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unidentified
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Earlier today, Kash Patel faced questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on his nomination to be the next director of the FBI. | |
| You can watch the full confirmation hearing tonight at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
| It's also available to watch for free on the C-SPAN Now video app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Brian Blaize. | ||
| He's president of Paragon Health Institute, formerly White House National Economic Council policy advisor in the first Trump administration. | ||
| Brian, welcome. | ||
| Amy, thanks for having me. | ||
| Just to ask about Paragon Health Institute, your mission and your funding. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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 Found Day Paragon takes no corporate or industry funding. | ||
| And why did you feel the need to create Paragon Health? | ||
| Was it, like, what are the issues that you're trying to solve? | ||
| Health policy is, I think, the most important domestic policy issue facing the country. | ||
| It's a huge part of family budgets. | ||
| It's a huge part of what the federal government does, a huge part of what states do. | ||
| And policies are not working for the American people. | ||
| They're not working for patients. | ||
| The quality of health care is often underwhelming. | ||
| And they're not working for sort of the hardworking American families and the taxpayers that are financing these programs. | ||
| So there's a lot of things broken that need to be fixed. | ||
| Why is it? | ||
| Why is health care so expensive in this country? | ||
| And as you said, the quality is not there. | ||
| I mean, that's a very, I could go and answer that for a long time. | ||
| What's the biggest reason? | ||
| I mean, a lot of it goes back to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. | ||
| They used cost-based reimbursement. | ||
| So hospitals were getting as much from the payer as they claimed their costs to be, which led to a very inflationary increase. | ||
| And we've really separated the end user of health care from the price of those services. | ||
| 90% of what we spend in health care comes from third-party payers. | ||
| It comes from the government bureaucracy or it comes from health insurance companies. | ||
| So we've created this big wedge between the supplier, the producer of the service, and the user of that service. | ||
| And there's a lot of sort of intermediaries in the process, and some of them play valuable roles, and some of them, I think, are less valuable. | ||
| But they have just led to sort of escalating costs over the past really several decades. | ||
| I want to play you a portion of RFK Jr.'s confirmation hearing from yesterday. | ||
| He talked to senators. | ||
| This is Senator Michael Bennett. | ||
| He's a Democrat of Colorado talking about his previous views on health issues. | ||
| And then I'll get your response. | ||
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unidentified
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Did you say that COVID-19 was a genetically engineered bioweapon that targets black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people? | |
| I didn't say it was deliberately targeted. | ||
| I just quoted an NIH-funded and NIH published study. | ||
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unidentified
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Did you say that it targets black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews? | |
| I quoted a study, or I quoted an NIH study that showed that as certain phrases. | ||
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unidentified
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I have to move on. | |
| Did you say that Lyme disease is highly likely a materially engineered bioweapon? | ||
| I made sure I put in the highly likely. | ||
| Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon? | ||
| I probably did say that. | ||
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unidentified
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Did you say that? | |
| I want all of our colleagues to hear it, Mr. Kennedy. | ||
| I want them to hear it. | ||
| You said yes. | ||
| Did you say that exposure to pesticides causes children to become transgender? | ||
| No, I never said that. | ||
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unidentified
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Okay, I have the record that I'll give to the chairman, and he can make his judgment about what you said. | |
| Did you write in your book, and it's undeniable, that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS? | ||
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unidentified
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Yes or no, Mr. Kennedy? | |
| I'm not sure if I may say that. | ||
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unidentified
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Okay, I'll give it to the chairman, Mr. Kennedy. | |
| And my final question, did you say on a podcast, and I quote, I wouldn't leave it, abortion, to the states. | ||
| My belief is we should leave it to the woman. | ||
| We shouldn't have the government involved, even if it's full term. | ||
| Did you say that, Mr. Kennedy? | ||
| Senator, I believe that every abortion is a tragedy. | ||
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unidentified
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Did you say it, Mr. Kennedy? | |
| This matters. | ||
| 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. | ||
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unidentified
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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. | ||
| I hope my colleagues will say to the president, out of 330 million Americans, we can do better than this. | ||
| What do you think of that, Brian Blaze? | ||
| Well, it doesn't sound like Senator Bennett is ready to vote to confirm Mr. Kennedy as secretary. | ||
| I would say that, you know, I think the president selected Mr. Kennedy because of the compelling message around make America healthy again. | ||
| Which we'll talk about. | ||
| But I wanted to ask you, do you believe that he is qualified for that position? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| He was selected by the president, and I think he is qualified. | ||
| Do you believe he's qualified because he was selected by the president or because of his qualifications? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think both. | ||
| The president vetted candidates for that position. | ||
| It's a really important position. | ||
| And I think that Mr. Kennedy brings certain attributes and skills to that position that are going to be a good fit to be secretary. | ||
| Make America Healthy Again. | ||
| Walk us through some of those key points. | ||
| So I think, first of all, it's diagnosing the state of American health. | ||
| And if you look at many measures of American health, one of the principal ones being life expectancy, we've been in decline. | ||
| So starting in 2014 for three straight years, life expectancy in the U.S. declined. | ||
| And then, of course, we had the pandemic and the tragedy around the pandemic. | ||
| So life expectancy is lower now than it was a decade ago. | ||
| And I think you've got an increase in many chronic diseases, diabetes, obesity. | ||
| I think during the hearing yesterday, about two out of three Americans struggle with obesity or overweight. | ||
| And there are sort of problems with children too, both in terms of I think a third of kids overweight or obese, as well as a lot of mental health challenges that were severely exacerbated during the lockdowns in the pandemic. | ||
| So you think you have a lot of, I mean, American health has stagnated over the last 15 years, and I think public policy has failed to recognize that. | ||
| It's been focused on very different things in health policy. | ||
| And I think he's going to reorient the conversation back to what matters for American health. | ||
| And we'll take your calls for Brian Blaise talking about health policy. | ||
| Our lines are by party: Democrats 202748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| Mr. Kennedy mentioned getting chemicals out of food. | ||
| That would require regulation of the food industry. | ||
| What kind of regulation do you think is needed right now? | ||
| Well, I mean, and also it overlaps with the USDA and the guidance that the federal government puts out. | ||
| I mean, puts out to consumers. | ||
| Puts out to consumers. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, I think 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 body. | ||
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unidentified
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C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington to across the country. |