Today's guest on the Ron Paul Liberty Report is Murray Sabrin, author of a new book that describes why the current system of employer-based insurance and government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are financially untenable and yield less than optimal outcomes for patients.
Find Murray Sabrin's book on Amazon:
Universal Medical Care from Conception to End of Life: The Case for A Single-Payer System
https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Medical-Care-Conception-Life/dp/1662433360
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Today, we have a very special guest, somebody I've known for about 35 years.
He's a political activist, a libertarian for sure.
He's also been a professor on finance at Ramapo College.
And matter of fact, when I first met him, he had me up there for a special session that he had shortly at the time he was there.
But he was there for 35 years, so he must know everybody.
But he's well known in libertarian circles.
He's run for office several times, and he's still active and likes to write.
And right now, we're going to talk a little bit about the most recent thing that he has written and having to do with medical care, which seems to be very appropriate.
But Murray, I want to welcome you to our program today.
Well, thank you, Ron.
It's great being with you.
I always enjoy having a conversation with one of the great libertarian heroes in my lifetime.
Well, very good, and I thank you for that.
I'm going to mention first the book that you've written, and it's out, and it's important today because medicine is so messed up, and medicine has really gotten messed up with COVID.
It just aggravates me to no end.
And I think one of the themes in your book takes, you know, handles it.
One of the things that I have been most disappointed about is medicine is I witnessed the total destruction essentially of the doctor-patient relationship.
There's a little bit there, but it's corporate medicine at its worst.
And when you think of public health, that's what they think of with medicine.
And when you think of what's going on with this COVID, boy, I'll tell you what, your book is needed and people need to understand it in light of the principles of libertarianism, because what you're saying in this book really applies to the problems that we have.
We don't need the government in there telling us.
Now, the title of your book is a little bit long, but it gives us a message.
Murray's title is Universal Medical Care from Conception to the End of Life.
The case for a single payer system.
Murray, explain that to us.
Do you really want to give us a single-payer system?
Well, the single-payer, Ron, is something that libertarians and real constitutional Republicans should applaud, which is the individual and the family, not the government, as Bernie Sanders wants, with Medicare for All.
And by the way, the reason I wrote this book is because Bernie was making such headway in 2016 with his Medicare for All.
And originally this book project was a critique of the welfare state.
But then as I saw things unfolding, I said, I better just concentrate on one aspect of the welfare state, which is this $4 trillion bill, which will probably be what the American people spend this year through insurance premiums, through their employer premiums, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs.
So I'm tackling head-on the whole medical establishment, the whole medical structure from employer-based insurance and get back to what I was familiar with when I was a youngster, back in the 1950s in New York City, where my parents paid cash for their medical care, where we paid cash for our prescription drugs.
And when my father had a major operation in New York City in 1961, Blue Cross Blue Shield took care of it.
And I never heard of any, I don't recall my parents saying this thing is going to bankrupt us because the operation was going to be so expensive and the cost of the hospital was so expensive.
Remember, that was before Medicare and Medicaid.
And as you well know, between Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 and the general inflation we've had since then, medical care costs have risen the fastest of any component in the CPI.
And it's no accident, the government has taken over more and more of medical care decisions.
And the consumer and the individual and family have suffered enormously because of the skyrocketing premiums.
So my book really gets into the heart of the welfare state in chapter one.
And I also discuss how we can transition from where we are today, which is a hybrid system.
And as Mises wrote 70 years ago, the middle of the road policies lead to socialism.
And I'm afraid that's what we're seeing right now.
If we keep on this road that we've been traveling on for decades, we are going to have a government single-payer system.
And I wrote this book to point out to the American people, there is a single-payer system that would provide us with low-cost, high-quality medical care by putting them in charge of their medical decisions as opposed to the insurance companies or the government.
Yes.
And, you know, I think it's important that you deal with this in a larger concept.
I was in medical school, just left medical school in the early 1960s.
And one thing I did was, and that was before Medicare and Medicaid.
And you've already described how it was different for your family when they didn't have to deal with Medicare and Medicaid.
And I remember working at the Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio.
And some people don't believe this story, but I worked in the emergency room for experience as well as taking care of patients because I had not had a full medical training.
So they paid me $3 an hour, but there was no Medicare and no Medicaid.
But Murray, guess what?
There was nobody.
It seemed like they were struggling or big stories about people dying in the streets and all of these things.
It just didn't happen.
So I saw all that come in.
So I say I was on the tail end of it when the government was just a minimal nuisance.
But of course, it's changed a whole lot.
You know, the other thing that I found interesting in your title, and I know you'll understand this coming from me, but you say universal medical care from conception to the end of life.
Responsibility Over Universal Care00:14:55
You made a point of saying conception.
Some people, I don't know, they might ask questions about that, but you and I have talked about whether there's a patient at conception.
And you've actually taken a position which was a challenge with identifying a fetus as somebody requiring or deserving of legal protection.
And since we visited with that many times over the years, I often wondered, you've never really expressed, you know, boy, that position was tough on me, and I suffered a lot because I had that position.
What actually has been the reflection?
Because you didn't always hold that same position.
Well, that's true.
I mean, growing up in New York City in the 1960s, I remember when abortion became legal in New York State in 1967.
And when I was on the pro-choice side, so to speak, I opposed Bro versus Wade because it wasn't a constitutional decision from my perspective.
It's something that the states should be decided, just as they decide on criminal law on a whole host of issues.
And I felt from a constitutional perspective, this issue should be left to the states.
Like the 10th Amendment says, any issue not authorized by the federal government of the Constitution, authorized the federal government to do something, the state should take care of it.
And then that's the laboratory democracy, I guess, mantra that the founders wanted for America, is where the states would determine a lot of these contentious issues.
So I thank you for your great book, Challenge to Liberty, of presenting a very, very powerful pro-life defense from a libertarian perspective.
And I wish more libertarians would read that book and more Americans would read that book because it points out the sanctity of human life.
And I think that's what is missing the dialogue.
It's not about a woman's choice, it's about the sanctity of life.
And if we took that position, I think a lot of things would fall into place, and especially in this climate of endless wars that hopefully will be ended as the Afghanistan, the backend draws down.
But yeah, I think one thing that I'm really passionate about is for people to take care of their own medical decisions and health care decisions.
That's something that is missing from the dialogue in this country because people have basically outsourced their lives to the federal government or the state government or their employer with employer-based insurance.
And so as I see it, Ron, we should have a four-pronged approach to medical care that would cut the cost enormously.
Let me give you one example.
I was at the Free Market Medical Association annual conference in early August.
Now, I met at breakfast one day with a gentleman who works for an upper Midwest company.
And they decided that they were going to contract directly with medical providers.
And so they brought a truck onto their property and provided MRIs for their employees at $400.
Now, I don't know if the employee paid for the $400 or the company did, but the point is the truck went down the road to the hospital and the hospital is charging $6,000 for the same MRI, showing that they weren't adding any value, but just hiking up the price to make this huge profit, which, of course, they're not called profits at hospitals.
They're called surpluses.
This is one example of how the whole system is ripping off employers and individuals who want to pay cash for their services.
But with the Free Market Medical Association, they are doing their best to get the word out.
Doctors are doing their best to get out of the current system and doing direct cash payments.
And you're familiar with that.
Direct primary care is, I think, growing and should grow enormously.
That would be one part of what I'm proposing in the book.
The other would be a sort of a mega health savings account where you would put money in tax-free.
It would grow tax-free.
You would take it out tax-free to pay for extraordinary expenses.
And then you would have a catastrophic policy for the really big expenses.
If you need open-heart surgery, that would probably come down in price as well.
And the fourth component, which I'm very intimately involved in, since I'm a founding trustee of a nonprofit health center in Bergen County, New Jersey, northern New Jersey, is that the indigent wouldn't need Medicaid any longer.
That would save the taxpayers $600 billion a year by the creation of thousands of nonprofit medical centers founded on the principle of volunteers in medicine in Hilton Head, South Carolina.
And if Jeff Bezos with his billions and Bill Gates with his billions and Warren Buffett really decide to do something great for the American people, leave a great legacy, it would be helping create nonprofit health centers across the country.
And the one that I found that is thriving in northern New Jersey, savings people's lives at no cost to the taxpayer.
And that is the voluntarism, the libertarian approach to medical care that I think would achieve all the goals that Bernie thinks he could achieve with Medicare for all.
You know, your point about the responsibility of the individual, I think, is the key to it, because it sounds good and people say, yeah, but it doesn't work.
And they make all kinds of argument because they're so dependent on government.
When there becomes a vacuum, let's say they take away some of those responsibility of the individual, then there's a vacuum, but it's filled then with corporations.
We get corporate medicine, and that is where the real problems come in because doctors very, very rarely are, you know, the free market group, they do a very good job on moving in the right direction.
But unfortunately, you know, these responsibilities, doctors belong to these groups, and very few.
I remember when I started my practices in the 1960s, that I opened up an office, I had a nurse and an insurance person, and that was it.
But now you have to join groups, and then the government is involved, and then you have HIPAA that's going to protect everybody's privacy.
So we have a major problem there, too, because the privacy issue I think is atrocious because everything my son practices in private practice right now.
And he tells me that he says he has to carry his little computer because it goes in and it immediately goes to some services that goes to the government and keep a record.
They have a record of, oh, that patient got too many medications and oh, we're making sure they practice good medicine.
That to me is a real shame.
And I think this is the reason why your book is so important.
It emphasizes that you don't have to say that, well, if you don't have the government doing it, who's going to do it?
Well, you just listed four things that could be done.
And the magnificent thing about that is that that's how you get the prices down.
What we did back in the 60s when we shifted is, you know, the prices went up and medical care went down.
And the doctor-patient relationship was undermined.
And it did exactly the opposite.
And just like all other things that you have talked about so much over the years, when the market works, quality goes up and the price goes down.
And people say, oh, you can't do that with medicine.
And I think you can.
It doesn't have to mean that you have to act like a ruthless person because, matter of fact, providing a good service is a moral issue because it's something that can be done.
But most people think that if you don't have that, the whole thing will fall apart and there'll be people starving out in the streets.
Then I got to thinking, what about those people?
You probably even see them up your way.
Tense cities in the middle of the cities, big cities.
We're turning them into slums.
And they say, what we need is more government.
So it doesn't make any sense to me.
And I know it doesn't make sense to you because you've been fighting this battle for a long time.
Well, the thing is, we all, we have the infrastructure in place to transition from where we are today to this hybrid system, government-dominated system, to a free market, universal care system.
And I outlined it in the book.
Is it the final word?
I don't think so, but I think it gives us a good blueprint to start building a new system that would lower costs, that would increase people's real incomes, increase the bottom line for businesses, and we would have a much stronger economy, better quality medical care.
And what I do in the book, which no one else has done as far as I'm concerned, is I separate health care from medical care.
Health care is your responsibility, and the person that's responsible looks you in the mirror every morning.
Medical care is what we seek when we don't have optimal health care.
And I have a whole chapter on wellness, which I think you'll appreciate because I interviewed a naturopath who's a longtime friend of mine, free market-oriented.
And he gave me his experience as a youngster from poor health to being a top-notch naturopath, helping people get to better health, having doctors shadow him in his office, working with doctors, oncologists, cardiologists, for an integrative approach to help patients get to where they want to be, which is without medication and without hospitalization and living a good life without having these chronic ailments.
And most of the healthcare decisions that we make is our responsibility.
We are responsible for what we eat, what we drink, whether we exercise or not.
And this is part of the program that I've been trying to follow for a long time as an adult.
I know you've been following it because you're in great shape, no matter what age you are.
And I think we all have to have a change in our culture because people think it's someone else's responsibility for their life.
And I reject that since I was a youngster.
And that's why I think the libertarian philosophy was so attractive to me when I read about it in the late 60s and early 70s.
And here I am in 2021, trying to take us to that next level of a free society, which is getting government out of medical care.
And just as we know that war is too important to be left to generals, medical care is too important to be left to insurance companies and third-party payers in the government.
And I think that's what should be our mantra.
Libertarians should be, as I think Mises wrote, or Mrs. Mises wrote, we have to be radicals for freedom.
And I think with the book that I just wrote, I think that achieves that objective because we have to point out loud and clearly that government cannot provide the appropriate decision-making, which is a very intimate decision between the doctor and the patient.
As I pointed out to someone the other day, education and medicine are two areas outside the family which are very important person-to-person meetings and very intimate.
You have to like your teachers.
You have to like your doctors in order to have good outcomes.
And if you don't like either of them, you're not going to have good outcomes.
So again, it's all about developing a culture in our society that is much different than what we have today, which is a challenge.
But I think I'm up to it.
And that's why I hope people buy this book, because as I've stated in previous podcasts, I intend to use all the royalties to support organizations that I've supported throughout the years, like the Mises Institute.
And I intend to help the Ron Paul Institute achieve that next level of success by leveraging it, which I'll discuss hopefully in a few months.
But if people buy this book and give it as gifts, especially the e-book, because believe it or not, as an author, you get greater royalties from the e-book than you do from the paperback.
And so my strategy is very simple, to try to get this word out to as many millions of Americans, tens of millions of Americans as possible.
And if the book can be on the bestseller list like other books have been, this could be a game changer.
But it's up to the people to help boost the sales of this book so we can get the message out with a message of hope, freedom, and wellness, which I think the average person wants.
You know, we've gone through a lot of changes and a lot of arguments about medical care, especially with COVID, because in some ways we've stepped back terribly.
In other ways, people are waking up to the views that you're expressing because you talked about choices.
And I talk about the entire system, you know, whether it's monetary policy or all economic and social reaction, it should be done freedom of choice.
You know, it's hard to believe that we're the ones who are really the pro-choice people.
You know, we want people to have choices.
But I think people have been conditioned.
You know, I think our problems have been building for 100 years since the progressive era started.
And yet, I still see a lot of opportunity because, yes, we have to work for a transition.
I've argued that in monetary policy.
But we have to also realize that we might not have our way for a long time to come.
And conditions may get so bad that this is the time people ought to be looking at good health.
And you've mentioned that already about taking care of health and just taking vitamin D and zinc may be an alternative to quickly putting people in the hospital and letting the government pay the bills.
But this prohibition on drug usage and the fact that people have trouble getting hydroxychloroquine and the other things that could be helpful instead is vaccine, vaccine, vaccines.
And of course, I believe in vaccines, but I don't believe in the type of promotion that's going on now because I think there's too much commercialism involved with it.
But I think that this COVID thing has been very, very damaging.
But at the same time, I look and say, each day we do our program and we dig up the articles, and people are shifting their opinions.
They're looking at it.
And today we talked about how people are shifting their opinion about government schools and they're shifting toward homeschooling.
And that's where the real solutions come from because the progressives have been educating or giving bad information to our young people for a long time now.
And we have to combat those efforts as well and talk to them more about our libertarianism, which you have done so well.
Well, thank you, Ron.
Offering Liberty00:03:43
Ideas, as you know, run the world.
The progressive ideas were percolating for 100 years.
And look where we are now.
We're on the verge of a single-payer government system.
And I'm trying to offer the American people an alternative, which puts them in charge.
Unfortunately, as we know, a lot of people don't want to be in charge of their life.
They rather outsource it to the government, which is a sad commentary on our culture.
But I think with you, and Daniel, and the Mises Institute, and LuRockPoll.com, and other outlets that have been fighting the good fight for decades, I think I'm hoping that this book will give us an opening to change the dialogue in this country as to,
rather than expanding Medicare and Medicaid, is let's transition out of these programs that will benefit everyone, especially the taxpayer and the recipients, the elderly, the small business owner, the big corporations, so they can reduce their medical costs.
Remember, every time we save a dollar, that means we can free up a dollar for other purposes, whether it's philanthropy, whether it's saving for the future, whether it's for our children's education or grandchildren's education.
This is what life is all about: improving yourself and helping the people around you that you love and cherish.
And so, what I'm hoping is that this book gets wide reach over the next few months, and by 2022, we can start having a real discussion about having a free market, universal medical care system, which I believe is an idea whose time has come.
Right.
You know, we're going to have to close.
I want to mention one fact that was in the paper today.
Somebody proposed yesterday a new form of medical care.
And then I want you, Murray, to tell people the best way to order your book.
But the article I want to mention came from not exactly a libertarian site, and that's Politico.
And what they write is sort of anti-libertarian.
The story here today was: HHS unveils office to treat climate change as a health issue.
So you can imagine what's going on.
Everything is going to be a health issue now, but that's the kind of thing that happens that we have to combat because you don't want to be against the environment and environmentalism.
We have to support that.
Of course, we'd be able to come up with libertarian answers to that question, just as you have come up with libertarian answers to the medical problem.
But go ahead and tell our viewers how they can get your book.
The book is available on Amazon and other platforms.
And the nice thing about Amazon, you can order the book immediately as an e-book.
And as I pointed out, the e-book royalties are much greater than the paperback royalties, which will mean that the royalties that I get will be deposited in the Sabrin Charitable Trust Fund that we created four years ago to distribute to nonprofit organizations.
And I'm really excited that if the sales take off, there will be so much money in that charitable trust that I'll be able to support these organizations in a way they otherwise could not do for my retirement income.
So I'm not using the royalties to live on.
I'm using it to create another success story for the libertarian movement, the liberty movement, over the next several years.
Very good.
And it sounds to me like you have every bit as much energy as you've had for the whole time I've known you.
But I want to thank you, Murray, for being with us today.
Thank you, Ron.
I appreciate it.
I enjoy our conversations always and hope to see you soon in the near future.