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Dec. 11, 2024 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
33:16
Deny, Defend ... Doubt!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comSummary generated by an evil AI robot. SummaryThe video covers several major topics, beginning with a discussion about baseball, specifically the Juan Soto situation and his $720 million contract with the New York Mets. The conversation then shifts to historical political events, including Clayton Williams' failed Texas gubernatorial campaign against A…

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I don't know.
I mean, it's like, what happened in the six months?
Was he just training, almost like Anders Breivik style, just like training constantly to do this?
Did he have a schizophrenic break?
Was he sort of, I mean, I joked about this on Twitter, like he was MKUltrad.
Was he sort of taken in and brainwashed and fragmented to the point that he would do something like this?
I think the way he was clearing the gem from the gun in that moment of high stress really seemed very well trained.
Another possibility might be he was just taking out his family competition in true Italian fashion.
Well, I'm not sure they were competing with the insurance.
I mean, they were getting money from the insurance.
Maybe their family got screwed over.
Yeah, that's possible.
I mean, there's also an element of wanting to be seen here.
The idea of having a backpack full of Monopoly money and trying to create this mystique as a sort of Joker type or a Batman villain.
I mean, I think comparing him to Breverick is a bit of sort of an insult almost to Breverick because ultimately what he did really kind of changed politics in Norway, whereas I think this ultimately was kind of a mediocre act.
I mean, I'm not...
In terms of going off the rails and doing something, there's a lot more you could have done to make a bigger impact.
I think it's a totally mediocre act.
Look at the people who resonate with this.
If Taylor Lorenz is resonating with it ideologically, then you should check yourself.
Where do I begin with this?
There is this notion that I remember hearing Ten or so years ago when there was the Obamacare debate, and it was like, why doesn't everyone have insurance?
And I would always say, why do you want insurance?
Insurance is not the fucking point.
The idea is that everyone is healthy.
And there are ways to get healthy that include nutrition and exercise.
And having reasonable medical facilities.
And I would probably even throw in a kind of Plato point of we should be helping people who are injured or temporarily sick and not perpetuating people who are sickly or dying.
But there's this fascination of like everyone needs health insurance.
And it's this kind of American style socialism of we don't want to just give people We don't want to engage in actual socialism.
We want to engage in universal bourgeoisification.
So it's like, why can't everyone have health insurance?
Why do you want insurance?
Insurance is like for merchants.
That's what insurance is about.
You don't want insurance.
We don't even use health insurance as insurance.
Insurance is about something that is catastrophic and unpredictable and extremely rare.
The fact is, you have to go to the hospital to get a checkup, get your eyes checked, go to the dentist.
You know, go to urgent care and get some antibiotics or whatever.
It's something you use all the time.
So what it really is is a kind of, you could say, a tax or like a prepayment plan.
Insurance at this point is a kind of middleman eking out some profit here and there.
Whereas the big problem is the provider.
Yet we don't want to attack like hospitals and nurses.
Insurance is really a wealth redistribution scheme from the healthy, the pay into the system, to the sick, the recipients, and a large and a very corrupt intermediary called the health insurance industry.
I agree with you.
It's a complete misnomer.
There's no insurance here.
It's really access to services.
UnitedHealthcare, specifically, owns a lot of medical practices and clinics.
And it's nothing short...
I mean, I'm astonished that the anti-monopoly regulators in the U.S. have not zeroed in on this, because apparently under the fig leaf that so-called health insurance companies are buying companies in other...
Sectors such as medical practices and drugstore chains.
Somehow this does not constitute monopolistic behavior.
It certainly does because you control every step in that food chain.
You have doctors who are basically tied to dealing with particular insurers and they create, if it's not a requirement, but they create very strong incentives to buy.
Medications and medical supplies through distributors and drugstores that they own, that belong in the same organization.
But the way this came to be, apparently, is because specifically, I mean, I can't remember where I saw it.
There was a, somebody published a list of health insurers, like the top 15 health insurers in the U.S. Ranked by the percentage of claims they deny.
UnitedHealth was up there.
UnitedHealthcare was on top.
It was like 30% or something.
36% or something like that.
It was the highest.
Clearly, this guy may have researched it and zeroed in on the target.
Their shareholder meeting was coming up, so this was convenient.
Apparently, the way the medical practices became part of that Business empire is because of this denial rate.
Basically, medical practices find themselves unable to fund their working capital.
And the same group, in the case of UnitedHealthcare, owns a finance company.
It's essentially a payday loan company that lends money to the medical practices.
That cannot pay their bills because the insurer is holding up the claim and not paying it, but they have to pay for supplies.
They have to pay salaries to their employees and so forth.
And before too long, a lot of those practices fall into the state of pre-bankruptcy.
And then United comes in and basically buys them on the cheap.
And that's how they've been able to consolidate this empire.
It's truly, truly an evil business.
I'm becoming less sympathetic towards Brian Thompson.
Well, yeah, he himself, I heard the only thing personally about him, and I don't know if it's true or not, but presumably he was instrumental in designing an AI-based
system that questioned doctors'bills and basically...
Automated, based on some AI algorithms, automated the process of denying those claims or reducing them to whatever United considers profitable to themselves.
So, yeah.
Maybe Luigi had gotten wind of something like that because he does have a fascination with AI.
And you could see in his mind the way you would depict that is like, oh, so it's some evil robot that's making life or death decisions.
You die.
Oh, you get to live because you have enough money.
Oh, your grandma dies.
That baby dies.
I could see him becoming morally righteous over reading about something like that.
It could be, yeah.
It's certainly in his wheelhouse.
But even without, I mean, somebody early on when he hadn't been caught yet pointed out, and again, it doesn't seem to have been corroborated since then, but apparently, obviously his own episode with his back pain,
with his injury that he received when surfing in Hawaii, apparently.
And somebody suggested that a couple of his family members Sure.
Sure. It was the pretty serious amount of support that people expressed toward him.
And there were numerous people going online and saying, well, condolences for the Thompson family require pre-approval or something like that.
Some snide remarks.
Yeah, I saw one.
I would grant libertarians the benefit of the doubt here, in the sense of a free-market, out-of-pocket system might very well be hugely efficient.
And if you think about it, I even hate mentioning this, because I kind of feel bad even thinking about this, but I had my dog, Zeus, neutered.
Castrated, that is.
Yikes. I remember...
Taking him to surgery.
It was done in one day.
And it cost...
I think it cost between $400 and $500.
It really was not a big deal.
And granted, he's a dog.
But that is a major operation.
Something you don't want to screw up.
Something that's important and delicate, to say the least.
And it was a three-figure bill.
That I just paid with my debit card then and there.
And if we had a free market in healthcare, there would be all the incentive in the world for the clinics to make things more and more efficient and inexpensive.
We forget.
I think the cost of the original Apple...
Macintosh was like, I think it might have been $5,000 or something in 1984.
Was that what it was?
Or 1982?
Which is the equivalent of $15,000 or $20,000 computer now.
I mean, the laptop I'm using, I can't remember exactly, but I think it was under $5,000.
And it's a nice MacBook Pro.
And it has a higher resolution screen.
Far, far more memory and storage, far more powerful, and it is less expensive even nominally, but it's certainly less expensive with inflation.
So everything with technology is pushing prices down, making things affordable.
Even some homeless people have smartphones.
That's a computer in your pocket.
So why wouldn't this apply to the medical industry?
I think this is, as much as we hate libertarians, I find it hard to disagree with him, actually.
I was going to say that.
There's this hatred of Milton Friedman in our circles.
I have to say, first of all, let's not confound his academic research with his societal prescriptions.
Those are two different things.
When it comes to his prescriptions, there's good and bad.
But one of the things he did say was deregulation.
He was really a proponent of that.
And even there, it's a case-by-case thing.
But in the case of healthcare, I just kind of have to agree.
I know.
Look, we can be grown-ups enough.
We don't have to buy into the philosophy of libertarianism just to say that they're right about this.
Now, the problem is we don't live in this world, and we live in a moralizing world, as I said before.
I remember the debates over Obamacare.
I was actually living in New York City, and there was one person saying, you know, like, can you believe that?
30% of the country doesn't have health insurance.
And I would always respond, why do you want health insurance?
What about paying $900 a month or whatever, $500 a month for something called US Health United?
Why do you want to do that?
Because the reason why they want to do it is that it's a status symbol.
It's like you're rich.
The goal is to be healthy.
The goal is not to have health insurance.
I've already said this.
I'm repeating myself.
It's just always bothered me.
So again, we're doing it wrong.
We have this middle-class way of doing things where everyone is going to have universal insurance as opposed to universal health.
Universal health would involve different things.
It might very well involve regulating.
It does involve, this is one thing we're good at, it involves compulsory vaccination.
It might very well involve compulsory exercise, but it's not about more insurance.
We've obviously become obese.
I mean, it's a correlation, not a causation, but under this system, we're obviously getting obese and dumb and slow and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We want health.
We don't want health insurance.
We also live in a kind of morally righteous time where, you know, if someone can't afford a car, that's one thing.
Or if someone can't afford a new Rolex, that's one thing.
We're sort of okay with...
Something that can be considered luxury not being universal.
That's sort of the point of it, after all.
We live in a world, I totally get this and I understand it, where we think all of this should be universal.
If you're not granting someone the right, the access to a hospital, you are in effect murdering them.
And under this system, I think we need some sort of...
I am a kind of compromising libertarian on this issue.
So if I could just create a system that is right, I would do a sort of post-office-like solution.
So there is a government-run...
Not-for-profit clinic where if you are dead broke and you get into a car accident, you're going to make sure that your legs are healed and your broken leg is healed and they'll do some tests on your brain to see if that concussion's too bad.
There's a sort of baseline of government post office style healthcare that you're not going to die on our watch, basically.
Now, on top of that, could you have health insurance or clinics as a sort of like elite thing, an almost luxury product?
That's the compromise that I would come to.
I'm just recognizing the fact that people are very morally righteous about this.
But then I'm also recognizing the fact that...
The libertarians are right, and if the free market were allowed to apply to health providers, it would be a hell of a lot less expensive.
There it is.
And I think the onus falls, and people don't like hearing this, but it honestly falls on doctors and hospitals, like the sort of backwardsness of the healthcare system, the costs.
I mean, just sort of an example of this.
I was reading about how there was a company that was trying to
Use AI image recognition to essentially diagnose based off of x-rays and CT scans.
And they were blocked from receiving training data, not even by the hospitals, but by the American Association of Radiologists or some other kind of lobbying group.
Because these doctors have this incentive to have some Person that went to school for eight years misdiagnose some ailment based off of an x-ray rather than have, you know, the one thing that, you know,
these neural nets are really good at.
And that's image recognition.
We might have talked about this.
Did we talk about this before?
My grandfather, my maternal grandfather was a radiologist.
And even when he was retired and well into his 70s, In the 80s even, the hospital would drop off like a dozen x-rays to him.
And in the afternoon, probably while drinking a bourbon on the rocks, he would like diagnose people.
I think he just did it.
I'm sure he probably was paid to some degree.
I think he just sort of wanted to kind of like keep a foot in the ballgame kind of thing.
But AI could do that.
What he did, he was just going through x-ray.
AI could do that and he could read a book or something.
There's this perception of healthcare providers as being this holy class of individual that is completely self-righteous and they're doing things for the good of the people.
When in reality, most of the people who are becoming medical professionals are doing so because it's an easy way to get...
You know, quarter to half a million dollar salary for honestly work that is, I mean, unless you're some kind of intensive care, unless you're like a surgeon or you're doing some groundbreaking stressful medical work, it is quite,
I mean, I don't want to call it an easy job, but it's not really a job where you have to innovate.
You just kind of implement some skills that you learn in medical school and training in residency.
And I mean, itrogenic.
Deaths is the third leading cause of death in the United States.
That is death caused by misdiagnosis.
I think that includes people getting infections from staying in hospitals.
But there is a large percentage of people who die early because they are misdiagnosed by healthcare providers and are given the wrong medication or not the right medication.
Or they don't catch some ailment in time.
And so I think, you know, we need to stop, you know, lionizing these healthcare workers as being these totally selfless, you know, scions of greatness or something.
Yeah, and to add to your point, first of all, it's more than money.
It's also a cultural and artistic device to be a savior.
I think there's a lot.
I mean, even if you were to cut everyone's salaries in half, I think people would still regard being a physician as like the epitome of social clout, precisely because they're kind of adhering to a breeding model, quite frankly.
Everyone respects doctors.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
It's funny, I come from many people in my family who are doctors.
My father is a doctor, and my Maternal grandfather was a doctor as well.
I never had an interest, and I always hated being in hospitals.
I had some Nietzschean gene of, like, something's falling, give it a push.
Yeah, same here.
You should repair an injury, but if someone's inherently sick, he should die.
That's Plato, not Nietzsche, but I agree with it.
I've always agreed with that.
I just had that kind of...
I don't know.
Yeah, I too had a lot of doctors in my family, and I don't know.
Initially, I went into pre-med just to satisfy my parents, basically.
Yeah, I was like, no, no way.
I'm not spending the next 15 years of my life doing this.
With sick people, yeah.
It's not for me.
At the same time, maybe this is a residual bias on my part, but the conservative...
Attack on vaccinations and doctors being evil or something.
That really rubbed me the wrong way.
Maybe it is just a residual bias.
It might very well be to some degree.
It doesn't mean I'm wrong.
But I just, you know, I don't know.
I guess I respect doctors as well.
I understand all of these criticisms, though.
I think it's a soulless and it lacks creativity and it's sort of the perfect place for a midwit to exist in.
I mean, that's like the majority of medical school is just kind of You'll hear doctors talk about,
well, at medical school, I just had to memorize a bunch of these terms that I'm not really using in day-to-day practice.
And there's this sort of institution that I think is built up.
I think I also read somewhere that one of the doctors' associations actually, and these medical license boards, they lobby to reduce the number of spots in medical schools.
You know, a game theory economic perspective.
It's in these people's interest to reduce the supply of medical providers by introducing barriers to entry to prevent people.
For example, you have to get a four-year degree that's sort of...
I mean, I wouldn't say four-year degrees are useless, but you're doing what?
Maybe a year's worth of...
B-med courses to be able to get into medical school.
That's itself an artificial barrier to entry.
And then you have, you know, medical schools that are extremely expensive, that kind of put you in this...
Yeah, you have a, you know, four to ten year long residency.
It's this sort of very established...
Exactly. It's a very...
You know, look, not everyone in society is going to be an innovator and is going to want to change the world.
And that's okay.
I mean, I agree that it is a sort of midwit or kind of upper midwit profession.
At the same time, if you're performing surgery, I mean, my father performs eye surgery on the retina.
I imagine that you get a godlike thrill from doing something like that.
Yeah, there's a high correlation between those types of professions, surgeons and the psychopathy.
Yeah. Our medical community is a big redistribution scheme of taking money from the healthy.
And those that are fit for survival in a lot of ways to the people that are sick.
And I remember even seeing this during COVID.
I'm in my early 30s.
I never got COVID.
I would often flaunt it not even wearing masks and stuff like that.
And I never got COVID the entire time.
And yet I was forced to do all these things when, of course, older people, sickly people, they should wear masks.
They should get a vaccine.
They should be prepared for this.
Decision to choose to save themselves and not die from this, but they're forcing the healthy people to redistribute their time, their money in the healthcare system to the unhealthy.
And it's just a lower class cult in a lot of ways.
Yeah, and it's exactly the reason this system that we have exists, because at its core, Yeah.
And the way out of it could be one of the two.
One is what Richard kind of touched about, which is eliminate
insurance altogether and basically make it retail, pay for the service at the time the service is provided.
seems unfeasible at this point because, you know,
Of the amounts that we've seen people being charged for medical procedures or for even medical visits.
But what's going to happen if that was the direction taken is throughout that industry, providers will be forced to adjust their cost structures to the new reality where people can only pay within the limits of what they earn.
And it would cause a mass dislocation in the industry.
A lot of providers, a lot of companies, a lot of medical practices will go bankrupt.
There'll be an enormous amount of savings because a lot of the corruption and waste will be cut.
But over time, immediately the effect will be extremely disruptive, but at the end of the day, healthy.
So the libertarian solution is not without merit.
The other way to do it is to go to single payer.
And basically make it like, you know, majority of the developed world handles it perhaps.
Dealing with the, like any public good, if it's socialized, it leads to some extent to shortages of services that are the most high value added.
I mean, you take any developed country and the benefit of having a socialized system, In something like 85% of diseases or conditions is obvious over the system that the U.S. has because it's better positioned to do it because it's not expensive to treat those and it doesn't require an incredible amount of VC money flowing
into cutting-edge research.
Usually, in most of those countries, that system is supplemented with a private sector.
Like, for instance, if you don't want to wait six months for a hip replacement procedure, you can go to a private doctor if your budget allows that, things of that nature.
So you're not exactly stuck with the socialized option.
It's not a bad solution.
Just one quick anecdote.
I've got to jump, but about a year ago, I met...
An Indian doctor, a cardiologist who came to the U.S. something like 15 years ago, started a practice, a fairly large successful cardiology practice in Atlanta.
And he told me he is about to throw in the towel and go back to India because he cannot deal with economic uncertainty anymore.
And he gave me an example of a patient who came for a fairly simple and inexpensive procedure.
And I can't remember the exact dollar amounts, but the word of magnitude or kind of the proportion is about right.
So that procedure, if he were to pay for it out of his pocket, was going to cost him something like $100.
But he had insurance.
And he said, why don't I use insurance?
And insurance, it looked like, was going to pay for it.
So you can never ascertain.
Beforehand, what amount of claim will be paid and what will be the out-of-pocket cost?
And he says it turned out that when he used the insurance, his out-of-pocket cost was $500.
It's with insurance versus $100 if he had to pay just out of his pocket.
$100? That sounds like he removed a wart or something.
Yeah, something very basic.
If this were like a free market, that would be like $29.99.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But even then, if you're facing retail customers, everyone adjusts their cost structure.
You don't have grocery chain charging $500 for a box of cereal just because they know people cannot afford it.
Otherwise, they would.
If they had a third party paying for that box, they would certainly scratch their head and say, how do we charge a lot more than reasonable?
And the same thing applies here.
So, incentives are twisted.
If you remove those incentives to gouge costs, to introduce waste, and to introduce corruption in this, at some point, it will work out.
In the meantime, For the foreseeable future, you'll have chaos in the industry.
Or you go to single-payer, basically.
I almost think this thing has to just collapse.
The fact that there's no real political will to overturn the current system.
I don't know.
Maybe Project 2025 has some secret plan.
Trump has basically said, you know, we've got concepts of plans.
I don't know.
There's just so many things about the United States where it's like there's not the political will to fundamentally change the system.
A real solution is visible.
Completely, rationally defined, and yet we can't get there because it's going to dislocate billions of dollars and millions of people are going to be unhappy for a period of time.
And we're just stuck.
And it just keeps getting worse and worse.
And people use the bankruptcy system to pay for medicine.
I mean, it's just...
It's just irrational and mindless.
And we're not really putting strong incentives on people to get healthy.
We should have tax deductions.
Because the insurance company do do this to give them some credit.
But we should have tax deductions on exercise or something.
You should just write it off.
You hiked...
100 miles over the course of a year, yeah, that's a $10,000 tax deduction.
Because by doing that, you are going to cost society so much less than some fatso eating potato chips watching Netflix.
It's not even a question.
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