Andrew Klavan dissects Mitt Romney’s opportunistic Washington Post attack on Trump, mocking "Never Trumpers" who abandoned the 2016 election over Hillary Clinton—a "career criminal"—while ignoring GOP failures under Bush and Trump’s policy wins. Scott Atlas argues U.S. healthcare costs spiral from moral hazard, not market failure, proposing catastrophic insurance with HSAs while defending pre-existing condition protections via prior-coverage rules; he debunks single-payer myths, citing superior U.S. cancer outcomes and innovation. Klavan ties it to conservative fragmentation: Trump’s rise exposed systemic messaging failures, not just his flaws, as elites like Warren dismiss working-class voters while platforms censor dissent—leaving no viable alternative beyond performative outrage. [Automatically generated summary]
Whenever January 1st comes around, it's always fun to check out what new laws have just gone into effect.
It's a good way of finding out what people in government have been doing instead of working for a living or minding their own business like decent normal human beings.
For instance, in California this year, we have a new law that whenever an illegal alien commits an unimaginable atrocity on innocent Americans, news stations are required to play pictures of frightened Mexican children on the border for the next 24 hours or until the public forgets that Donald Trump is absolutely right on this issue, whichever comes first.
In New York State, whenever an untreated psychopath commits a mass shooting, public officials are now legally required to shake their heads sadly and talk about how Fox News is stigmatizing the mentally ill.
In Massachusetts, a new law says that in the event of Islamic terrorism, emergency workers must immediately rush to the city center and take turns reading violent Bible verses out of context until calm is restored.
And finally, a new law in Texas bars people from moving to the state from California, New York, and Massachusetts.
Although that law is currently under challenge by people in liberal states who feel it's unfair they should suffer the consequences of the crappy laws they passed at home when they could continue to feel virtuous by escaping to Texas and passing crappy laws there.
Some new municipal laws include San Francisco's Pooper-Scooper law, which requires wild dogs to clean up after homeless people.
Then in Portland, Oregon, a new law requires that masked fascist rioters give a Miranda warning before beating the crap out of the police.
And in Seattle, all drugs are now not only legal, but included free with your coffee.
Unfortunately, none of the laws I wanted passed made it through any legislatures, so it's still legal to make movies that run longer than two hours, and driving slowly in the left lane is not punishable by death, unless I happen to be right behind you.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Ring Security Failures00:02:41
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity-dicky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is ippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, Mitt Romney has unleashed an attack on Donald Trump's character.
Wow, that's new.
Whoever thought to attack Trump's character?
And Romney has gotten predictable backup from the mainstream media and the Never Trumpers at National Review, and of course, Bill Crystal, who used to have a job somewhere.
But the problem with American politics is obviously not Trump's character.
The problem is that Trump ran against a woman of even worse character who also opposed constitutional freedom.
And a lot of Never Trumpers were too self-righteous to make the choice that needed to be made.
A presidential election where the only choices were Trump and Hillary may well represent a failure of the American system.
But why is it no one ever asks himself how his actions or his politics or his philosophy may have contributed to that failure?
It's always some other guy's fault.
So let's take a look at Mitt and what he and the Republicans and maybe even we conservatives might be doing wrong.
But first, we got to talk about ring security.
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By the way, while I'm reminding you, this is the year that Another Kingdom comes out as a novel.
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Running Into Contradictions00:15:18
So Romney is now the incoming senator from Utah, and he unleashed on Trump in a scathing article in the Washington Post because, you know, the Washington Post doesn't have enough anti-Trump columnists.
They have to go out and recruit them.
This is like the Washington Post where democracy dies in seething hatred and bitterness.
So Romney says he agrees with the president on a lot of issues, and he praises Trump's accomplishments, like the tax cuts and the judges and all this.
But here's where he gets to the big thing.
He says, to a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation.
This is Mitt Romney talking.
A president should unite us and inspire us to follow our better angels.
A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity and elevate the national discourse with comedy and mutual respect.
That's C-O-M-I-T-Y, not routines.
As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit.
I guess he's thinking of Bill Clinton getting Oral Sachs in the Oval Office and Barack Obama silencing conservatives with the IRS and those things that really elevated the office.
But with the nation so divided, he goes on, resentful and angry, presidential leadership and qualities of character is indispensable.
And it is in this province where the incumbent's shortfall has been most glaring.
So he's really upset about pulling out of Syria, firing Mattis.
And he says in December, like Trump's character just showed himself he hadn't raised his character to the level of the office.
And he goes on to say, I will support policies that I believe are in the best interests of the country.
That's mighty nice of you, Mitt.
And I will oppose those that are not.
I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault, but I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest, or destructive to Democratic institutions.
You know, this is really interesting.
First of all, remember, this is different.
I'm not going to come here and defend Trump's character.
I never have.
You'll never hear me do that.
But it's really different for me to come on and talk about Trump's character as somebody who is discussing the news of the day.
That's my job.
And Mitt Romney, who's there to make laws, right?
He's there to legislate and work with the president and work especially with his party.
There are perfectly good examples of people who have done this without being subsumed by the chaos of Trump or by Trumpism, like Lindsey Graham.
Lindsey Graham will criticize Trump, but he always does it in a respectful way.
And who else?
Mitch McConnell, who has stood up to Trump but has also really helped him and in the foxhole of politics, has been on his side and has been loyal and has stood up for him.
You know, this is like when I criticized Ted Cruz and everybody yelled at me, I criticized Cruz for going to the convention and attacking Trump there.
I feel the same way about Mitt Romney doing this here.
Listen, Mitt was watching, like everybody, he was watching the midterms and he saw that rich suburban Republicans were put off by Donald Trump and voted against him and maybe didn't show up or they voted for whatever the local Democrat was running in Congress and maybe he thinks he can parlay that defection into primarying the president.
That would be a very bad idea.
It would also also, it's a lot of those people who didn't voted against Trump when Trump wasn't on the ballot will return to vote for Trump when the Democrat is running against them.
And they're dealing with these socialists on the left because that's, look, Nancy Pelosi is fighting her left wing.
Nancy Pelosi is a San Francisco lefty fighting the left wing of the Democrat Party.
That's where the Democrats are.
And you cannot look at Trump in a vacuum.
He didn't get there.
He didn't get there because everybody said, you know what, what we need is a New York developer.
He got there because he was running against Hillary Clinton, a career criminal who had lied to prosecutors, stonewalled prosecutors, tormented women who tried to attack her husband, and who despised the American people.
So Romney goes on.
And I just, listen, I don't mean to like just run Romney down because I think Romney has lived a good life and he's a good guy in a lot of ways.
But remember, you know, we're dealing with a Republican Party that with our last president, George W. Bush, gave us a huge bump in entitlement spending and wars everywhere, which are not conservative ideas.
So George W. Bush definitely had better character than Trump, but Trump has done a lot more conservative things.
And Romney, you know, Trump once said that he choked like a dog against Obama.
I think there's truth to that.
I think he was afraid to take Obama on.
He destroyed him in that first debate, if you'll remember, and then he let him get away in the second debate.
So now, Romney is just being disingenuous here.
Let's remember this, right?
Romney asked for Trump's endorsement.
Well, first he applied for the job of Secretary of State.
So he wanted to work for the administration.
He then asked Trump for his endorsement in Utah.
And then when he ran in Utah, he didn't run against Trump.
He didn't say, oh, I'm running because somebody has to stand up for Trump.
And suddenly, he's coming in and he takes this attack, he puts this attack out on him.
Let's play the one about cut three.
This is what he told Jake Tapper about what he said.
With regards to the shutdown, I'll be with Republicans on that front, which is I think it's important for us to secure the border.
At the same time, what I did in my op-ed was not just talk about the president and my relationship with him and how we'll work together, but also I laid out my perspectives and priorities on a very broad basis on everything from trade to China to our allies around the world, immigration, and so forth.
So I think it's important as you begin a new job to describe exactly what you hope to accomplish, and that's what I did.
See, I feel it's disingenuous and even a little bit sleazy because when you attack a man's character, you can't say, well, it's really about policy.
It's all, you know, I'll agree where I can agree and disagree.
You can't say, you know, you're a lowlife, but I like your suit.
You know, you're a low life, but I like your judges.
You know, you attack the man's character.
You're going after his character.
And this is what the Never Trumpers have been doing.
Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, whom I love both personally and as a writer, but he did it over the Christmas holidays.
We get it.
We get who Trump is.
We all know who Trump is.
You're not telling us anything new.
The question is, how did we get an election where Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, who was a worse choice?
And by the way, why didn't you show up for that election?
Why didn't you vote for the better choice in that election instead of deserting and saying, oh, I'm just too good.
I'm too self-righteous.
I'm too perfect to make the choice that needs to be made.
That's on you.
I mean, look, reality is reality.
That was the choice we have.
Let's listen to Trump's response.
You know, he was having a meeting and it just evolved into a kind of Trump stream of consciousness, but this is what he said about Mitt.
I just hope he's going to be a team player.
And if he's a team player, that'll be great.
I will say this.
If he fought really hard against President Obama, like he does against me, he would have won the election.
Does that make sense to you?
If he fought the way he fights me, I'm telling you, he would have won the election.
But I think he's going to end up being a team player.
I think he agrees with many of the things that we've done and many of the things that we have in mind.
And we'll see what happens.
All right.
So I'm going to get back to this in a minute because there's a broader question, a couple of broader questions here.
But first, let's talk about Quip.
I love these things.
Quip is an electric toothbrush, but it's a sleekly designed battery-operated electric toothbrush so you don't have this enormous object that you have to take with you everywhere you go.
The TSA stops you as you get on a plane because they think you're carrying a bazooka.
Quip is an electric toothbrush, which is the best way to brush your teeth, gets your teeth cleaner, but it is beautiful to look at and you can carry it with you.
I took it to New York over the Christmas holidays.
I loved having it with me.
It times the amount of time you spend on each quadrant of your teeth because you're supposed to spend at least 30 seconds on each quadrant of your teeth.
Plus, you can make a deal with them where they send you new brushes every three months, and that is important too.
It's not just me who loves Quip.
It's got over a million happy customers, and it starts at just $25.
Just go to getquip.com slash Clavin, getquip.com slash Clavin, and you can start at $25.
Get your first refill pack for free.
That's your first refill pack for free at G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash Clavin.
You can brush your teeth and say to yourself, hey, Kaylee.
It was K-L-A-V-A-N.
All right, so what's Mitt doing here?
Well, first of all, I think, aside from thinking about primary, he said auditioning for the John McCain slot.
John McCain left us, and now there's this open slot for the Republican who curries the favor of the mainstream media, right?
Because you want to hear, come on, this is hilarious.
Let's just listen now.
ABC, this is from our friends at Newsbusters, ABC and NBC welcomed this attack on Trump from Mitt Romney.
See if you can detect the subtle enthusiasm here.
Boy, this op-ed in the Washington Post, he says the president has not risen to the mantle of the office, says he will speak out against significant statements and actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant.
What a shot.
It is a scathing editor.
I can't think of anything like it from an incoming freshman senator that said he was the Republican nominee for president, but it is not just a declaration of purpose by Mitt Romney, as you pointed out there, saying in this op-ed that on balance, the president's conduct over the past couple of years, particularly his actions this month, is evidence the president has not risen to the mantle of the office and then going on to criticize the president's performance.
But he is also essentially declaring that he, for other Republicans, will be the cover.
He'll have their back for those who privately, many have said the same thing, but haven't uttered a word of criticism to president.
Mitt Romney says, follow me.
He's got this blistering new op-ed taking on the president's character.
He thinks a little excited.
We love you, Mitt.
Please, please keep attacking Donald Trump.
We love you so much.
And, you know, that stuff is addictive, you know.
Obviously, John McCain ran his whole career courting that stuff.
And of course, when he was finally running against Obama, suddenly he found all his friends turned into crocodiles and were ripping them to pieces.
And that's going to happen to Romney, too, of course, if he ever tries to run for president again.
Remember, he's run twice and lost.
And, you know, this is something that Bill Crystal echoed.
You know, everybody's saying that Donald Trump has bad character, but Mitt Romney came out and said it.
It's not Romney's job.
This is what gets me about all these political commentators is that they don't understand politics.
It's fine for a commentator.
It's fine for me to say, oh, Trump did this wrong, Trump did that wrong.
But I'm not working with the guy.
I'm here to talk to you about what I'm seeing.
I have to be honest about that.
I'm not going to lie and say and support Trump in every turn or attack him on every turn.
I'm not a senator.
That's not a senator's job.
It's absolutely absurd to take the office and do this.
You know, Henry Olson, one of my favorite observers of politics, he went to the Washington Post and he wrote a piece saying that all Romney has done is demonstrate the cluelessness of the GOP establishment.
All right.
So he says, he says, let's start with the article's premise.
This is Henry Olson talking.
Let's start with the article's premise that President Trump's character is more important than his accomplishments or his principles.
Most Republicans simply don't accept this argument.
Many instead see Trump's pugnacious and sometimes crude talk as an essential part of his virtue.
He fights while other Republicans cower.
Others would prefer he tweet less and do more, but still prefer Trump's fallen angel to the Democratic devil.
Now, you know, let's talk about this for a minute.
The Democrats, I mean, not only is it like truly dangerous people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you know, a lot of people on the left have been saying, why does she trigger the right so much?
Well, let me tell you why Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez triggers me.
She triggers me because she exemplifies her generation.
She thinks if she talks with passion and moves her hands and looks bright and hopeful, the words coming out of her mouth become true.
But that's not how it works.
When you're talking about socialism and you're talking about her green agenda, which is essentially a recipe, a blueprint for tyranny in the guise of protecting the environment, you know, this woman is a dangerous ignoramus.
She knows nothing about America and what it stands for and what it means.
She knows nothing about the Constitution.
She knows nothing about economy, but she thinks her passion and her social justice and her feelings mean something.
Plus, she's cute.
And let me tell you something: you know, moral emptiness and a good figure are a very, very dangerous combination.
Believe me, many man, including me from time to time, have been led down the garden path by that combination.
She's a dangerous character, and that's who we're looking at.
And the establishment people, the Mitt Romneys and the Bill Crystals, are actually in league with our friend Hillary Clinton.
I believe Crystal actually, no, he voted for that Evan Ed McMuffin or whatever his name was.
You know, Hillary Clinton, the thing about Hillary Clinton was forget her corruption, forget everything else for a minute, her anti-constitutionalism.
Just remember how much she hated, how much she despised the American people.
When she called people deplorable, that was just the beginning.
Do you remember that interview she gave in Mumbai?
She was talking to Indian people.
Just remember this, because I want to play this again.
Yeah.
This is cut number six.
The places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product.
So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.
And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards.
You know, you didn't like black people getting rights.
You don't like women, you know, getting jobs.
You don't want to, you know, see that Indian American succeeding more than you are.
Whatever your problem is, I'm going to solve it.
So the thing is, she won the forward-looking, internationalist, economically viable places, but she lost because the rest of us don't like black people.
We don't like women.
And of course, we don't like Indians.
I know we're all seriously thinking about Indians, but she's in India, so she's playing to her audience.
They all think that.
All of the elites think that.
They think that the world of tomorrow, the arc of history, is taking us to a global world where America is just going to be another state, and they do not like Trump overturning that apple cart.
Look, you know, Trump, Trump is a gut guy.
He's not a brain guy.
And so brain guys frequently think that gut guys are stupid.
But a lot of brain guys work for gut guys.
And a lot of the brain guys in the administration are shocked to find themselves working for a gut guy, and they're calling up their friends in the press and saying, oh, he's an idiot, he's ignorant, he doesn't know anything.
Maybe that's true, but he's got a pretty good gut so far.
His first two years went pretty well.
You know, that can be dangerous too if his character is as damaged as I think Trump's character is.
But I'm just saying that there's a lot of disdain for him that doesn't really play when you look at his accomplishments, which are really pretty good.
Conservative Arguments on Twitter00:05:27
And my question is this.
My question, the big question to me is this.
Where's Bill Crystal's magazine?
Why did the Weekly Standard go down?
Why is National Review struggling so much with their never Trumpism?
And again, I like the people at National Review and I respect them a lot, but I don't think they're taking into account that their arguments, their conservative arguments, their version of conservatism failed.
It failed because it produced a world in which Americans would elevate Trump and Hillary to our choices for the presidency.
Why, if you don't like Trump's character, my question is, why wasn't there somebody of good character that you could put forward who would win with your ideas?
And you know, I see a lot of problems with conservative ideas right now.
I see a lot of contradictions.
Let me give you a couple of them.
Just a couple of things that really bother me about the conservative arguments right now.
We're constantly talking about, we're constantly talking about how the Constitution was made for a religious people.
John Adams, right, our Constitution was made only for immoral and religious people.
It's wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
But polls continually show people who say they have no religion, they associate with no religion, those people are rising.
The number of those people are rising.
The country is still about 70% identifies as Christian, but the number of people who identify as none, as no religion, is rising.
Now, those people aren't atheists necessarily.
A lot of them are into New Age crazy stuff, you know, and they believe in something.
But my question is, if the Constitution was written for a religious people, and I'm sure most of the founders were talking about Judeo-Christian religious people of some sort, some kind of Western religious people, and we're losing those people, how are you going to fight for the Constitution?
Why would you fight for the Constitution if the people who can be governed by it aren't there anymore?
I think we really have to talk about God.
I think we really have to talk more about whether we can, not just whether it's good to believe in God.
Of course it's good to believe in God.
It's useful to believe in God.
But is he there?
Can we make the argument for God in a scientific world?
Is this assumption that we're hearing more and more from the Steven Pinkers of the world and the Jonathan Haights of the world saying to us, you know, God, you can't really believe in that in new science?
Is that true?
Does it have any reason behind it whatsoever?
Why that's something we should be talking about?
Because why would we sell the Constitution, which is written for a religious people, to a non increasingly non-religious people?
This is another thing.
This drives me crazy.
Our God King, Jeremy Boring, was for a moment, momentarily tossed off Twitter, suspended from Twitter today.
He made a joke about Brussels Sprouts.
And they're just trying to find anything they can to censor conservatives.
Ben got in touch with Twitter and they kind of said, oh, well, maybe we made a mistake on this Brussels Sprouts thing, but it's just going to happen again.
It's happening all the time.
It's happening to Franklin Graham on Facebook.
It's happening to conservative voices.
And yes, and some conservative voices who are nuts, but still, they deserve a hearing.
And I keep hearing conservatives say, well, Twitter is a private company.
Twitter is a private company.
But our right to free speech, our right to free speech is protected by government, but it comes from God.
And if Twitter and Google and Facebook have a monopoly on the dispersal of information, if they have a monopoly on the information, then they are censoring people is depriving us of our God-given rights, and we should turn to government to stop them.
They should be forced to live up to the standards that were set by the fact that they are platforms and not publishers.
The fact that their platforms mean we can't sue them when we get slandered there, but it also means they can't censor us.
And they are censoring us, and they're pretending they're not, but they are.
And we should fight back against them, even using the government if we have to.
Our arguments have to make sense.
Our arguments have to make sense in order for us to win.
And finally, you know, I mean, the economy, capitalism is a beautiful thing.
Capitalism, globalism, these have lifted people up.
Free trade have lifted people up.
But we have got to address problems in our country.
Trump is absolutely right about this.
Good character or no.
We cannot have our own people dying of opiate addiction, unemployed, you know, hopeless in the middle of the country and say, yeah, but some guy in India has a job now.
That doesn't work.
That is not the way you run a country and we cannot have our freedoms.
We cannot have our freedoms while people starve and despair.
So all I'm saying is, you want to talk about the fact that Trump and Hillary were the only choices we had in the presidency?
Fine.
Talk about what we are doing wrong, how conservatism has failed, how our arguments have to make sense, and then I'll start to listen.
But just taking pot shots at Trump, to me, it's narcissism and it doesn't get you anywhere at all.
Hey, today we have the backstage.
Don't miss our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage.
Lots of people will be there.
Some guy named Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, we may let him in.
And of course, the Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, he may not be welcome on Twitter, but we love him.
And I'll be there too to ring in the new year and talk about how the left is going to try and ruin everything.
And as always, the lovely and talented Alicia Krauss will class up the joint and take your questions as they roll in.
Only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions, so make sure to subscribe today.
It's allows you 10 bucks a month, $100 for the year, and you get to be in the mailbag and you get the leftist tears tumbler and you get just, we'll come to your house and dance on your table.
We'll do anything to entertain you to get you to subscribe.
We have a guest tonight today, Scott Atlas.
Healthcare Costs and Insurance00:14:15
He's a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a member of Hoover Institution's Working Group on Healthcare Policy, which is absolutely going to be one of the biggest issues in the next election.
He investigates the impact of government and the private sector on access, quality, pricing, and innovation in healthcare.
His book is Restoring Quality Healthcare, a six-point plan for comprehensive reform at lower cost.
It is out now.
Scott, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Happy to be here.
So give me an overview of what is wrong with our healthcare system seems to be in disarray.
People were really worried about it.
I think it was a motivating factor in the midterm elections.
What's the problem?
Yeah, well, the big problem, and actually this sort of escapes the essence of the argument, is not about quality.
And it's really not about access.
It's about the cost of health care.
And the reason that's a problem is because A, the government programs are unsustainable if the costs are this high.
And B, the people vulnerable to that are the most to the high costs are the ones who depend on those programs, the poor and the elderly.
And so we need to fix that, but we need to fix that without impairing the quality, which by the medical literature is the best in the world.
And that's factually true, but somehow the U.S. healthcare system is pilloried by false accusations and indeed a very false narrative by people who advocate single-payer health care.
The way to fix this, if I can just cut to the chase, the essence of the problem about high costs is because people think someone else is paying.
They don't care about the costs.
The way our system is structured, more and more we have made health insurance cover everything and minimizing the whole concept of a patient caring about the cost.
If someone else is paying, no one even asks what it costs.
As opposed to every other good or service, people use healthcare and not only don't know what it costs, but they never even ask.
They get the bills after they use the good.
So insurance, I mean, this happens with cars too.
If your car is insured, the price of fixing it immediately goes up because they know that you think you're not going to pay it out of pocket.
Should insurance be limited?
Should it be limited what we can insure?
Is that the way to solve that problem?
Well, the way to solve the problem is to put patients in a position where they care about the price and are rewarded for paying less.
And because of that, they consider the value of what they're buying.
That's why a cell phone, an iPhone that's in your pocket that's essentially a supercomputer from the old days, doesn't cost $10,000 because we shop around for it.
And the way to make healthcare, people seek value in healthcare is to change the nature of health insurance.
The nature of health insurance should be what it was intended for, like insurance for everything else, catastrophic insurance.
Unexpected, significant expenses.
Not routine use, not things that cost $100.
And so when you get rid of all these mandates, most of which were doubled down on by Obamacare, where they minimize the cost out of pocket.
And in fact, they gave you subsidies to buy bloated health insurance.
When you get rid of that and you deregulate and you let people buy the insurance that they want, which is cheaper insurance with a higher deductible, and most health care episodes are not big catastrophic multi thousand dollar expenditures.
Most healthcare is outpatient, scheduled, non-emergency.
And most health care is relatively small cost.
And so when you are paying out of pocket because there's a higher deductible, the insurance won't kick in right away.
When you are paying, you consider the price.
You see the price, you ask what it costs, and the reward, the system has to be in place to actually reward savings.
And the big vehicle to do that are large, liberalized use health savings accounts that you keep when you die.
In other words, you can roll them over in a health, in a tax-free way to relatives or to anybody you want.
You can use them for, say, your elderly parents.
They're double the size of what they were.
You actually are rewarded for saving.
A very sort of basic point is a tax deduction for health care makes a dollar spent on health care more valuable than some other dollar.
Whereas a health savings account, not only is it a deduction, but it rewards the saving of the money if you get to keep the money or use it for health care for your elderly parent or roll it over.
And so you care what you're spending.
So I see a number of political problems with this.
We're talking to Scott Atlas, the author of Restoring Quality Healthcare.
For instance, I hear people saying, and I sometimes hear the President of the United States echoing them, there shouldn't be a mandate.
You shouldn't be forced to buy health care.
But at the same time, we need to cover pre-existing conditions.
When you cover pre-existing conditions, you're no longer talking about insurance.
You're talking about government health care, it seems to me.
Is there some argument that would win through to people on a subject like that?
Well, I think the argument has to be made.
The argument has to be articulated.
And I would say just off the bat, the Republicans, the conservatives have done a very poor job of articulating the problems with single-payer health care and the positives of their vision of health care.
It's a little bit complicated, but it's really not that complicated.
Here's the issue.
You can't just say we cover pre-existing conditions no matter what, if you mean that you buy insurance for the same price even after you get sick.
And that's what Obamacare does.
Because then you're only going to buy insurance after you're sick, and you'd be foolish to buy insurance while you're not sick.
Therefore, the only people who are insured are heavy users of the health insurance.
And therefore, the whole concept that it's unsustainable, the health insurance itself, it goes bankrupt.
But the Republicans and conservatives do support covering pre-existing conditions with the following nuance.
And the nuance is that you have to have some incentive to buy insurance before you're sick.
Otherwise, like I said, the system's unsustainable.
And so the incentive to buy health insurance before you're sick is A, to make sure there are cheap health insurance options available, not bloated, massively mandated coverage, all-incumbency insurance, but more catastrophic insurance, higher deductible, cheaper insurance.
And then secondly, if you have insurance, one example would be if you have insurance before you get sick for say a period of six months, then you are insured even after you get sick for the same rate.
Okay, you can't get away.
And you can't get your rate rate.
That's assuring people get coverage for so-called pre-existing conditions.
But you should have to pay more if you sit there and game the system.
If you wait, have no coverage, and then after you get the diagnosis, okay, now I'm going to buy coverage.
Well, there has to be some disincentive to do that.
There has to be.
It doesn't mean you're not insured, though.
See, this is what the previous model was, and this is what's being distorted.
Democrats are claiming that Republicans are saying, oh, you're not going to be able to get coverage if you have a disease.
That's not true.
No one is putting forth that model.
There's not a single proposal by the conservative side that puts forth that model.
But what they do put forth, and it's necessary to put forth, there has to be an incentive to buy insurance before you're sick.
And that incentive is financial, obviously.
And so you have to have it to be cheaper options, first of all, for insurance in general, but also some disincentive that if you buy it after you're sick, then you have to pay more.
When you put our healthcare in an international context, you have a situation where a lot of countries have single-payer healthcare.
They have government health care.
They don't have to negotiate with the pharmaceutical companies because there's only one buyer.
And so they don't have to pay what it really costs to develop and research a drug.
And all those costs back up onto us.
Is there some way for us to fight this?
I mean, we create, I think, more drugs, more new drugs than all other countries combined.
I think that's right.
So is there some way that we can stop paying for England's national health?
Well, I mean, here's the issue.
You can't do what some have proposed already, even in the Trump administration, which is to say, okay, we're going to tag our prices to those of these single-payer systems outside.
Because when you import the prices, which is essentially what that does, you're importing their price controls.
And the price controls have an impact.
There's no mystery to why we not only develop the drugs, but more importantly, we get the drugs before every other country.
I'll give you an example.
The NHS, the nationalized health system in the UK, they have a government-controlled system, but specifically for drugs.
So, for example, they just put in something toward the end of last year that said that the government is going to so-called negotiate the price of new drugs, and they're not going to allow new drugs to be used until they get the price they want.
And they gave themselves up to three years to do that.
Now, what do you think that does?
Well, we know what it does because we look at the data.
These are factual statements here.
This is not opinion.
The NHS has less access, and in fact, sometimes no access to life-saving drugs that we routinely get not only sooner, but by far the greater number of those new drugs in the U.S. Most new drugs, by the way, are for cancer.
So, let's just say you're in the UK, you're dependent on NHS, and you have cancer.
And the UK government says, Well, you know, we're not going to prove it because the price is a little bit too high for our system, and we get three years to negotiate that price.
Okay, well, you got cancer.
You want to wait three years to get that drug.
And what the impact is, is that people die.
And we know for a fact that in countries with single-payer systems, if you just even look at the drugs alone, the diseases that are dependent on drugs, and these are the most important diseases, cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, high blood pressure, the United States, by the medical literature, I'm not talking about opinion here, I'm talking about facts.
By the medical literature, the published literature, the U.S. patients have better outcomes.
And that's all that this is about.
We have better medical outcomes from cancer, stroke, heart disease, the biggest killers, diabetes, high blood pressure, all the serious chronic diseases than all the systems with single-payer healthcare.
Yeah, they always mess up these statistics.
I've seen them play with them.
You know, the fact that healthcare gets better and better, is there a difference between, say, our televisions get better and better, and the television comes out, and at first it costs $2,000, and then pretty quickly it costs $600.
Is there a difference between that and what would happen to medicine because you need the medicine and you can't negotiate and they have a monopoly on the brand?
Is there any difference in that?
Or can that system, a free market system, work for medication as well?
Well, that system can absolutely work for all of healthcare.
The difference that we see, why hasn't the price of health care dropped significantly, like those things that you just said?
The reason is very simple.
The government shields patients and insurance shields patients from caring about price.
There is a shielding.
There are barriers to competition for people's money based upon price in healthcare.
That's exactly the problem.
And so that's why the real solution to these things.
And remember, the arguments are fallacious that say, oh, you can't shop for healthcare from the back of an ambulance.
Well, that's true, except 5% of medical expenditures are emergency.
5%.
Nobody's saying that, hey, you're going to be having a heart attack and you're going to say to the ambulance driver, wait a second, let me get the prices here.
No.
But what we are saying is that 60% of medical expenditures in the United States are outpatient.
These are scheduled things.
And not only that, we know it's already proven from the literature in specific medical care, both from diseases that were never insured, like for instance, in the beginning of LASIC surgery for vision correction or certain plastic surgery procedures or MRI screening head to toe.
These things originally were not covered by insurance.
What happened?
They came out, thousands and thousands of dollars were prices.
Shirley's Journey: Music and Money00:06:23
People competed.
The cost came way down.
I have to stop you there.
I'm out of time, but I'm really, I'm glad to hear that that logic holds true in medicine as everything else.
Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution up at Stanford, his book is Restoring Quality Healthcare, a six-point plan for comprehensive reform at lower cost.
Thank you very much for coming on.
I hope we get to talk again.
Sure, Hope.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
You know what?
I think we're going to, oh, before I talk about anything, I have to talk about Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren has announced that she has started an exploratory committee.
I think she has sent a scout up to the hill to survey the Great Plains and to see if she is going to run for president.
And she went on, what was she on, guys?
was it Facebook?
Yeah, so she goes online, but she wants to relate.
So she cracks open a beer.
Here, you got to play this.
Hold on a sec.
going to get me a beer.
My husband Bruce is now in here.
You want a beer?
No, I'll pass on the beer for now.
Sure.
Okay, Longer Fest.
Yes.
So this is my speedy.
Hello.
And I'm crazy to wrap.
I love you.
I love you too.
Thank you for being here.
Pleasure.
I'm glad you're here.
Enjoy your beer.
Feel free to toast along with us.
Absolutely.
You know what?
Everybody here seems to be having a great time.
Ah, it's like burning your lungs.
Ah, your lungs feels good.
We have some great guests and music.
A lot of drinking on the left, you know.
You don't want to destroy a good country sober.
I think that's the problem.
All right, some stuff I like.
You know, I watched, I had these screeners that I get at the end of the year because I'm a member of the Writers Guild.
And they send me the movies that came out that they want you to vote for.
And so I watched a couple over the holidays.
I watched two movies, neither of which I'm going to terribly recommend.
The better of the two is Green Book, which was with Vigo Mortensen, great actor, and Tony Valalonga, also a great actor.
He was in that Midnight or whatever it was called.
Moonlight.
He was in Moonlight.
Also a terrific actor.
And Valalonga plays this Don Shirley.
I'm sorry, I've got the wrong guy.
Tony Valalonga is the character Viggo Mortensen plays.
The actor is Marishala Ali.
He was the guy from Moonlight, and he plays Don Shirley.
And Don Shirley was a pianist, classically trained pianist who played jazz and kind of American standards.
And he goes on, this is based on a true story.
He goes on a tour of the deep south during segregation days, and he hires this bouncer, essentially, played by Viggo Mortensen, to drive him around.
And that Green Book is the book that supplies places where Negroes, as they were called then, could safely go in the Deep South.
And it's the story of the friendship that develops between these two men.
And of course, it's getting attacked by the left because the left has lost all joy in life and has nothing to do but attack movies.
But it's getting attacked because it has a white guy who is helpful to a black guy.
You know, they hate the idea that sometimes white people were saviors to black people.
And this, they just become, I found, very equal friends.
There are some funny scenes where Viggo Mortensen introduces this kind of snooty black piano player to fried chicken.
You know, he says, you got to eat fried chicken, you're a black guy.
You know, and some I found some pretty funny scenes.
It's very enjoyable, very watchable.
Not a great movie, but it's fun to watch.
Vigo Mortensen, he's a terrific actor.
It's fun to watch him do this kind of guy, this kind of Italian bouncer type.
And the other picture I watched was Can You Ever Forgive Me, which is Melissa McCarthy playing another true story.
She plays this writer, Lee Israel, who is an overweight, unattractive, nasty, lesbian writer who can't sell her books because she's writing obscure biographies and she falls into forging letters from famous writers and selling them so she can pay her rent.
And Richard D. Grant is also ended as her kind of loosh, gay friend who helps her do this.
And the picture was, again, very watchable, not great.
I kind of liked it because I knew that world, you know, I knew that world of bitter literary people in New York.
I hated it, but I knew those people, and so I could recognize even some of some of the people were actually based on people I might have known at the time.
And so I kind of enjoyed watching it.
But both of these movies, what they both had that I liked, was the music.
Now, in Can You Ever Forgive Me, they had, it opens up over the credits, I believe, with a singer that I had never heard of before named Jerry Southern, who sings a song called I Thought of You Last Night, which is just as sexy and cool a song from the American songbook days as you could ever hear.
You can look that up yourself.
But more to the point was this guy, Don Shirley.
They imitate Don Shirley, the piano player in Green Book.
They imitate him in the movie, but I could tell just by listening to him that he had this unique style where he combined his deep classical training and his deep love of the classics with the American songbook.
So it was really different, a really different sound.
So then I went on YouTube and looked him up, and I got to say, he blew me away.
This guy was a genius piano player, Don Shirley.
And just I was grateful to the movie.
Like I said, watchable and enjoyable.
I can't say it's a must-see, but I was grateful to the movie for introducing me to this guy I had never heard of, a terrific, terrific piano player.
Hey, I got to say goodbye.
It is the end of this brief claviny week, but I hope you got as much claviny goodness as you can.
Next week, we'll be here all week.
And of course, tonight we'll be on Daily Wire backstage, so I'll be back there.
But, you know, the rest of the time, you're just going to have to make your way through.
Pre-order the novel Another Kingdom, that'll help.
But otherwise, just try and survive.
Survivors Gather Monday00:01:21
And survivors will gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Here's a little bit of Don Shirley traveling music.
The Andrew
Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production, copyright forward publishing 2018.
Coming up on the Ben Shapiro Show, President Trump does an epically chaotic press conference.
Democrats keep on pushing against wall funding, and internacian warfare breaks out in both parties.