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June 23, 2017 - The Dan Bongino Show
40:24
Ep 488 What You Need to Know About the Healthcare Bill

In this episode I discuss the problems with the GOP Senate Obamacare replacement bill.  https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/the-gops-obamacare-out-repeal-replace-in-copy-paste   I also address a criminal justice reform measure which can interest both liberals and conservatives.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Time Text
Dan Bongino. I owe you, who owes who? You owe me, I owe you, there's no money!
The Dan Bongino Show. Anything run by liberals will be run into the ground,
burned, stepped on, gasoline poured on it and burned again.
Get ready to hear the truth about America.
They're arguing about things and debating how quickly they can deconstruct the greatest country in the history of mankind and all of the ideas and norms that have gotten us here.
On a show that's not immune to the facts, with your host, Dan Bongino.
Alright, I was in a really pissy mood today before Joe did his British accent to get me going, so...
He's like, all right, how do you do it?
Give me a countdown.
Here we go.
Things can't be that bad, Daniel.
Cheer up now, pip pip.
All right, welcome to the Renegade Republic.
I'm with Dan Bongino, producer Joe, obviously doing better than I am.
Really, I was in like, thank God Joe's funny, because I'm ready to take this microphone, smash it through the damn TV in my office.
You know, folks, being a homeowner is a great thing.
This is not a commercial.
This is like my actual... I see.
But man, alive, is it a pain in the butt.
Gosh, stuff, I was gonna say something, is breaking in my house like every day.
My house was built in 2003.
It was not built, it'd been post-World War I, okay?
This is a 2003 house.
Stuff is always breaking.
Always.
My gosh.
The guy, you know, the AC guy was here yesterday and my thermostat broke, so he put a new thermostat, then the unit went down, the sucker thing that sucks the stuff out of the system got clogged with sucky stuff in the sucker, and That sucks.
That sucks!
The sucker broke and then I have this crap surround sound system.
By the way, this is totally First World Problems.
I completely get that.
If you're in Venezuela right now under Socialist Maduro eating pigeons for a living, you don't want to hear it and you're hanging up on the podcast right now.
I totally get that.
But that doesn't make me any less angry right now.
The surround sound system, I have this control 4 thing, it's like the worst thing ever.
It never works.
The app broke, the TV never works, it comes on, the sound stays on, the picture shuts off, the remote doesn't work.
Oh man, alive.
I said to my wife, sometimes I think you're better off renting.
Sheesh.
If I didn't understand the economics of, you know, of home buying versus renting, I swear I would rent.
It is driving me crazy.
Every day something breaks.
I'm nuts.
This is the part of the show where it's just a little slice of life from your host.
Oh man, then we get this crap Obamacare bill that came out yesterday.
I mean, I don't want to be depressing, folks, but really this is not like a The golden age of republicanism, you know?
I mean, gosh, this crap Obamacare bill comes out, the replacement bill.
So we'll get to that today.
All right, today's show brought to you by our friends at My Patriot Supply.
On a serious note, I did get some really good feedback.
There was a listener the other day that sent me a great email.
He said, listen, there was a Tornado down here or a big set of storms.
And I said, you know, I'm going to use your email in one of the reads.
And he said, you know, I'd never really thought about buying emergency food.
Just real email.
I'm not making this up.
The listener knows, you know, knows he didn't give me permission to share his name, so I'm not doing it.
But he said, I went to the grocery store and shockingly there was no food left.
Now, that's not a joke.
Like, God forbid that tornado, and we had a real serious set of storms, and you were out of luck for a couple days.
It's nice to know you've got an emergency food supply.
Listen, better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
It's crazy not to have an emergency food supply set up.
My friends at MyPatriotSupply send you a month's supply of emergency food.
For just $99, that's it.
You're good for 25 years.
$99 for 25 years of food?
Think about that.
25 years, I'll be dead before you need to replace that stuff.
Go get yourself a box of emergency foods.
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Easy to prepare.
You just have to add water.
God forbid you need it one day.
You'll be the most popular guy in town.
God forbid something goes wrong and you have that supply of emergency food.
Pick up two boxes, as a matter of fact.
It's available for just $99.
Go to preparewithdan.com.
That's preparewithdan.com and pick up your one month supply of emergency food today.
140 servings.
Okay.
Now for the content portion, this Obamacare bill in the Senate just really sucks.
Like the sucker in my, I don't even know what the hell the thing's called, a vacuum pump or whatever, the flux capacitor, but that broke and it sucks garbage out of the system.
And unfortunately Republicans were elected to office to suck garbage out of the system and we're just injecting garbage back into the system because the Senate bill is really terrible.
And I really want to applaud Senator Mike Lee, Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Rand Paul, and Senator Ted Cruz.
For standing up and saying, listen, we're willing to work with you, but this thing is really terrible.
Got my wife now.
Everything, you hear a phone going off in the background.
She's in the desk drawer now.
Here, you want to get something?
Here you go.
You want to join the pod?
Say hello.
Here, say hi.
I'm trying to get you some air conditioning.
You'll love me later when you have cold air.
Paula's paying the AC guy for the broken AC.
She's so shy.
She doesn't want to say hello.
The show is totally off the rails today, folks.
But listen, this is real.
This is dad bod Gino's life, right?
So I thought of a way to Sum this up for you because gonna be a lot of debate going on about Obamacare and I want to leave you on a serious note with some information to take out of this so you can explain away why this thing stinks as bad as it does.
But before we do that, we have got to explain what Obamacare is!
Because here's the problem I'm having, Joe, debating liberals on Twitter and, you know, people I run into in the gym and things like that who want to discuss Obamacare.
They don't know what it is.
So there's a terrific piece at Conservative Review, and I don't just say that because I work there.
This is really a great piece by Dan Horowitz, which I will put in the show notes today, which is conveniently at Conservative Review on their podcast.
Which describes succinctly what Obamacare is, and I'm just going to go into you.
He describes the five components of Obamacare.
This is what Obamacare is so you know what you're actually talking about when you're debating your Looney Tunes liberal friends.
Number one, the purchase mandates.
What Obamacare did, Joe, a little background here, is it made people buy insurance products that many of them didn't want.
Alright, now I say made people buy insurance products that many people didn't want because if it made you buy them, you didn't buy them before it made you buy them and therefore you didn't want them!
What's the need for an insurance mandate to buy hair plugs if people don't want to buy hair plugs?
It's just simply government force.
It's using government force to get people to buy stuff that they don't want to buy.
So, Obamacare had a bunch of purchasing mandates in there that had, you know, vasectomies and other things in there that people did not want to buy insurance for.
Now, Joe, that does not mean they did not want to buy the procedure.
It meant people did not want to buy insurance for the procedure.
Does it mean people didn't want hair transplants?
The hair transplant business is doing quite well.
Now that's a problem, trust me, Joe Armacost will never in a million years have with his Elvis flowing black mane even at 75 or whoever old he is.
Joe will not need that.
So Joe is not that customer.
Joe does not want hair transplants, nor does Joe want insurance for hair transplants, which he will never need.
Right, Joe?
Hopefully.
You bet.
Joe has the nicest head of hair any human being I've ever met has.
It's frankly embarrassing for a man of his age.
He makes us all feel bad at 42.
He's got nicer hair than me.
Joe doesn't want insurance for hair transplants!
So that's component number one of Obamacare, these purchase mandates to buy insurance for things that people do not want to buy themselves.
Fascinating.
How that works out, and how it drives up costs.
Amazing!
Joe, isn't this shocking to liberals?
You ask people to buy insurance against a product they didn't want to buy in the first place, no less to buy insurance for it, and insurance companies charge more for it?
Oh!
What?
Really?
That's how that works?
Yes.
Okay, so moving on.
I'm moving at a glacial pace here, and I'm doing way too much in the realm of humor today.
So number one component of Obamacare, purchase mandates.
Buy insurance products against procedures that they didn't want.
Number two was means-tested subsidies.
These were income-based in Obamacare, meaning Because Obamacare made you buy insurance for a bunch of stuff you didn't want, vasectomies and hair transplants, they realized Obamacare people who designed it, who were relatively smart.
I mean, it was devious what they did, but they weren't stupid, Joe.
They said, well, if we ask people to buy insurance for vasectomies, it's going to cost extra money and people's premiums are going to go up.
So what are we going to do?
I got an idea.
Let's give them taxpayer money to pay for the stuff they didn't want to buy in the past, so let's take money from other taxpayers and give it to them to buy insurance for products they didn't want to buy in the first place.
Ho-ho!
Genius!
And let's call it a fancy name, means-tested subsidies.
So, quick economic lesson when you hear means-tested.
Means-tested means it's based basically on income.
So, you'll get a certain amount of money based on a sliding scale of how much you make.
So, if you make $20,000, you'll get X amount of money.
If you make $21,000, you'll make X minus X amount of money.
And if you make, say, $90,000, $95,000, you'll get no subsidy at all.
Copy, Joe?
So, number one component, purchase mandates.
Number two, means-tested subsidies, which is a fancy way of saying other taxpayers are paying for your overpriced insurance.
Component number three was the Medicaid expansion.
Medicaid within the states was limited to people who were poor.
Medicaid was designed to help the poor get medical procedures that they couldn't have done at their income level.
Now, Medicaid has not done that.
Medicaid has been a disaster.
The University of Virginia study on Medicaid is pretty dispositive on the matter.
People on Medicaid have worse health outcomes after surgery than people who have no insurance at all, and also have worse health outcomes than people who have private insurance.
Now think about what I just told you.
People on Medicaid have worse outcomes than people who have no insurance at all.
In other words, if you have Medicaid, you're better off going into surgery with no insurance.
There's a statistically better chance you do well.
I'm not making that up.
Look it up.
It's a University of Virginia study.
What the Medicaid expansion did within the states, Joe, Is it expanded Medicaid to people who were outside of basically the poverty line up to people making in some cases up to $90,000 a year.
And what the federal government said is they said, we got a magic deal for you.
Because again, the Democrats aren't stupid.
They said, Joe, if we do this, if we give basically government taxpayer funded healthcare, that's what Medicaid is, if we give this to people for nothing in return, that's going to cost money because they're going to go have procedures done, they're going to have to get paid.
How are we going to do it?
Yeah.
So what they did is they said, well, to defray the cost to the states, which would have been absurdly high.
They said we'll pick up 90% of the tab for the first few years.
Now the states are like, wow, that's a great idea.
Until you figure out this little basic economic fact that this country is called the United States of America.
So if the states are not paying, who's paying?
Martians?
The states!
So it's people from other states paying for people from other states who are paying for people from other states.
You know, it reminds me of that old Milton Friedman joke about government spending.
You know, the big joke about government spending is you think your neighbor's paying for it and he's laughing because he thinks it's the same thing.
In other words, you both think your other one's paying for it.
You're all paying for it.
The Medicaid expansion was a joke.
It was never going to be economically feasible.
Oh, 90% is being paid for by the federal government, which is composed of what?
Space aliens?
Uranus?
The planet.
Mars?
Hmm.
Wha- *laughs*
Right?
*laughs* I-
*laughs* I don't-
*laughs* Where did you think the money was coming from?
Oh, no, no!
Don't worry, we're only paying 10%!
The federal government's paying the rest!
The federal government composed of you!
Again, folks, I give up.
I completely give up to talking to liberals.
It's useless.
I'm hoping to argue with liberals, only so a third person will hear us, to see how dumb liberals are.
No, no, the federal government picks up 90% of the tab.
Oh, and who's the federal government?
The United States.
Was that slow enough for you?
Joe, do you have to hit a sound effect there to slow that down?
You're paying for it.
No, I got it.
Take a sip of this.
I'm a little wired up today because I'm really P.O'd about this stupid Obamacare bill.
It's been like 20 years.
You think we can get this damn house together and figure things out, you know?
Mm-hmm.
It's been a little more than 20 years.
It's been since the Reagan era, so 30 years.
We should have been able to get this thing together.
We can't figure out what we want to do with healthcare.
It's unforgivable.
Okay, so we're up to number three.
So the five components of Obamacare.
The purchase mandates for crap you don't want.
Secondly, paying for crap that you can't afford with other people's money via means-tested subsidies.
Third, expanding a crap program that's doing crap to help people in the Medicaid expansion.
Number four, crap mandates.
The individual and employer mandates.
Again, the devious creators of Obamacare rapidly figured out, Joe, that people aren't going to be able to afford this stuff.
If people aren't going to be able to afford this stuff and other people are also going to have to pay for it because taxpayers are going to have to subsidize the subsidies, then what are we going to do?
Well, we're going to have to make people buy Obamacare because Obamacare sucks so bad.
The suck factor on this is high, if you're missing my point, which is perfect that we started with the broken sucker on my air conditioning unit.
Totally unplanned, but the sucker thing fits right in today.
So, it was an individual and employer mandates.
The individual mandate was If you can pay for Obamacare, or if you don't pay for Obamacare, we're going to institute a tax penalty through the IRS.
It was roughly, was it 1% of income or a couple hundred dollars, and the amount goes up every year.
Problem is, Obamacare was so ridiculously expensive because of all the mandates and the crap subsidies, that even with the tax penalty, most people flipped the government off with the middle finger and said, I'd rather just pay this crap individual tax.
Which wasn't enough, by the way, to offset the cost of Obamacare.
There was also an employer mandate.
If you're a company that hired 50 people or more, you had to provide insurance.
Hence the term 49ers, because companies were not hiring that 50th person because they didn't want to have to pay for Obamacare insurance.
There were also 29ers, because if you had a workforce and someone was subjected to 30 hours a week or more of work or, you know, work 30 hours more, subjected to it, it's not indentured servitude.
If you work 30 hours a week or more, the employer would have to provide insurance.
Hence the term 20-niners.
When you hear the terms 20-niners and 40-niners, that is a reference to companies that are trying to avoid Obamacare penalties by hiring a total of 49 people rather than 50 and having the people that work there work 29 hours a week instead of 30.
20-niners and 40-niners because they didn't want to pay for Obamacare.
Okay, finally, Obamacare was a series of tax hikes.
It was an enormous tax hike, trillions of dollars over 10 years.
Those tax hikes, these crap tax hikes that really sucked, the suck factor was high on this.
There was a 0.9% payroll tax that was going to be levied against couples who make more than $250,000 a year because that's rich by Obamacare standards.
Unfortunately, if you live in a city run by Democrats, you're probably poor at $250,000 a year.
0.9% payroll tax.
There was also a 3.8% investment tax levied on capital gains for people who make over a certain amount of money per year.
Those were really high taxes.
That is in addition, by the way, to the individual mandate tax, which affected everyone that did not choose to buy insurance.
So, when you see people like Senator Claire McCaskill from Missouri coming out and saying that, well, this is a handout to the rich, let's debunk that right away.
Because, and I'll get to it in a second, but one of the components of the Senate bill that is decent is it does get rid of those taxes.
But McCaskill's point, Joe, is that by getting rid of those taxes, this is a handout to the rich.
She says, all of these taxes were only designed to hit the rich, the payroll tax and the investment tax.
But what McCaskill's conveniently leaving out is the biggest tax of all.
The individual tax, if you don't buy Obamacare, that's for everybody.
So again, it's easy to debunk liberals, even PolitiFact, which is a left-leaning hack organization, told McCaskill to basically slow a roll on that one.
Slow your roll down, McCaskill.
You're just making that up.
This was not a tax cut for the rich.
It was a tax cut for anybody who doesn't want to buy crap Obamacare.
Now that we have that out of the way, what Obamacare is, and I'm sorry I had to lay that groundwork, but it's, I really, based on some of the traffic I get, there are some, not all, but some people who really have no idea what this is.
And you know, it's all summed up nicely in the Dan Hurwitz's piece, which I'll put at the show notes here.
Okay.
What are the downs and the ups of the bill?
Very few upsides, but here are the downsides for the replacement bill that Mitch McConnell launched yesterday, for those of you who are coming in late here.
All right, number one.
Well, we're in trouble right away, by the way, because we have 52 Senate seats.
You need 51 to pass, so you can have two senators defect because the vice president would break the tie if it was 50-50, and you now have four GOP senators saying we're not interested.
You have Paul, Cruz, Lee, and Johnson, so the bill's already in trouble.
But here are the downsides.
It does not repeal the regulations, Joe.
This is – I don't know any other sound or basic economic way to say this, but when you ask people, check.
Rewind the tape.
When you demand by government fiat.
That people buy a product, whether they have the money or not, you are going to drive up the price of the product.
This should not be mysterious to people.
In other words, Joe, if you demand that people buy cars with, you know, Bluetooth surround, Apple CarPlay, Droid CarPlay, Sunroofs and Moonroofs.
In other words, products some people want, some people don't because they can't afford.
Why would it surprise you that the car is more expensive?
Now this surprises liberals all the time.
I'm talking to reasonable people now.
When Obamacare regulations demanded people buy vasectomies and buy hair transplants when they want to pay for them, somebody had to pay for them.
The insurance companies had to pay for them, and the insurance companies had to get the money from somewhere, so they were getting the money from the taxpayers who subsidized the more expensive plants.
So, just to be clear.
Excuse me.
I like this.
There's a really good protein product I enjoy.
Biotech.
I got to get Miles and them to develop a really good protein product out there.
Maybe a casein product.
Totally off topic.
Okay.
Show's off the rails a little bit today, folks.
Sorry.
It's not that I'm distracted, I'm just a little annoyed, so I'm trying not to do an overly emotional show here.
So it doesn't repeal any of these regulations to buy sunroofs, to buy Bluetooth, to buy Apple CarPlay.
It doesn't do any of that.
It doesn't repeal any of that.
I don't understand.
Now, let me tell you how they're framing this, because this is what you're going to hear from your liberal friends and a lot of the rhino Republicans out there.
They're framing this as a series of patient protections.
Now, this is fascinating.
I've always told you about how liberals manipulate the language, because once you control the language, you control the argument, even when the argument hasn't yet begun.
You control it.
Once you frame something as a patient protection, the argument's over.
Is it not?
Joe, how are you going to argue against patient protections?
You're not!
Joe's not repealing patient protections.
Joe's repealing a series of Obamacare regulations which have made the cost curve dramatically grow to the point where people can't afford it.
These are not patient protections.
These are government red tape regulatory rules which make you buy crap you don't want.
But it's being framed as a patient protection bill.
The Democrats, of course, go right to the media with it.
The media parrots this talking point, and outside of a few Republicans in the Senate with major league nerve, with cojones like steel, like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Cruz, and we'll see Johnson, too, who seems to be opposing this.
They're afraid to tell people the truth, that these are not patient protections.
These are patient mandates.
These are things you're being ordered by the government to buy that you could buy yourself tomorrow freely.
But you don't want to.
Right.
Because if you did, you would not have to be ordered by the government to do it.
I don't have to be told to buy a car.
I don't have to be told to buy a television.
I want to do it.
The only reason the government would need to do it is because you don't want it!
The GOP bill does not get rid of the regulations to buy this stuff, folks.
The price is not going to go down.
And the problem, Joe, If we pass this thing with these, quote, patient protections, which is a bunch of red tape built in, the cost is not going to come down.
And Joe, who do you think is going to own this damn thing in the next election?
Yeah, I know.
We are.
Republicans.
Yeah, of course we are.
We're going to own this thing.
It doesn't matter.
Folks, listen, the media sucks, okay?
They're a bunch of liars, a bunch of hacks.
They don't ever tell the story the right way, okay?
They are not going to say, oh, Obamacare built in this red tape and Republicans just didn't get rid of it and henceforth the Republicans aren't fully responsible.
That's not what's going to happen.
Your prices are going to continue to go up and the media is going to go, oh, all the failures of Obamacare are blamed on Republicans.
Just like I told you the other day, if you listen to my show, if you're binge listening right now, you're probably familiar with this about an hour ago when I talked about how they're blaming Obamacare uncertainty for a lawsuit that happened before Trump even got in office.
You remember Joe, that show where I was talking about how there's this lawsuit against Obamacare that started way before Trump got in office and now the leftists are blaming Obamacare price hikes on uncertainty caused by Trump.
But the lawsuit has nothing to do with Trump.
The lawsuit started before Trump even got in office.
You're just making that up.
But don't ever count on liberals to tell the truth.
So it does not, so just to rewind a little bit, the downside to this, the major downside, it does not repeal the regulations for you to buy stuff that is going to cost a lot of money.
I don't know any easier way to tell you this.
Your costs are not going to go down, as the bill stands now.
Number two, it allows the Medicaid expansion.
Joe, again, the Medicaid expansion is a bottomless pit.
Why are we telling people who make up to $80,000 and $90,000 a year that that's an acceptable income to take other people's money and spend it on your health care?
Can't we be responsible for a minute?
And you know, even if we have to lose an election, just be honest with people and say, folks, you know, here's the thing.
Doctors and hospitals cost money.
Okay.
These people work for a living.
They have to get paid.
If you make 60, 70, $80,000 a year, I'm sorry, but there is not a reason for another taxpayer to fund your healthcare.
They have to pay for their own healthcare.
I mean the taxpayer and the person demanding it.
Why is this a hard argument to make?
Do you really believe you're going to lose the American electorate by telling the truth about this?
So it allows this Medicaid expansion to people making absurd amounts of money who are not poor by any measure, who are getting taxpayer money now to buy health care.
And the idea is, oh, well, we got to keep the Medicaid expansion.
What are we going to do?
We're going to take it away from people we've given it to?
Yes.
Because we haven't given them anything.
Taxpayers are paying for them.
What do you mean, we?
It's not the government.
Oh, the government's going to be heartless and take away their health care.
The government's not paying for their health care.
Other people are paying for their health care.
Folks, we're not talking about taking Medicaid away from the poor.
That's not what the expansion was.
The Medicaid expansion expanded Medicaid, government-paid, taxpayer-paid health care to people who are not poor by any reasonable or fair measure.
And nobody wants to say the truth.
Oh, we can't come off as uncaring.
Uncaring?
What's caring about having a person making $50,000 a year who's not eligible for Medicaid pay for someone's health insurance who's making $90,000 a year who is eligible?
What is that?
Well, I don't understand how it did that you that whatever I can steal a line from Alicia Silverstone and
Whatevs, man, you know?
Whatever.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I just don't get it.
Sometimes, you know, I'm never running for office ever again in human history, in the history of humankind.
But gosh, I swear if I did, I would like run a scorched earth campaign and be like, I am never ever going to BS you ever.
Here's it.
This is the deal.
The Medicaid expansion is Joey Bagadonuts paying for Bobby Bagadonuts insurance.
And Joey Begadonis is making 50k a year and Bobby's making 80.
That's fair.
Tell me how that's fair, please.
Please explain.
I'm going to turn the question on you.
How's that fair?
I'm sorry if I'm a little frustrated today.
Really.
I am.
But really, since the Reagan era, we've had years to get our act together on this.
And it's like we can't get out of our own freaking way, man.
Just disappointing.
You think the Republicans are dumb?
You think they know not repealing the regulations that you buy vasectomies?
You think they don't understand that by not getting rid of that, the costs are going to go up?
Of course they know the costs are going to go up.
They don't.
And you say, well, why are they doing it?
Because they're afraid.
They're afraid.
They're afraid of the lobbyists, the vasectomy lobbyists who want their vasectomies covered by taxpayers.
And they're afraid of the Democrats in the media.
Oh, oh my gosh, you're going to repeal patient protections?
Who's protected?
You turn the question to them.
Who's protected?
So basically what you're saying is you want the government to order people to buy stuff they don't want to buy.
And that is protection again.
How?
Explain to me.
No, no, serious question, Armacost.
How the hell is that a patient protection?
Well, I'll tell you, Dan.
I mean, it's a good thing that it'll pay for me as a guy.
It'll pay for my OBGYN.
Hey, listen, if you go that sex change, you may need that.
Yes, and that's exactly it.
To use, you know, my OBGYN, I can get the sex change.
You know what?
You just figured it out.
I knew I had you on the show for a reason.
You know what?
Let's just stop the show.
Joe nailed it.
That's it.
But, you know, as crazy as all this sounds, you start to wonder, like, Yeah!
You have to almost use humor to understand the depravity of the situation, how dumb this is.
It just pisses me off.
Alright, let me give you an upside.
My plants are dying, I gotta water my plants today.
Remember those, um...
Those Eureka palms I had to rip out.
They had the deadly fungus from another planet that kills everything it touches, Gamma Derma.
So I had them ripped out and I had them replaced with some Clusia bushes.
And you know, it's Florida in the summer, so it's...
67,000 degrees, of course.
And you know, I work, so I can't sit home and water these plants all day.
But like these clusia bushes, I got to get cracking with the water.
These things are going to die.
And you can't water them in the middle of the day because the water is like a magnifying glass and the sun, you know, it's like 97 during the day.
Cook those darn things, you know?
So I got to go out and water a little bit today on these things before it gets too hot.
You know, and if you catch the gamma derma yourself, you can use your Obamacare to take care of it.
I wonder if it covers a human gamma derma infection from Eureka trees.
That may be, Joe.
We should look into that.
That may be part of the portfolio of crap you have to buy in Obamacare.
In addition to, hey, listen, nothing wrong with vasectomies, bro.
If you want to get...
Have at it, man.
Remember the, don't tase me, bro?
Don't cut me, bro.
People don't like vasectomies.
That's cool.
People, some people like cut me.
I got it.
You know, I'm not no more little kiddos from it.
Whatever.
Do your own thing.
Just pay for it.
I mean, is this really crazy?
Hair transplants or playing for, you know, hair plugs for dudes?
Just, hey, listen, I, I get a lot of people get, that's cool.
Like do your thing with the hair too.
I had no beef.
I didn't lose my hair, so I shouldn't speak with forked tongue.
But my personal advice, if you care, just shave the melon, brother.
It looks good.
Bald is in, man.
Just shave the melon.
Make it easy.
Not everybody has a mane like Gravy Sweat and Joe Armacost, like the old Elvis dude.
Not everybody has that.
Everybody knows Joe looks like Elvis, too.
When they see him at CPAC, they recognize him.
Remember that lady?
Oh, you must be Joe.
You look like Elvis.
Oh, look, it's Elvis.
You must be producer Joe.
You must be producer Joe.
She recognized you right away.
Yeah.
It's funny, I had like five, six stories today, and I'm all over the place.
All right, the upside of Obamacare, because there is, to give you kind of a fair analysis, there are some upsides to the Obamacare replacement bill.
All right.
It does repeal the individual mandate and the employer mandate.
So those are going to go away.
So in other words, the mandate that you purchase Obamacare insurance, let's say you don't have a job.
In other words, you're in the individual market.
You do not have what you would call job-sponsored insurance.
You will no longer be obligated to purchase insurance or have to pay a penalty.
The employers will not be obligated to do it for 50 employees or employees that work 30 hours a week either.
So that's kind of good.
You won't have those taxes.
Now, again, it's hard not to view this holistically, because when you cut those taxes, the individual penalty tax, and you take that out, but you still keep the Medicaid expansion and the regulations, you know, it's kind of good that they cut the mandate, but again, Joe, costs aren't going anywhere.
So now you're going to have to cut from, you're going to have to rob from Peter to pay Paul.
But it does repeal the taxes as well, the payroll tax and the investment tax, which I think will be good for the economy.
But let me tie this up because I just want a couple, I want to cover a couple more things and move on.
And folks, I mean it.
I love that you listen in and the show is very real.
We do very little editing and I do want to apologize for being a little scatterbrained today, but I am just unusually Excited about the topic in a bad way because I'm fascinated by healthcare economics, by economics in general, and I just find it utterly repulsive that forever we've been dealing with this and we cannot find a way to market market-based solutions despite the fact that it's worked almost everywhere it's been tried.
Why do you think LASIK eye procedures It costs like 25 cents now.
Okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but LASIK eye surgery was unbelievably expensive when it first started.
It's generally not covered by insurance, so people pay it out of pocket, and now LASIK eye surgery is one of the most affordable medical procedures out there because the government largely didn't intervene with LASIK eye procedure, which will probably be part of the Obamacare expansion portfolio of new things you have to buy, which will then drive up the price, and people will blame it on Republicans, which is just unreal.
So it does repeal the taxes, that's a good thing.
All right, so we sum that up.
Let's move the Obamacare thing aside.
A couple more things I wanted to cover here.
A little bit of a sensitive topic to me, being a former law enforcement guy.
There was an article yesterday about prison education, and I don't know, maybe it surprised you a little bit, my stance on this.
May not.
But there's an article in the Wall Street Journal about basically GED-type programs in prisons.
And folks, I totally get That this is a highly sensitive topic.
There are people out there, conservatives and democrats and maybe even some liberals alike, who are like, hey, prison should be prison.
Get the damn weight room out of the prison, get the books out of there, and prison should really suck.
I agree, it's not a deterrent if it doesn't suck, right?
I mean, you certainly don't want it to be Club Med.
But that argument is transferred over to the GED and education services as well, where, I don't want to say there's been an overwhelming push to pull education out of the prisons, but a lot of conservatives seem to support, some of them that I spoke to, the idea that, no, no, prison should just be prison, and we shouldn't be doing anything for these men and women in there.
And just for a second, I'd like to propose an alternate perspective.
It changed me a little bit.
When I was a cop, when you were a rookie, you worked the cells a lot.
It's a crap job.
Every precinct has jail cells in the precinct.
And the reason is you arrest the guy, you don't bring him right to central booking.
Central booking in New York City with the NYPD.
Each borough had one, so I worked in Brooklyn North.
So that's where they processed all the prisoners from Brooklyn North, and then you would go to central booking, so it's called central, and then they'd go to Rikers Island.
But, while you process them at the precinct, you know, you need a place to store criminals.
Securely.
So there were jail cells.
Turn the key.
Turn the key.
So when you were a rookie, you would do the cells, which was a terrible job.
I mean, when it was a busy Friday night and those cells were packed in the 75 precinct, You could not even get your head.
You'd be fingerprinting 100, 150 guys a night.
They're all complaining.
They just got arrested.
They're all pissed off.
And I remember this.
I'd have nightmares about this.
You'd try to sit down for a second, and they'd be like, yo, CO!
CO!
One, I'm not a CO.
I'm not a correction officer.
I'm a cop.
There's a difference.
Yo, CO!
I'd hear it all night.
And once one guy says it, they'd all say it.
It's like a cacophony, like in the peanut show.
Yo, C.O., yo, C.O., yo, C.O.
It was like a song.
Because then they would realize, like, oh, if this guy's calling for the C.O., who's not even a C.O., he's a P.O., then I better get him first.
So it was this cacophonous sound of, yo, C.O., it would drive you absolutely nuts.
And it was always something.
Like, the guy next to me smells, the toilet bowl doesn't work, I need my phone call.
They think, like, a phone call, by the way, is a constitutional right, which it's not.
You try to give it to them as a courtesy.
But there's no constitutional right to a phone call.
You know, the phone would be broken, whatever.
It would drive you crazy.
So...
Where was I going with this?
Oh, but one of them did sell.
Sometimes though, when it was a little bit of a slower night... See, sometimes I get too immersed in the humor and I forget I'm trying to tell a story.
When it was a slower night, I liked to talk to the guys because I was a psychology student at the time and I was genuinely fascinated by how some people seemed to find a life of crime rewarding, Joe, even though the chances of them getting caught and living a sucky life like the sucker from my air conditioner that's broken were pretty darn high.
Right.
And I would just, you know, like, why?
I would just quit.
Like, I don't get it.
Like, there's a 99% chance your life is going to suck.
Even the richest criminals of all time that, quote, thought they got away with it, always get caught.
Pablo Escobar, that Jordan Belfort dude from the Wolf of Wall Street, you know, a Bernie Madoff.
They all think they're going to get away with it.
And very few of them, John Gotti, they just don't.
The story, the movie always ends bad.
So why do you continue to try to act in that movie?
The movie always ends bad.
And, you know, a lot of these- what I found out- listen, it was not an exhaustive psychoanalysis, I don't want to be ridiculous, but one of the things I found out is these guys, almost universally, Joe, had childhoods that were horrifying.
I mean, by any measure.
I don't mean horrifying by first world standards, like I'm whining about my thermostat and my pool pump.
I mean horrifying by, like, third world standards.
I mean, like, sexual abuse, grotesque physical abuse, complete lack of parenting at all, no discipline.
And, you know, some of these guys, if you were nice to them, they'd freely share with you, you know, the deepest, darkest secrets.
I mean, yeah, the sexual and criminal and physical abuse of them, sexual and physical abuse, which is criminal, I should say, was almost universal.
And what I'm getting at is I'm not a liberal.
I'm not saying, well, you know, listen, I had a rough childhood too.
If you read my first book, you'll get some insight into some of the stuff we went through.
It wasn't pretty either with regards to physical abuse.
It was pretty ugly, actually.
And I took responsibility.
I was the victim of it.
I wasn't on the other end of it.
So was my brother.
I didn't use that as an excuse then to keep the circle of violence going, but some people do.
But remember, I had the advantage of a great education and a parent who cared at the time.
They didn't have that.
So I guess what I'm trying to get at is, maybe I made it a little bit longer than I needed to, but when it comes to things like a simple, basic education in prison that's...
You know, a lot of it's funded by charity work.
And frankly, if it's a taxpayer argument, I get it.
I'm okay with that.
I'm not going to demand, I'm not going to be a hypocrite.
I'm not demanding you pay for a service.
Make it a charity thing.
But even the charities are having problems sometimes getting in there.
I think this is a thing we could all kind of universally get behind.
What's the worst that can happen, folks?
Really, what's the worst that can happen?
You get a guy in education who learns to read, I mean, really, some of them for the first time.
I mean, what's the worst that can happen?
He goes out and maybe gets a job.
If one out of a hundred of those men and women in prison that are lifetime recidivists becomes a productive citizen, do you realize the societal costs, not just in money, But in those crimes, he doesn't commit, will have saved.
Maybe a woman who doesn't get raped, the house that doesn't get broken into, a guy who then starts being productive and stops paying taxpayer money and starts paying taxes.
Now, the reason I bring that up, because I believe in data and statistics, is in this Wall Street Journal piece, there was a fascinating number about these education programs in prison.
They reduce recidivism by as much as 43%.
I wanted to throw that in at the end and not in the beginning, so that when I gave the example of 1 out of 100, it would be salient in your head to show you the real example, that it's closer to 43 out of 100.
It's reducing that recidivism rate by a dramatic amount.
And I know it's not a top issue for people, I know you tune in for Obamacare, you know, the big stories of the day, and I get that.
But I think when we say to liberals, and we're trying to find some common ground, there is very little, I agree, there.
This is probably an issue where we could all agree that the worst of us are probably the worst of us for a reason.
And if we can do a little thing, take a little step to make them semi, even semi-productive members of society, this is something everybody can get on board with.
Alright folks, I appreciate you tuning in and I hope you enjoyed the show today.
If you didn't, Please email me.
I mean it.
Daniel at Bongino.com.
I know sometimes I get a little emotional and I'm always happy to hear the feedback from the audience.
I read all of your emails, all the complaints about the show notes.
I read them all.
All the Brickhouse Nutrition stuff.
And please go sign up for CRTV.
Use my promo code Bongino for $10 off.
We've got a lot of surprises coming down the pipe.
Go to CRTV.com.
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