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ICE Officers and Protest Violence
00:15:22
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unidentified
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Trump Boulevard, in his honor. | |
| We'll bring you live coverage of the road naming here on C-SPAN. | ||
| That's scheduled to start at 3.15 p.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| While we wait for the rural health care discussion with the President to begin, we'll show some of today's Washington Journal. | ||
| Joining us this morning is Chad Wolfe, the former acting Homeland Security Secretary in the Trump administration and the Homeland Immigration Chair for the America First Policy Institute here to talk about Trump administration immigration enforcement actions across the country. | ||
| Mr. Wolf, I just want to begin with the headline that we're seeing, the president considering invoking the Insurrection Act in Minnesota. | ||
| When you look at ABC Brennan Center's reporting on the Insurrection Act, this is what they report. | ||
| It allows deployment of troops in the U.S. in limited situations. | ||
| The president can invoke it when, quote, unlawful obstructions make it impractical to enforce the laws. | ||
| And last invoked in 1992 when requested from then California Governor Pete Wilson during the Rodney King riots. | ||
| Mr. Wolf, what do you think of this idea of invoking the Insurrection Act? | ||
| Would it be appropriate? | ||
| Well, I think it's certainly becoming an option, right? | ||
| And why is it becoming an option for President Trump there in Minneapolis? | ||
| Because I think two things are at hand here. | ||
| One is obviously you have some ongoing protest every day and certainly at night. | ||
| That protest is getting violent. | ||
| You see arrests almost every night. | ||
| I think two days ago or a day ago, they broke into an ICE vehicle, stole a weapon. | ||
| And so that continues. | ||
| At the same time, you have local police not supporting and not helping ICE go out and do its mission. | ||
| And obviously, ICE officers over the last, I would say, week or so have been involved in several incidents. | ||
| So you've got two things at play here. | ||
| And I think what the Trump administration is looking at is saying, look, we don't want this to get out of control, right? | ||
| It's one thing to have people protest. | ||
| It's another thing when that protest leads to violence. | ||
| And then that continues. | ||
| At the same time, the city and the state are not acting fast enough. | ||
| And of course, we saw this in 2020 when parts of Minneapolis burned and the governor eventually asked President Trump for help restoring order. | ||
| I don't think the Trump administration is looking to have that sort of repeat. | ||
| And so they want to head this off. | ||
| I think they are encouraging and they're trying to talk to the state and to the local police to take charge to arrest those individuals that are committing that violence, hoping that it will obviously die down. | ||
| It's okay to have people protest. | ||
| You can protest all day, every day. | ||
| But the violent part of that protest, I think, is what is most concerning. | ||
| If you were Homeland Security Secretary today, would you advise him to invoke it? | ||
| Well, I don't have all the information that they have, so I don't have the data. | ||
| I don't have the intelligence. | ||
| I don't know everything that they're seeing. | ||
| But from just looking at the public reporting and looking mainly at the words of the governor and the mayor, who have it doesn't appear that they are going to let their police actually assist ICE. | ||
| And the fact that they continue to incentivize these folks to go out and to continue this by saying ICE is undertrained. | ||
| They're the Gestapo. | ||
| They only pick up colored people. | ||
| All of that, of course, is not true. | ||
| And so if I see the remarks by the governor and the mayor continuing, I would likely advise the president to do so at some point. | ||
| Look, I think the violence has to reach a certain threshold. | ||
| I'm not sure that we're there yet, but I do think that this is certainly a viable option for the president. | ||
| What factors would the White House consider and the Homeland Security Secretary consider to invoke? | ||
| You just mentioned two, it sounds like. | ||
| What are officials in Minnesota saying and then the level of violence? | ||
| I think a large part of it is going to be their internal or private discussions with the state and the city, trying to understand what is their posture, what are they doing, what is the coordination between federal law enforcement and state law enforcement. | ||
| You know, I had a very similar incident in Portland in 2020 where a courthouse, very much like the ICE facility now in Minneapolis, but in a different degree, was under siege. | ||
| And I asked state and local police, mayor and the governor in Oregon at that time to help, and they refused to help. | ||
| And we had three months of out-of-control looting and burning. | ||
| And finally, they sent in the state police, and that's when the violence started to subside. | ||
| So I would encourage both the mayor and the governor to be a partner with federal law enforcement here and making sure that you're holding those that are committing acts of violence accountable. | ||
| They are the best ones to make those a local arrest. | ||
| I don't think ICE wants to make local arrests for people looting and obviously targeting their facility. | ||
| They would rather have local police do that so that they can focus on their other mission. | ||
| Why didn't you advise the president in 2020 then to invoke the Insurrection Act in Portland? | ||
| Well, it's been widely reported. | ||
| We had discussions about that. | ||
| We had discussions around a variety of things. | ||
| But at that time, some of the violence was subsiding at the time. | ||
| And then, as I indicated, the governor eventually agreed to send in the state police. | ||
| If the Insurrection Act was invoked, what would it look like on the ground? | ||
| Well, you're either going to have the Minnesota National Guard nationalized, right? | ||
| So then instead of it being under the command of the governor, it's going to be under the command of the president and the Secretary of War and others, or you're going to see active duty military in there. | ||
| And most likely they're going to go in there and they're going to do two things. | ||
| They're going to restore order. | ||
| They're going to make sure that no property is being burned, no vehicles are being vandalized, things of that nature. | ||
| Again, if the police, if local police aren't going to do that, someone's got to do it. | ||
| Otherwise, we're in a lawless place. | ||
| So they would go in and do that as well as protect ICE. | ||
| Obviously, ICE is under attack. | ||
| We see a number of attacks of officers lately. | ||
| And again, local police is not helping ICE do their job. | ||
| So my guess is that they would also go in and not do that immigration job, but they would provide protection for those agents that go out there and do that. | ||
| Our guest this morning is Chad Wolf, the former acting Homeland Security Secretary in the first Trump administration. | ||
| He's here to take your questions and your comments about immigration enforcement. | ||
| Democrats, dial in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can text at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Just include your first name, city, and state. | ||
| Mr. Wolf, your reaction to the video that we've all seen on that fatal shooting by an ACE agent in Minnesota. | ||
| Yeah, I've been pretty clear on this. | ||
| Obviously, my first instinct is to let the investigation play out. | ||
| I've been a part of too many of these where, you know, what you see on a video that comes out in the hours and the days after an event is very different than what the investigation leads to in all sorts of different directions. | ||
| So I'm on the side of letting the investigation play out. | ||
| I will say, obviously, I have seen the video. | ||
| In my opinion, it believes that the officer did act in self-defense. | ||
| But, you know, you need to take eyewitness testimony. | ||
| You need to figure out everything that was going on. | ||
| I think it's also important, and there's a lot of case law for this, making sure that we understand what was in the mind of those officers. | ||
| What were they briefed on before that shift started? | ||
| They were likely briefed on that they had three car rammings earlier in the day and they had four or five the week before. | ||
| You know, what kind of intel were they getting coming into that situation? | ||
| And of course, we've spent the last week dissecting that video. | ||
| That officer had a second and a half to two seconds to make a call. | ||
| So all of that's going to be taken into account into the investigation. | ||
| But again, as it appears, the video and the different angles that I've seen, clearly this individual did not adhere to lawful commands, did not get out of the car, did not stop the car, obviously, and then back the car up and then surge the car forward, either targeting that officer or trying to abscond from law enforcement. | ||
| All of that, all of what I just described is all illegal. | ||
| None of it is okay. | ||
| And I think we've gotten to this place in today's world where individuals, American citizens, believe it's okay to do all of that in front of an ICE officer in an ICE operations. | ||
| We wouldn't do that with FBI agents. | ||
| We wouldn't do that with a local police department if they were carrying out a criminal operation. | ||
| And we shouldn't do it with ICE either. | ||
| All right, let's get to calls. | ||
| Jill in Iowa, Democratic caller, you're talking with Chad Wolf. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, I would really like you to get some facts out there. | |
| There's a slate article that came out about the hiring practices at ICE and how they're not even letting people finish their paperwork and they're hiring them anyway. | ||
| They haven't done their background check. | ||
| And I also want to know how many of the pardoned January 6th violent people are now working for ICE because it looks to me like a lot of them are. | ||
| And then the big thing with FBI agents and everybody else, they don't go around masked. | ||
| They don't look like a Gestapo. | ||
| I think they're being called the Gestapo because their actions and their looks kind of match. | ||
| Federal judges don't get to wear masks. | ||
| No one in America should be wearing masks. | ||
| And they say, oh, well, these officers are doxed. | ||
| Well, look what's happening to our people in college. | ||
| The people who just simply said you don't have to follow illegal orders, which, by the way, is the truth and just simply stating what the code is. | ||
| No one, I don't hear the president lowering the temperature about all the doxing that happened to Melissa Slotkin. | ||
| Okay, it's Jill. | ||
| I'm going to jump in. | ||
| Mr. Wolf, let's start with her comment about training. | ||
| What do you know about training? | ||
| Yeah, obviously ICE officers are trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glencoe, Georgia, just like many other federal law enforcement, as well as state and local. | ||
| It's a premier training center. | ||
| That's where they go to get the majority of their training. | ||
| And of course, they have then specialized training. | ||
| And then they have recurrent training as well. | ||
| Most of their operations, as you can imagine, are in an urban environment. | ||
| So that's what they are trained in versus the Border Patrol, which is less urban, I would say, than what ICE normally does for their operations. | ||
| The caller was correct. | ||
| They are obviously on a hiring spree because they need more officers. | ||
| A lot of ICE officers left during the Biden administration. | ||
| And then, of course, the reconciliation bill that passed last year gave ICE more money for officers as well. | ||
| So they are certainly on a hiring spree. | ||
| And as you hire, you train, you deploy, and you get them out into the field. | ||
| So, you know, they undergo training like they always have. | ||
| And then I would say on the mask, I think she had a primary concern about ICE officers being masked. | ||
| Primarily, why are they covering their face? | ||
| They are covering their face primarily because there is an extensive amount of doxing of these officers. | ||
| When you go to your work, you don't get doxed. | ||
| There's not a presumption that all of your personal information is going to be out there on the internet. | ||
| There's going to be threats against you and things of that nature. | ||
| This is almost the normal operating environment for ICE officers today. | ||
| And so they should be able to go to their job, do their job without the threat of death threats and personal information out on the internet. | ||
| So that's primarily why. | ||
| If you didn't have that and you didn't see that, I would say that you would likely see them reverting back to the way that they did things before this doxing became very, very prevalent. | ||
| And we've seen this now for many, many years. | ||
| You know, I've been asked about some of the tactical gear that they wear. | ||
| Again, we got to remember that the majority of these operations, they are carrying out a criminal operation, meaning that they are either pulling someone over in a car or they're going into a neighborhood and their target is a criminal, illegal alien. | ||
| And so they have to protect themselves, just like any other law enforcement officer would. | ||
| It's not fun in games what these officers do. | ||
| It's dangerous work and they need to protect themselves. | ||
| That's why you will see body armor, body gear. | ||
| You will see the vest. | ||
| You'll see a variety of different things there. | ||
| And that's just to make sure that they are protected as they go in to a certain environment. | ||
| The article the viewer was referring to is from slate.com. | ||
| The headline, you've heard about who ICE is recruiting. | ||
| The truth is far worse. | ||
| I'm the proof for those who are interested. | ||
| Tammy in Florida and Independent. | ||
| We'll hear from you next. | ||
| Hi, Tammy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thank you for letting me on. | ||
| Your caller is complete. | ||
| Your guest is being completely disingenuous. | ||
| All of the videos show ICE shooting priests who are standing there praying and completely unprofessional. | ||
| The only people creating an insurrection are you by taking people. | ||
| I've seen 10 videos just this morning of ICE pulling people over randomly, not allowing them to show their citizenship paper and taking them into custody anyway. | ||
| Leaving children alone, arresting people who were here traveling. | ||
| The reason this is happening is because ICE is out of control. | ||
| If they would stand down and behave professionally, then we wouldn't need to do any insurrection. | ||
| Personally, I think ICE should be abolished. | ||
| I think the FBI and the state and local law enforcement could work together to do everything that ICE does in a much more sane and professional manner. | ||
| All right, Tammy, I'm going to jump in. | ||
| There's a headline in Politico from two days ago: abolish ICE. | ||
| Many Democrats are ready to fund it, the movement that is, with conditions. | ||
| Chad Wolf. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is a question for Congress. | ||
| Congress has given ICE a very specific authority and very specific mission, which is to remove individuals that don't have a legal right to be in this country. | ||
| It's what every other country around the world does. | ||
| And so for these individuals that say, such as the caller that says, look, and we hear this from the mayor and the governor, which is we support our neighbors, we protect our neighbors. | ||
| Well, there in Minneapolis, ICE has pulled off, has arrested a thousand criminals in the state of Minnesota. | ||
| So those are their neighbors. | ||
|
Congress's Specific Mission for ICE
00:03:44
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| Those are the people that they want to protect. | ||
| So if you're upset with ICE, then you're upset with Congress because Congress has given ICE a very specific mission. | ||
| Go out, arrest criminal, illegal aliens, but it's not just criminals. | ||
| It's anyone that doesn't have a legal right to be here in the United States. | ||
| Because if you don't have that, you don't have a country. | ||
| If anyone can come into the country and no one's going to be removed, or what you're saying is that the United States government needs to wait until you commit another crime here in the United States before you're removed. | ||
| I disagree with that. | ||
| I think part of law enforcement is to make sure that a crime doesn't get committed and they act before that happens. | ||
| And so this idea that we have to wait until an illegal alien commits another crime against a U.S. citizen before you're able to prioritize and remove, I would disagree with that. | ||
| So, I mean, we can talk about the tactics of ICE. | ||
| You can talk about all of that. | ||
| A big part of it, though, is the fact that they don't have local support. | ||
| So the caller indicated, well, she'd rather have FBI and local do the job. | ||
| Mayor Fry has made it very, very clear. | ||
| They have a stand down order. | ||
| They do not help ICE. | ||
| They do not enforce immigration law. | ||
| He has been abundantly clear on that message. | ||
| And so when you have a mayor and you have local political leaders that say, I will not do this, that's actually the definition of an insurrection, by the way. | ||
| It's when the state government cannot or will not help you enforce federal law. | ||
| And so that's what's going on in Minneapolis. | ||
| We don't see this in the state of Texas or Florida or South Carolina or anywhere else. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because you have local police partnering with ICE to do this in a jail setting, in a very safe environment, or to actually partner with them when they go out. | ||
| It's only in places like Minneapolis and Portland and Chicago that they just refuse to help ICE. | ||
| Mr. Wolf, how do you respond to folks who have answered this Quinnapiak poll who may not agree with abolishing ICE, but 57% disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws, while 40% approve. | ||
| Does ICE have an issue here and are you concerned about how they are being perceived? | ||
| Well, I'm certainly concerned about how they're being perceived. | ||
| I would say a couple of different things. | ||
| I would say that there's a lot of misreporting out in the legacy media. | ||
| I think your caller, the last caller, was a perfect example of that. | ||
| I think she said, well, ICE is arresting U.S. citizens. | ||
| That couldn't be further from the truth. | ||
| Now, what ICE will do is when they go in, for instance, if they're pulling over someone that's a target, that's an illegal alien, and they have four other people in the car or four other people in the house, they are absolutely going to ask for their identification to understand who they are, just like any other police officer would. | ||
| If those individuals are U.S. citizens and they have outstanding warrants, guess what? | ||
| They're going to jail. | ||
| ICE is simply not going to release those individuals. | ||
| So there's a lot of detail here that gets missed all the time about certain laws. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump. | |
|
Affordable Care Act Debate
00:15:31
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||
| This is a very important one today. | ||
| We've worked on it long and hard. | ||
| For years, they've been working on it. | ||
| And I see Kevin's in the audience, and I just want to thank you. | ||
| You were fantastic on television today. | ||
| I actually want to keep you where you are if you want to know the truth. | ||
| Kevin Hashet is so good. | ||
| I'm saying, wait a minute. | ||
| If I move them, these Fed guys, certainly the one we have now, they don't talk much. | ||
| I would lose you. | ||
| It's a serious concern to me. | ||
| So I just want to say thank you very much. | ||
| You've done incredible. | ||
| We don't want to lose him, Susie. | ||
| But we'll see how it all works out. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Thank you, Kevin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great job. | |
| And thank you for all being here as we discuss the largest investment in rural health care in American history. | ||
| This is the big one. | ||
| We're delighted to be joined by many incredible members of the healthcare community, including doctors, nurses, and pharmacists from all across America. | ||
| We're also very happy to have with us some very talented people, a man who is really good at this, extremely non-controversial, which is I wanted somebody non-controversial. | ||
| So I chose Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. | ||
| Daddy Banger. | ||
| And he also happens to be a great guy. | ||
| Brooke Rollins, who's doing a fantastic job at agriculture, and thank you. | ||
| And how are the prices coming? | ||
| They're coming, sir, they're coming down. | ||
| Don't forget, we inherited a mess. | ||
| Remember eggs? | ||
| They were up four times higher than they ever were. | ||
| And in my first day, they said, what are you going to do about eggs? | ||
| I said, I didn't cause the problem. | ||
| We didn't cause, we inherited a mess, but the prices are coming down. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Wholesale prices are down 86 percent, retail a little bit less than that, but yes, you're making America affordable again. | ||
| With you in charge, I have no doubt, and I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a really good man, a really brilliant guy, Dr. Mehmet Oz. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, Emily. | |
| Thank you, Dr. Ross. | ||
| And thank you also to Governor Jim Pillen, Senator Dan Sullivan, and Representatives Rob Bresnahan, Mike Lawler, John McGuire, and Nick Begich. | ||
| Thank you all for being here. | ||
| Appreciate it very much. | ||
| We have other congressmen here, I see, and a couple of senators, and we appreciate everybody being here. | ||
| Everyone wants to be a part of this. | ||
| It's so important. | ||
| Maybe, I don't know, for many people, there's nothing more important. | ||
| I would say maybe defense. | ||
| We need defense, and we need offense too, by the way. | ||
| As part of the Great Big Beautiful bill, we're increased and we have increased funding for the health care by an unprecedented $50 billion. | ||
| That's rural health care. | ||
| Nobody thought that was going to happen, and we got it done. | ||
| So we have rural health care. | ||
| For those that were trying to make a case that we weren't taking care of the rural community, I'm all about the rural community. | ||
| We won the rural communities by numbers that nobody's ever won them before, and we're taking care of those great people. | ||
| So we already did this. | ||
| We increased funding for rural health care by an unprecedented record-setting, $50 billion over five years, which will benefit Americans in all 50 states. | ||
| And this made possible and was made possible by cutting massive waste, fraud, and abuse from Medicaid and reinvesting those funds to revitalize hospitals and our cherished rural communities and hospitals and rural communities. | ||
| And I want to say with all of the fraud that we're seeing in Minnesota and California and other places, I actually think that if we do an unbelievable job, you could almost balance your budget, Kevin. | ||
| If you take a look at the kind of numbers you're talking about, nobody ever saw anything like it. | ||
| They're all corrupt politicians, from the governor of Minnesota to the governor of California to everybody. | ||
| They're just corrupt politicians. | ||
| And you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud, waste fraud and abuse, but in fraud, you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. | ||
| Under the Unaffordable Care Act, which is Obamacare, it's called the unaffordable. | ||
| It is unaffordable. | ||
| Remember that. | ||
| Rural hospitals and communities were devastated by soaring costs, and that continues. | ||
| Despite colossal increases in government spending since Obamacare was passed, only 7% of the annual Medicaid spending on rural hospitals has gone to rural hospitals. | ||
| So there's only a very little. | ||
| They didn't care. | ||
| Obama didn't care about the rural community, to be totally blunt. | ||
| What he did care about is insurance companies. | ||
| And this was a bill to make insurance companies wealthy. | ||
| And they did. | ||
| They made insurance companies very wealthy. | ||
| I would say they don't like me too much because they spent hundreds of billions of dollars. | ||
| And we're going to have that money spent to the people and given to the people, not we're going to circumvent the insurance companies. | ||
| Partially as a result, rural health care facilities have suffered from low occupancy rates, workforce shortages, and failing programs that put band-aids, literally put band-aids over the problems in those communities. | ||
| And we're not going to have that. | ||
| We're taking great care of them. | ||
| With the Rural Health Transformation Program, we are getting rural communities the health support they need, and we're getting it immediately. | ||
| These funds will go to empowering rural hospitals, strengthening their workforce, modernizing facilities and technology, and ensuring that rural Americans get world-class health care in their own community, right smack in their own community, like they've never had it before. | ||
| And they've been hurt very badly by the Unaffordable Care Act. | ||
| Every single Democrat in Congress voted against the lifeline for rural communities. | ||
| And I hope everyone knows this. | ||
| And this is not about elections, but I hope you remember this in the midterms because the Democrats are just so horrible toward the rural community. | ||
| But I want to take a moment to thank the incredible House and Senate Republicans who worked so hard on making this historic investment possible. | ||
| That's what they did, and they did work hard. | ||
| We, I don't think, got a Democrat vote, did we? | ||
| Did we get one Democrat vote? | ||
| We got all Republican votes. | ||
| It was an amazing, it was an amazing feat. | ||
| And I want to thank Mike, our Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and John Thun for really doing a great job. | ||
| It was tough. | ||
| You know, we have small majorities. | ||
| And I want to thank the congressmen that are here for doing, in particular, for working so hard in getting this done. | ||
| Yesterday I also announced our framework to lower health care prices for all Americans, including those in rural America. | ||
| And we're calling it the Great Health Care Plan. | ||
| You know, we had to come up with a name, and everybody wanted to say, oh, well, can we put something about lowering costs? | ||
| Because we're lowering costs very substantially. | ||
| So I had Bobby and I had Oz. | ||
| We had everybody in there. | ||
| We had a whole group of people trying to come up with, so we're saying the cost reduction plan that gives you good health care. | ||
| And I said, it's too long. | ||
| It's not going to sell. | ||
| I said, we had more plans. | ||
| And they wanted to get the words cost reduction in there, Lawrence, especially you. | ||
| They wanted cost reduction in, and then they wanted great health care in. | ||
| I said, look, you can have one or the other, but it gets too long. | ||
| We're talking about the name of a plan. | ||
| So we got it down to seven or eight words, which is far too long. | ||
| Nobody can remember that much. | ||
| And I said, how about just call it, because this is the great health care plan. | ||
| Now, a great plan has to be cost-effective, otherwise it can't be a great plan. | ||
| That's the way I looked at it. | ||
| So we have a very glamorous name. | ||
| It's called the Great Health Care Plan, not the Unaffordable Care Act. | ||
| I don't like that name. | ||
| This is called officially the Great Health Care Plan. | ||
| That means low price and great health care. | ||
| So you're going to have, at a lower price, great health care. | ||
| First, our proposal codifies the massive discounts on prescription drugs that my administration is achieving through our most favored nation provisions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| We can go into this. | ||
| We can go into this for hours, but the bottom line is we'll be paying the lowest price of any nation in the world. | ||
| Whoever's paying the lowest, we match it. | ||
| This could have been done years ago. | ||
| I was going to do it in my first administration, but when COVID came toward the end, I said, I can't believe it wasn't the right, it wasn't exactly a good time to be doing it. | ||
| But I said, why isn't somebody doing it? | ||
| And the reason they're not doing it is that no other nation would agree. | ||
| France, as an example, paid 10% of what we paid. | ||
| Germany was paying 13 or 14% what we paid. | ||
| In other words, we paid many times more, not a little bit more, not 10% more, 10 times more. | ||
| A pill would cost 10 times more in New York than it would cost in London, as an example, than it would cost in Munich. | ||
| And this went on for many decades. | ||
| This was right from the beginning. | ||
| And the reason it went on was a little bit of the health care companies, but it was other nations. | ||
| And I understand that. | ||
| If I were heading Germany, I'm not going to double and triple and quadruple my health care. | ||
| They got the health care companies to pay, just took place over a long period of time, got worse and worse. | ||
| And it just hit numbers that were just absolutely unsaleable. | ||
| And if you remember, the doctors in the audience remember they say, well, we have to do research and development. | ||
| I said, well, what about research and development for Germany? | ||
| Well, we've decided to put up the, so the pill would cost five times more because of research and development and five times more for other reasons. | ||
| They had all these phony reasons. | ||
| And finally, I said to the health care companies, can't do it anymore. | ||
| We can't do it. | ||
| And it started, really. | ||
| I tell the story. | ||
| It wasn't meant to be funny. | ||
| People find it funny. | ||
| But a friend of mine who's a very smart guy, very, very rich, very powerful man, actually. | ||
| But he was very fat. | ||
| And he took the fat. | ||
| I call it the fat drug. | ||
| I won't give you which one. | ||
| It was Ozempic. | ||
| I won't tell you that. | ||
| And he went to London on one of his many business trips. | ||
| It's all he does his business. | ||
| He can't walk across the street, but he's a great businessman. | ||
| And he said, President, President, I said, what? | ||
| He used to call me Donnie. | ||
| Now he calls me President. | ||
| So I said, you've come a long way. | ||
| He goes, but I have a problem. | ||
| What's your problem? | ||
| In New York, I pay $1,300 for this drug. | ||
| Now, this means nothing to him. | ||
| This is like a penny out of your wallet. | ||
| The guy's worth hundreds of millions, billions of dollars. | ||
| He said, and in London, sir, I pay just a fraction of that. | ||
| I said, what are you paying? | ||
| $87. | ||
| I said, well, is it the same drug? | ||
| I knew exactly what he was getting at because I've, you know, it bothered me for a long time. | ||
| He said, it's the exact same drug. | ||
| And because of his wealth and his business march, he had a check. | ||
| It was made in the same plant by the same company. | ||
| It's identical. | ||
| And here I pay $87. | ||
| And in New York, I pay $1,300. | ||
| So it was too much to bear. | ||
| Because after I told him that the drug does not work on him, because I saw him recently, he's actually fatter than ever, I said, the drug is not working on you. | ||
| You're going to have to go to something else. | ||
| But it does work on a lot of people. | ||
| And he said, thanks, you make me feel good. | ||
| I said, well, I got to be truthful. | ||
| Always tell the truth, right, Mr. Congressman. | ||
| Oh, look, one of the great, one of the great Congress, two of the great Congressmen. | ||
| But the drug, we have to do something about it because that's the same with every, I would say, Bobby, every drug, essentially. | ||
| It doesn't have to be in that proportion. | ||
| In some cases, it's much worse. | ||
| Because what happened, I might as well get off this crap because it doesn't explain it properly. | ||
| Because what happened is these countries are very smart. | ||
| And the drug companies would go to them and they said, look, we're paying $10 for the pill. | ||
| We're not paying more. | ||
| Charge America. | ||
| And this happened one time, then the next year, the next year. | ||
| This is over 40 years. | ||
| All of a sudden, they're paying $10 for a pill, and we're paying like $130 for the same pill. | ||
| It just happened over years, slowly. | ||
| And it got to a point over the last 10, 12, 15 years where it just was unbearable. | ||
| And I went to a great executive at Eli Lilly, the top man, he's a very smart guy, and I confronted him, and he had the same line that they always had, blah, blah, blah, research and development. | ||
| I said, look, look, we've got to stop this nonsense. | ||
| We're paying 10 times more for things than Europe. | ||
| It's not research and development. | ||
| And if it is research and development, they should pay their fair share of that too. | ||
| And he said to me, and he's a great guy, he said, look, you're right. | ||
| We can't defend it anymore. | ||
| I said, you're admitting it? | ||
| Because these guys had a stand, all of them. | ||
| They must have taken a class together. | ||
| Must have been, it's probably illegal what they did, Laura, you'll check it, right? | ||
| They must have gone to school together and said, this is the way we're going to fight this crazy thing where the United States pays 10, 12, 13 times more for a drug. | ||
| Same drug. | ||
| Same drug made in the same plant. | ||
| And he said, here's the problem we have. | ||
| The nations are brutal. | ||
| When we go in and say, we have to give you an increase, they say, no, put it on America. | ||
| We're not paying you anything. | ||
| And they say it with such power, and they actually shut us off from selling the drug. | ||
| And it just happened over and over again. | ||
| It got a little worse, a little worse, a little worse. | ||
| All of a sudden, we're paying many times more for the same. | ||
| I said, it's not going to happen anymore. | ||
| He said, the problem is, sir, you'll never get the nations to agree. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| They're very tough, and they are. | ||
| And they'd have to agree to a doubling or tripling of their drug prices in order to get you down, because the world is a bigger place than us. | ||
| So it's not like you cut it in half. | ||
| Actually, if they raised it a little bit, we'd go down a lot. | ||
| You understand that? | ||
| I think people understand that. | ||
| So you raise it like from $10 to $20 or $10 to $30, but we'd go from $130 down to $30 or down to $20. | ||
| So, because the numbers are much bigger, the numbers on their side are much bigger. | ||
|
Jimmy Carter's Gift
00:03:08
|
||
| So they'd need a doubling or tripling or quadrupling. | ||
| Now, if you're the head of France, the last thing you want to do is say, I'm going to quadruple the cost of a drug. | ||
| And that's the way it is. | ||
| But I said, I know, but it's not fair. | ||
| And this has taken place. | ||
| And the head of Eli Lilly, and I really mean it, an unbelievable executive, an unbelievable guy, one of the most successful companies, and who's, by the way, spending hundreds of billions of dollars right now. | ||
| He's building, he told me the other day he's building six major plants in the United States. | ||
| You know why he's doing that? | ||
| Because of tariffs. | ||
| He's doing that because of tariffs. | ||
| Without tariffs, he wouldn't be doing it. | ||
| Nobody understood tariffs until I came along. | ||
| Nobody understood, other than President McKinley, he understood him a long time ago. | ||
| And because of him, we were the richest nation that we ever were at that period of time. | ||
| And then when he died, he was assassinated. | ||
| Teddy Roosevelt came over and he inherited a war chest. | ||
| And he built the Panama Canal, which is the single most expensive thing ever built in the history of the United States, relatively. | ||
| We spent what would be the equivalent of $5 trillion building the Panama Canal. | ||
| It was also the most successful thing probably we've ever built and to this day. | ||
| And then Jimmy Carter gave it away for $1. | ||
| This is the same theory we have on favorite nations. | ||
| The great Jimmy Carter, President Jimmy Carter, gave it away for $1. | ||
| We lost 38,000 men. | ||
| In those days, it was men. | ||
| I hate to say this, but mostly men. | ||
| They didn't have a lot of women workers on the Panama Canal. | ||
| But we lost 38,000 people. | ||
| They died from malaria and snake bites. | ||
| It was a combination of that, a vicious snake, one of the most vicious. | ||
| You get hit, you're dead. | ||
| They died from snake bites. | ||
| 38,000. | ||
| They paid workers from the United States three times more than they made to come over to Panama and dig. | ||
| For many of them, that was not a good deal. | ||
| They died. | ||
| 38,000. | ||
| We gave it away for that. | ||
| But that same stupidity having to do with the Panama Canal, and I could tell you about a hundred other stories, too. | ||
| You don't have time. | ||
| But that's what went into this whole thing with favorite nations. | ||
| So Europe and other nations all over the world were getting drugs from the same plant, same factory, same everything, same location, everything, same company, for a tiny fraction of what we're paying. | ||
| So our people were paying a tremendous amount. | ||
| So the gentleman from Eli Lilly and others, we had a root meeting, and they all finally put up their hands. | ||
| You got us. | ||
| We give up. | ||
| And they were great from that time. | ||
| But we had a problem. | ||
|
Negotiating Drug Prices
00:12:24
|
||
| The other nations weren't going for it. | ||
| France turned it down. | ||
| Germany turned it down. | ||
| UK turned it down. | ||
| European Union turned it down. | ||
| The whole group. | ||
| And they said, there's nothing you can do about it, sir. | ||
| I said, yes, there is. | ||
| No, there isn't. | ||
| You'll never be able to get them up. | ||
| I mean, the whole industry is going to be torn apart. | ||
| I said, we'll get them up easily. | ||
| Are you crazy? | ||
| Of course we'll get them up. | ||
| That's what I do for a living. | ||
| I get people up. | ||
| So I called, I started with President Macron of France, a very nice person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like him a lot. | |
| I hope he's listening because he doesn't believe that, but I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a nice man. | |
| And I said, Emmanuel. | ||
| Yes, Donald, Donald, thank you so much for calling. | ||
| I said, you're not going to like this call. | ||
| You're going to have to get your drug prices up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I will not do that. | |
| I said, Emmanuel, we're paying 13 times more than, 13 times, not 13%. | ||
| 13 times more than you offer this pill. | ||
| I rattled off some numbers that are crazy. | ||
| You know the numbers I'm talking about, Oz. | ||
| Oz would give me some numbers. | ||
| I'd say, this is crazy. | ||
| We're paying 10 times, 12 times, 13 times. | ||
| No, no, no, no, I will not do that. | ||
| I said, look, you've got to do it. | ||
| 100% you're going to do it. | ||
| No, no, Donald. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I told you I will not do that. | |
| I said, here's the story, Emmanuel. | ||
| If you don't do it, I'm going to put a 25% tariff on all goods, wine, champagnes, and everything else coming into the United States of America. | ||
| He said, Donald, I would love to do this for you. | ||
| It would be a great honor to do it. | ||
| And that's where it began. | ||
| And I went through country after country. | ||
| Susie was responsible for getting every one of those leaders on the thing. | ||
| Susie, by the way, stand up, Susie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She is doing such a good job. | |
| She's the first female chief of staff. | ||
| And she might be the best chief of staff, too. | ||
| But she's doing a great job. | ||
| Thank you, Susie. | ||
| So Susie, Susie got him on. | ||
| And I just went one after another. | ||
| I called Germany. | ||
| No, no, no, we will not do that. | ||
| I said, no, we're going to put a 25% tariff, which is, by the way, about seven times more than they would have to pay by raising their drug, like seven times. | ||
| This wasn't like a little bit more, seven times more. | ||
| And I may do that for Greenland, too. | ||
| I may put a tariff on countries if they don't go along with Greenland, because we need Greenland for national security. | ||
| So I may do that. | ||
| I'll give you a little, I'll talk about, I'll take you out of that. | ||
| In fact, that will end up being the story. | ||
| But actually, this is a much bigger story because we're reducing health care by numbers that you haven't seen. | ||
| So I spoke to the top 10 countries. | ||
| They all said no, and within about two minutes, they all agreed. | ||
| And we were off to the races. | ||
| And now we have favored nations. | ||
| It's called most favored nations. | ||
| So if France is paying, let's say, $20 or $30 instead of $10, we are going to pay that $20 or $30. | ||
| We pay the lowest price, whatever the lowest price is. | ||
| So if France is paying $100, but Germany is paying $20, we pay what Germany pays. | ||
| So we go from a horrible situation on drugs, prescription drugs, to the lowest price anywhere in the world. | ||
| Is that a correct statement, Oz? | ||
| Because they are going to blame you. | ||
| If you want to correct me, you can, but you won't be here for long if you do. | ||
| Oz has left employment. | ||
| No, but is that a correct statement? | ||
| That's an absolutely correct statement. | ||
| And that's what we want to codify in the great health care plan. | ||
| That's why we codify. | ||
| Because if the President's not here, there is a flight risk with these companies not obliging us anymore, because I think it's the strength of your personality, but also they know they will follow through with the threats if we don't act. | ||
| So we believe other countries will change their opinions, and so will drug companies. | ||
| So we've got to get it into legislation. | ||
| Well, if you have the wrong president, the countries have tremendous influence over us. | ||
| You know, they look, why did we go to an income tax system instead of a tariff system? | ||
| We had the wealthiest nation. | ||
| If you go back to the 1800s, 1887, we had money, so much money, we didn't know what to do with it. | ||
| But the countries at that time, same, no different. | ||
| They have a tremendous influence over this country for whatever reason. | ||
| I don't know, but they do. | ||
| So if you have the wrong president, they will change the system in two minutes. | ||
| I mean, they will change it. | ||
| And the drug companies are very powerful, too. | ||
| You have to deal with them. | ||
| In this case, it was both. | ||
| I mean, you had a problem with the drug companies, but you had a tougher problem in theory, other than the fact that I understood how to deal with them. | ||
| And I'm the tariff king, and the tariff king has done a great job. | ||
| And I hope we win the Supreme Court case, because if we don't, be a shame for our country. | ||
| Be a shame. | ||
| We have a great, safe, beautiful country now. | ||
| We are doing better than we have ever done. | ||
| We hit 42 stock market highs during the 11-month period that I've been here. | ||
| There's never been anything like it. | ||
| Stock market's hitting a new high again today. | ||
| So it's been incredible. | ||
| So just to end it on this, because it's such a big subject and it can't be explained by reading as good as my speechwriter is, he's fantastic, but he can't write it in one sentence what we're talking about. | ||
| So we're going to get most favored nations. | ||
| We will be taking prescription drugs down to levels never even contemplated. | ||
| And that's all great for health care, because when you're paying a tiny fraction of what you had anticipated paying prior to today, prior to this month, this all took place over the last month and a half. | ||
| And the sad part is that when we first announced it, and we did it in a little bit less, more general form, when we first announced it, the Times did a story on page 22 or something, way back in the little story in the back of the newspaper. | ||
| This is the biggest revolution in the history of medicine in this country because it's price. | ||
| You're going to buy the drugs for a small fraction of what you were paying for them last month. | ||
| And I tell the story of my first term. | ||
| I was the one, after 28 years, that got drug prices down. | ||
| It was either one-quarter or one-eighth of one percent. | ||
| I got them down for the year. | ||
| First time in 28 years, I was so proud of myself, I called the news conference. | ||
| I said, ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in 28 years, drug prices have gone down for the year. | ||
| One-eighth of a point. | ||
| In fact, I had a chart. | ||
| It was the worst chart I have ever seen. | ||
| It was a line that went from January to December, and it was dead straight. | ||
| You had to get a little, you know, like a carpenter system to see. | ||
| I said, does it look good? | ||
| It's not the greatest line. | ||
| But I was proud of it because it did. | ||
| It went down either a quarter of a point or an eighth of a point, tiny. | ||
| And now think of what we are doing. | ||
| We are bringing medicine down by many times, by many times. | ||
| Nobody has ever seen. | ||
| And there are two ways of calculating. | ||
| You could say 1,000 percent, 2,000, or you could say 90 percent or 80 percent. | ||
| The Democrats want you to say 90 or 80, but there are two ways of calculating it. | ||
| You understand that, Dan? | ||
| And we'll take either way. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| But we'll be paying a tiny fraction. | ||
| So that's going to go into our plan. | ||
| And what Oz said is very important. | ||
| It's very important that whoever is in this office is strong and intelligent. | ||
| And if they're not, it could be ended. | ||
| But what we want to do is we want to have it codified so it's very hard to change. | ||
| And that's all part of the process. | ||
| I think it's the greatest revolution because it's financial is a big part of the drugs. | ||
| And all of the doctors sitting there know exactly what I'm talking about. | ||
| They have their patients in Europe and they say, I can't believe it. | ||
| I'm buying the same thing for 15 percent of what I pay in New York or in Chicago. | ||
| And they're all nodding their heads. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's not going to happen anymore. | ||
| We pay now, just to end it, the lowest price in the world, whatever that is, that's what the United States of America will be paying. | ||
| Isn't that an amazing, long story? | ||
| I was going to say long, boring. | ||
| It's not boring. | ||
| To me, it's long and exciting. | ||
| It's the biggest thing to happen to health care. | ||
| I don't think there's anything we can do. | ||
| We can do all of our different methods, but there's nothing we can do that can ever top what we do. | ||
| And the press should treat it fairly instead of not writing about it, because they don't write about it because it's me, primarily because it's me, but also because it's Republican. | ||
| And they don't write about it, and they should be ashamed. | ||
| But fortunately, the public understands it, and that's why we won the election in a landslide. | ||
| So it's a great thing. | ||
| Instead of Americans paying the highest drug prices anywhere in the world by far, by 10 times sometimes, we'll now pay the lowest costs paid by the lowest nation. | ||
| So the lowest nation, whatever that is, I hope they negotiate a great deal. | ||
| I hope somebody out there of all those nations is going to be a better negotiator than everybody else. | ||
| And whatever they get, we get, Mike. | ||
| Is that pretty good? | ||
| Look at Mike. | ||
| Even Lawrence, first time I've ever seen him smile. | ||
| And next, our plan would reduce your insurance premiums by stopping government payoffs to big insurance companies and sending the money directly to the people. | ||
| So instead of, and this started, and I'm not really a health care MAVEN, but I was always a good businessman. | ||
| It started. | ||
| I'm reading the paper and I see the money that the insurance companies were making from us on Obamacare. | ||
| And they're up by 1,000 percent, 16, I think one was up 1,723 percent, 1,700 percent. | ||
| And it's because of the massive amount of money that's sent to them by the United States government. | ||
| And I said, why don't we just send it directly to the people instead? | ||
| And I made that statement. | ||
| It was a common sense statement. | ||
| I didn't check with anybody. | ||
| I didn't even call Oz or anybody. | ||
| It just made sense. | ||
| I made a statement, and it went viral. | ||
| Can you believe it? | ||
| It was so popular. | ||
| In other words, we cut out the insurance companies. | ||
| They're making a fortune. | ||
| And, you know, they're good people. | ||
| They're business people. | ||
| I don't blame them. | ||
| But we cut them out. | ||
| We pay the money directly to the people. | ||
| The people love it. | ||
| I said it, you know, I said it as a non-professional in that business. | ||
| And I made the statement like all of a sudden it's like the biggest story, that one, the biggest story. | ||
| And I get a call from Caroline, who's around here someplace. | ||
| She said, sir, We're getting inundated. | ||
| Margo called me too. | ||
| Margo, you called me too. | ||
| Margo, everyone knows Margo. | ||
| She's been here from the beginning, right from the beginning. | ||
| But she said, sir, both of them. | ||
| They said, sir, we're being inundated by what? | ||
| You made a statement about health care being paid directly to the people into health savings accounts or whatever you want to, health care accounts. | ||
| And I said, I did. | ||
| What's the story? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He said, it's crazy. | |
| It's blown up. | ||
| People loved it. | ||
| And so that's where we started. | ||
| So Obamacare was designed to make insurance companies rich. | ||
| It really was. | ||
| I mean, maybe not knowingly at the time by Obama, because he didn't know much about this stuff. | ||
| It was designed by other people in Congress that are total pros that are bought off by the insurance companies. | ||
| And the problem we'll have with this is we'll get no Democrat votes, even though it should be very bad, very bad for them if they don't. | ||
| But maybe you'll get some. | ||
| You'll call some of your friends, fellas, and Bob, you'll call some of your friends over on the other side. | ||
| I don't know how they can reject it. | ||
| It's just so popular. | ||
| It's so compelling. | ||
| So Obamacare was designed to make insurance companies rich with taxpayer subsidies, and I want that extra money straight to the health savings accounts for you. | ||
|
End the Middlemen
00:05:54
|
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| And you can choose your own health care. | ||
| You go out and negotiate your own health care. | ||
| It makes people entrepreneurs, many entrepreneurs. | ||
| They'll pick the health care that's best for them because it's so different. | ||
| A young person, they need health care for different reasons, and an old person doesn't need certain things that a young person needs, and vice versa. | ||
| To further reduce insurance premiums, my plan ends the giant kickbacks to insurance brokers and corporate middlemen. | ||
| We're getting rid of the middlemen. | ||
| How long have you heard doctors? | ||
| All these doctors over there look so smart. | ||
| They're all brilliant people. | ||
| I assume you're brilliant, otherwise you wouldn't be here, right? | ||
| I assume we have the best. | ||
| Do we have the best of the doctors, I would imagine, right? | ||
| Hey, how cool is the White House? | ||
| Okay? | ||
| They're always in operating rooms. | ||
| I wouldn't want to be in an opera. | ||
| I don't like operating rooms, but they do. | ||
| But how cool is the White House, right? | ||
| The coolest place on earth. | ||
| And this is where it all begins. | ||
| This is where we came up with a little concept about a place called Venezuela. | ||
| How did that work out? | ||
| And this is going to be the same thing in terms of its precision. | ||
| Its importance is so big. | ||
| It's going to work just like that. | ||
| Venezuela was so amazing, but I equate that to other things because we can do other things like that. | ||
| It doesn't always have to be a Minnesota where everything is corrupt, where they have health care centers that nobody shows up and somebody is making millions of dollars, where they have daycare centers where there are no kids. | ||
| It's a scam. | ||
| It's a big scam. | ||
| It's like a horrible thing. | ||
| We have a country that was great. | ||
| We have a country that's now great again. | ||
| It's really come a long way. | ||
| Make America great again is almost going to be obsolete because our country is very close to, you know, we originally were going to keep America great. | ||
| We have to switch to keep America great. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| There's something about MAGA. | ||
| We should never change it. | ||
| Susie said, don't change. | ||
| We like MAGA. | ||
| Everybody likes MAGA. | ||
| So we want to make this precision just like a Venezuela, just like the attack on the Iran nuclear weapons, which wiped that out, just like all of the other things we do, they're precision. | ||
| We want to make it the opposite of Minnesota, California, and all these places that are so badly run. | ||
| So to further reduce insurance premiums, my plan ends the giant kickbacks to those insurance brokers and corporate middlemen that you've been hearing about for so long. | ||
| It also funds the so-called cost-sharing reduction program to bring down the cost of the most common plans on the exchanges by more than 15 percent. | ||
| And next, the great health care plan mandates unprecedented accountability and transparency from insurance companies and all health care providers. | ||
| You're not allowed to ask a doctor how much is it going to cost. | ||
| You're going to have your heart ripped out, and you're not allowed to negotiate. | ||
| This is a giant scam. | ||
| It's in certain ways, look, nothing can compare to most favored nations. | ||
| But when you give yourself the right to negotiate, you're not allowed to even ask how much it costs. | ||
| You're supposed to go into a hospital and get operated on. | ||
| Then they send you a bill and you have to file for bankruptcy. | ||
| Not going to let that happen. | ||
| So we are going to have insurance companies and health care providers going to have to have great, and hospitals, great transparency. | ||
| The word transparency is a very important word, so they can't get away with ripping you off any longer. | ||
| It requires insurance companies to make it easy for you to compare plans. | ||
| You've got to be able to compare plans. | ||
| You can't do that now. | ||
| You're not allowed to do that. | ||
| It's not even believable. | ||
| I'll tell you what. | ||
| I used to sit before I was a politician home and I used to say, how is that possible? | ||
| Things happen that I guess it's just the forces of nature, the forces of power, and you end up with very badly treated people and they won't stand for it. | ||
| But these forces are going to release an earthquake of reduced price health care. | ||
| You are going to have massively reduced costs. | ||
| This is no longer, we are going to cut it by the famous one-eighth of a point. | ||
| You are going to have massively reduced health care, and it is going to be massively better. | ||
| You are going to have great health care at a much lower price, which is the two things. | ||
| We want great health care and we want low price. | ||
| You are going to have great health care at low price. | ||
| Now you have terrible health care at a high price. | ||
| You have horrible, horrible Obamacare health care. | ||
| Like everything else he did, it was crap. | ||
| It was a horrible plan. | ||
| It was from day one and should have never been approved. | ||
| It was a very sad night that night when there was a thumb raised. | ||
| Most importantly, we will require any hospital or insurer who accepts Medicare or Medicaid to prominently post all prices. | ||
| You are going to post your prices at their place of business. | ||
| Something they don't have to do, something they are not even allowed to do. | ||
| We will have the maximum price transparency and the cost will come down just by that, not even talking about favored nations. | ||
| The price will come down. | ||
| So just in conclusion, I am calling on Congress to pass this framework into law so that we can get immediate relief to the American people, including rural America. | ||
| And I hope to get Democrat votes. | ||
| They know, they saw it. | ||
| I know a lot of Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they say that plan is unbelievable. | |
| Are you going to vote? | ||
| Well, I'm going to try. | ||
| They have tremendous pressure on them. | ||
| Vote no. | ||
| Vote no. | ||
| We have a couple of Republicans, Massey, Thomas Massey, he always votes no. | ||
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Butler General's Rural Health Push
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| He's like, something wrong with a guy. | ||
| If you have any clinical psychiatrists in there, maybe go check out his mind. | ||
| But he always votes no. | ||
| He's a very bad person. | ||
| He's a very bad Republican, bad American. | ||
| Just vote no. | ||
| Do you approve? | ||
| No. | ||
| You know, there's not a thing you can say to him either. | ||
| Lawler, look, Lola wants to be nice. | ||
| He likes to get along with everybody. | ||
| I don't. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't. | |
| But they vote no. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| You know, you have some people. | ||
| They're very I call them Rand Paul Jr. | ||
| Rand Paul always votes. | ||
| I don't know why he votes no, but I guess he thinks it's good politics. | ||
| I got him elected twice. | ||
| If I didn't endorse him, he wouldn't have been elected. | ||
| But he doesn't reciprocate, and I guess that's okay. | ||
| But I want to hear now, if I could, from Dr. Oz, and then we're going to have Dan Sullivan say a few words, and Rob and Mike. | ||
| And Governor, you're going to say a few words, and we appreciate you being here very much. | ||
| You're doing a fantastic job. | ||
| I just want to leave by saying that this is the biggest thing to ever happen to health care in our country. | ||
| It will not be covered that way by the fake news, and that's a sad thing. | ||
| It will probably not be voted positively by the Democrats, and that's a sad thing. | ||
| They all know how good it is. | ||
| I think we can make health care into a Republican issue because the Republicans are going to be close to unanimous on this. | ||
| It should be unanimous. | ||
|
unidentified
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Maybe we will be unanimous, but it'll be close. | |
| But we have a small majority. | ||
| We probably need a little bit of help from the Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
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So, whatever we can do, we're going to do it. | |
| It's the biggest thing to happen to health care, maybe from the beginning. | ||
| So, Oz, would you take it away, please? | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Mr. President, thank you for standing up for American health care. | ||
| And I just want to underline this fundamentally important issue. | ||
| We need Congress to help craft the Great America Health Care Plan. | ||
| And the Great Health Care Plan will work. | ||
| It's a brilliantly conceived framework. | ||
| And as it comes to the American people, they understand that they'll want it. | ||
| And it should represent the analogous situation, similar to what you did so brilliantly last spring with the Working Families Tax Cut Legislation that the President mentioned, has created the Rural Health Transformation Fund, which is why we're here today. | ||
| I want to put a little bit of texture around why this is such an important issue, because the Rural Health Transformation Fund is the largest investment ever in American history in our rural communities. | ||
| 50% increase in the amount of money that Medicaid, which Secretary Kennedy and I regulate, into our rural communities, $50 billion. | ||
| You can do the math, it's $1 billion per state, and that's an important factor because it got them competing. | ||
| There are 60 million rural Americans, and these folks do not have access to the same care that's available in urban and suburban America. | ||
| Their life expectancy, if they're in a vulnerable situation, is nine years shorter. | ||
| Because your zip code actually is your destiny. | ||
| It determines how long you're going to live, and we can make a dent in this because the high rates of chronic disease and other ailments that plague our rural areas are often driven because they don't have access to care. | ||
| That's going to change because of the Sentinel legislation. | ||
| And again, it's similar teams, the same leadership, same president, same Congress that passed the Working Families Tax Cut Legislation, which is incredibly popular around the country and will make the great health care plan successful as well. | ||
| From the day the legislation was signed to create this wonderful fund, this transformational fund, the team at CMS, which is under Secretary Kennedy, began working. | ||
| And they're here today, Steph Carlton, outstanding chief of staff, Alina Chekai, and Emily Chan. | ||
| That day started working. | ||
| It was July the 4th, by the way, on the specific vision for the program. | ||
| How do you actually get the money out the door in six months? | ||
| The President was insistent, did not want the money in Washington. | ||
| So began working closely to make sure that we'd use the money not as a band-aid, but to empower those closest to the challenges that rural patients face. | ||
| And who are those people, the 50 people who know rural health care the best? | ||
| The governors. | ||
| They wanted the money out of Washington into the governor's hands, and that was done in a remarkable way. | ||
| The governor's thought big. | ||
| We have one here from Nebraska who was actually the first to start working on community engagement, which is part of that legislation as well. | ||
| But we have to right-size health care in rural America. | ||
| And that's an important phrase. | ||
| All 50 states submitted amazing ideas to transport rural health care in ways that should have been done decades ago. | ||
| The CMS team awarded each team their portion of the $50 billion investment precisely with the same precision that we took Venezuela leadership, you know, convicted individual and with Iran as well, the same precision on time before the end of the year and got it out of Washington into the States. | ||
| Now, I want to take a step back and do a little thought experiment, Mr. President, if you wanted to do this. | ||
| If you, and God forbid this happened, had turned your head the other way in Butler, Pennsylvania, it wouldn't have been an ear injury. | ||
| Now, I've been to Butler. | ||
| I'm from Pennsylvania. | ||
| Butler General Hospital is a good hospital. | ||
| They don't have neurosurgery there. | ||
| If you have an injury to the head, you have a golden hour to get cared for. | ||
| You were taken to Butler General Hospital. | ||
| Because the injury, thankfully, was not as lethal as it was designed to be, it wasn't the problem. | ||
| But if you'd had a head injury, you could have had your life saved. | ||
| But without a neurosurgeon, and there is no neurosurgeon at Butler General Hospital, unfortunately, you wouldn't have an option because Pittsburgh is a far, far right away. | ||
| That's the closest metropolitan area where there are lots of neurosurgeons. | ||
| But with this bill, this legislation rather, this funding of $50 billion, Pennsylvania got its share. | ||
| And they're going to be able to build telemedicine hookups, even telerobotic surgery that would allow an injured individual in a car accident or any other reason that has a head injury in Butler General and rural hospitals across the country to be able to access the best care our nation has to offer so rural America will not suffer. | ||