care industry get now are not the result of providing value to a consumer.
They're about how much lobbying power they have in Washington.
So a lot of these groups, insurers, hospitals, they get more money from the government than they do from the private sector.
And the resources that are allocated to them are more a function of the lobbying power that those individuals, that those organizations have, rather than the value that they provide.
On Mr. Kennedy, see, he would be an appointee of President Trump.
So on areas that they disagree, and abortion is one of them, the president sets the policy agenda.
And his appointees, the cabinet officials, and all of the people that work in the White House, they have to follow the agenda that the president puts out.
The president was elected.
He got 77 million votes.
And part of that was an embrace of this Make America Healthy Again movement, which was really spearheaded by Robert Kennedy.
Sarah is next in Edgewater, Maryland, Independent Line.
Hi, Sarah.
unidentified
Yeah, good morning.
You mentioned earlier that there was a dye that was removed from the Food and Drug Administration.
They have known for decades that that dye causes cancer in rats.
And the question is, why would they even allow this to be in food when they know that, right?
Because this has, in some cases, probably caused cancer.
Then the second thing is healthcare in America, call it profit care.
And as you said, there is such a thing as people should make some money.
However, there's a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse going on.
And, you know, when you look at every major insurance company that offers Medicare Advantage plans, they have actively defrauded the federal government by tens of billions of dollars a year and have gotten away with it.
And there has been absolutely no consequence.
The government should shut down an insurance age, an insurance company, when they actively defraud the federal government.
Why are companies allowed to continue to offer Medicare Advantage plan when they have defrauded the federal government?
That I think should be addressed.
And then the last thing that I wanted to say is a lot of doctor offices today do not do their own billing anymore.
And I have experienced this by talking to people who work for these outside companies that do the billing for the doctor office.
And there's a lot of fraud involved in that, too, where employees get incentivized by adding additional, you know, costs to the total bill by adding procedures and changing the coding that's being used, you know, so that they can make more money.
I think that what he's trying to do and what President Trump is trying to put in place is the warnings to let everyone know about the number three red die that Bobby has known for how many years did he say 30.
I could be wrong on that, but there's no telling what we don't know.
unidentified
I think that with his health condition that he has studied, this has been his cup of tea, so to speak.
He has done his research.
He's written six books on nutrition.
He's very active, and he's exactly right.
I'm always envious of seeing people in China be so much smaller than the people in the United States.
There's things I could do myself, but I also know that President Trump is trying to get these warnings out, get his cabinet in place to give you the warnings, not to tell you that you can't go to McDonald's.
It's a choice thing, just like your Amendment One that gives you the right to speak.
So, Lynn, like the previous caller mentioned, sort of the craziness with the health care billing structure, I agree.
That's a pry because we have too much that runs through bureaucracy and insurers.
Just to step back and give you some context on the Department of Health and Human Services, it is a massive federal department.
It's got 80,000 employees.
If you think about the federal budget, the Medicare program, the Medicaid program run through the Department of Health and Human Services, and you've got all the public health agencies.
So you've got NIH, FDA, and CDC.
So it is impossible for any one man on the planet to know everything about all the health care programs that are managed by the Department of Health and Human Services.
So you've got a set of other people who have been appointed, selected by President Trump.
Dr. Oz at CMS, Marty McCary at FDA, Jay Bhattacharya at NIH, for example.
And these are very serious, reform-minded individuals that I think are going to be really great leaders at the individual agencies within HHS and provide good recommendations both to the Secretary as well as to the President.
Are you concerned at all about the potential cuts in the federal workforce in that department impacting the services they're able to give to the American people?
Jeff in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Democrat, good morning, Jeff.
unidentified
Hi, I'm Brian.
I wanted to know if you promote the restrictions they're trying to put on the people on the government food stamps about restrictions what they can buy in supermarkets when it comes to sweets, whether it's ice cream, chips, or sodas, because we have an overweight president that's drinking eight cans of diet soda a day, and he's addicted to fast food.
Now, I work out.
I have great blood sugar.
I should be entitled to buy what I want in the supermarket.
You know what I mean?
A lot of these people voted for him.
You know what?
I hope these are the people that he hurts the most.
So there is a policy debate now on whether the SNAP program, whether enrollees in that program should be restricted from using that benefit on sugary sodas, on sweets.
Really a substantial percentage of the spending on that program goes to those consumption of those products.
There is also a sense that money is fungible and people will use their own money on those products.
I myself, my view is that I think it's okay for the government to place restrictions on a government benefit.
So if the government studies this and thinks that there is a problem with too much overconsumption of sugar, soda, and sweets, which clearly there is in the country to place limits on that welfare benefit, then that sounds like a reasonable public policy to me.
Here's another Jeff, this time in Bayville, New York, Independent Line.
unidentified
Thank you, Meety.
Mr. Plays, I'd like to point out to you that you said that there's no disagreement apparently between people understanding that the measles vaccine and the polio vaccine are working.
But that's not true.
Mr. Kennedy has been opposed to those specific vaccines.
That's been brought out in the hearings yesterday.
He says though with his own words when the senators recount what he has said and then confront him with that, and then he changes his mind suddenly because he's been offered the job, which also has been pointed out, part of the sick affair she He's a very dangerous man to have his HHS secretary.
It couldn't be worse because there's a very great concern, for example, that H5N1 could turn into a pandemic at some point.
Hopefully, it won't.
But there's certainly tremendous concern in the public health community that it would.
Do we want somebody like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the vaccine program at a time when that vaccine will save millions of lives?
Clearly, I mean, if you just look at the experience in the pandemic, there were a lot of government recommendations that came out from closing of schools to the six-foot distance guidelines that had no scientific basis at all, but were promoted at the time as being backed by science.
So I think there is like science is a process.
Science is evolving.
It is evaluating what the evidence is.
And I think there are good studies that are well designed, that have control groups that you can draw definitive conclusions from.
And then there are studies that are weak, much weaker, and that they may come to a conclusion, but because of the study's design, you can't really draw conclusions from them.
I have a PhD in the sciences, and I think that Robert Kennedy is a good choice only for the purpose of radical transparency.
I think there's been a massive loss in trust in institutions, and a lot of that is actually well-founded.
And to people who are opposed to him, I just think that there needs to need to understand that, well, when you have the previous NIH having their discussions about the lab wards or they're saying they're 50-50, or if it comes out of China, we'll never know because we don't know a whistleblower.
And then they go publicly and they say it definitely didn't come out of China.
It's a conspiracy theory.
You have the new incoming head of, I believe, NIH Dave Atacharia, who was actively censored by the previous head of, I think it's the NIH, that would be Fauci and Collins.
These are the things that are the seeds that will sow distrust in the expert class.
And the fact that the expert class hasn't been able to latch onto that and realize that they need to go through a season of transparency if they're ever going to regain their credibility is really astounding to me the amount that they've fought back and pushed back against that.
And I think C-SPAN can help.
Emily Knope at Open or U.S. Right to Know has done great work on this in terms of getting the documents, whether it's the DARPA grant that basically looks a lot like the genetic sequence of the COVID-19 that just shows that there's a lot of evidence that was suppressed for a long time, and even the media hasn't really been forthcoming with it.
And if you all can do that, we'll get to a place where people can trust experts again.
I think there is a severe lack of trust in the public health authorities, Largely because of the pandemic response and that transparency, both in public health and really more broadly throughout the health sector, will help the American people have more confidence in the recommendations that they get from experts.
All right, Brian Blaise is president of Paragon Health Institute, former White House National Economic Council policy advisor in the first Trump administration.