Jan. 11, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:54
4282 The Shocking Truth About Medicaid Fraud!
Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio, listens to a Medicaid investigator reveal the shocking amounts of fraud in the government healthcare system - and who is most ripping off the American Taxpayer!▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux, hope you're doing well.
I'm here with Thomas.
Now, Thomas wrote to me after I talked with another doctor, well, with a doctor, about corruption in the healthcare industry and he had tales to tell that harrowed my very bone marrow, so thanks for taking the time today.
Yeah, no problem, no problem.
I'm glad that we were able to connect and I can, you know, bring this to the listeners.
The magnitude of it is beyond, I think, what a lot of people would expect.
So, tell me the things that you have seen and what troubles you the most.
Well, it's... Jesus!
It's so broad.
I was a state Medicaid investigator and also a drug analyst for about four years.
What does drug analyst mean?
Um, that's just, I, uh, do a number of things with, uh, the, the pharmacy group at the state level.
And, um, we do things like, um, review how Medicaid patients are utilizing drugs.
Um, we ensure that the state is getting, um, rebates from pharmaceutical companies.
Uh, there's legislation.
Oh, so you're looking for patterns where there may be illicit use of a prescription pad or overprescription that raises alarm bells, that kind of stuff as well?
Yeah, yeah, that's part of that too.
And that's kind of how I became a full-on investigator for the Medicaid program, which itself covers drugs for Medicaid patients, it covers It covers non-emergency medical transportation for Medicaid recipients.
It covers personal care attendant services or personal care assistant services.
It covers home health aids.
It covers bad pharmacists, bad doctors.
The whole Medicaid program just spans so much.
I mean, there's waivers for brain injury recipients.
It's really the Medicaid program itself has kind of stepped into... I guess this is what you get when you take a giant government cash hose in the form of the Social Security Act and you inject it in what used to be the province of the family.
Well, you said covers bad doctors, bad pharmacists.
What do you mean by that?
Well, I mean as far as What we did with investigations, there's a lot of bad entities across all those types of providers that I just mentioned.
But I just specifically said bad doctors or pharmacists because a lot of people, that doesn't always come to mind when they hear, when they think of a white coat, you know, a pharmacist or doctor, they don't think that there could be egregious levels of multi-million dollar fraud things going on with physicians or pharmacists.
So what are the kind of patterns that you have seen on how the taxpayers get ripped off?
Good question.
Great question.
So let's just start with the basics.
I mean, it can be as simple as personal care assistance or attendance.
These are kind of ubiquitous across the United States.
They come with different flavors of names, but they kind of do the basic Um, cares for elderly, um, for, you know, people who just, who need cares, um, and who can't care for themselves.
And what you'll find is at the basic level, things like they'll say they're providing eight to 12 hours of service for this person and they will bill for that, um, off their time card yet they'll be having, they'll have like a private, employment, of private employment and they'll be getting paid at a quote-unquote regular job.
So this is someone that there's like an elderly shut-in or somebody who needs visit and they say I go there 8, 10, 12 hours and it's I mean pretty much impossible in any meaningful way to validate what people say or how many hours they say that they're working or what they say they're up to.
Exactly, exactly and we we do pursue
Things in the investigations where we find time cards that have been punched and we prove cases that you couldn't possibly to be two places at once, although sometimes we'll run into barriers where, you know, the personal care assistant will be working for two Medicaid providers and there's no punch clock and we're like, well, we can't really prove where you were.
At either place.
So feel free to bill us for 24 hours of service because we can't prove whether you were here or there.
And you know feel free just to bill 24 hours of service.
And so we're telling records looks like there's a disincentive to that.
Right.
Right.
And that's and so that's a that's like a baseline very bottom level scheme you know to give the listeners kind of an idea in the Medicaid program and it scales up.
And let's see, so scaling it up would be just looking at the difference we have.
So then we would have something like adult daycares and these are rising in popularity.
So we have two parents working households and we still have Our parents and our family is aging and they will age and we will, a lot of times, if we're not putting them in a nursing home because of the expense of it, they're not ready for a nursing home.
They're not ready for that kind of acute care.
Put them in a place called an adult day center or adult daycare.
And what you have there is you'll have them saying that, oh, we had We had 50, 60, 70 people that we were caring for here today.
And then you show up for an onsite inspection or investigation and there's only 10 people there.
Maybe five people.
Sometimes there's no one there.
Yet they're billing the state at the tune of millions of dollars per year.
Millions of dollars per year.
So that happens.
And so that's kind of scaling up the scale of fraud.
In something like non-emergency medical transport.
This came about because ambulance services were being overwhelmed by... Yeah, people who say, like, I have a headache, I need an ambulance.
Right.
Right, exactly.
And so to offset that, you know, like any good politician, more legislation on top of more legislation, and out comes non-emergency medical transportation.
So now what you have are providers that will scheme the system.
They'll do things like they'll find patients that are going to, let's say, daily methadone clinic treatments.
So they're going to the methadone clinic five days a week, sometimes six days a week.
As far as the transport company is concerned, these people are virtual gold mines.
And what they'll do is they'll hook up with recipients or patients that need methadone clinic but are living tremendous distances from an urban center where you find most of the methadone clinics or the treatment.
And then the methadone clinics or the treatment centers will be overwhelmed in the rural areas.
These non-emergency medical transport providers will target these people and then what they will do is they will get them to their treatments in the urban center and then incentivize them with hotel stays halfway, hotel stays within the city.
Um, halfway houses or other, um, you know, apartments, temporary things where that they can stay near their treatment center and the transport company can remain, can still use their old address at the rural point and bill for hundreds and hundreds of miles, um, traveled for that patient when in reality they're transporting them less than 20 miles and they'll do that every day and To the tune of millions of dollars as well.
Wow.
Layers and layers.
Okay, what else?
I feel like we're just beginning.
Yes, we're just scratching the surface.
Then it becomes more complex when you start to mix in foreign populations.
Because if there's one thing foreign populations understand about America, it's the honeypot called Medicaid and Medicare.
So, and I'm just speaking mostly about the Medicaid fraud that I've encountered.
We certainly have had crossover with Medicare fraud, which... And sorry, just for the non-American listeners, if you can differentiate the two programs.
Right, okay, so Medicaid is for, it's basically for people who are, should be able-bodied Or they're at an age where they should be working and contributing to society and paying taxes and have health insurance for their employer.
But for any number of reasons, can't.
And they've been diagnosed by a physician as not being able to.
Or they've presented their case to their local county services and they are entitled to Medicaid services, which is Health insurance for the poor, basically.
And this is a small population of people who have been, quote, disabled.
Some of which, of course, are legitimate.
But this is a population that has been growing enormously.
Now, there's an aging population, so there's some aspect of it.
It still seems like a very high growth in the people who are on disability.
Exactly.
And I want to get to that.
So I'm glad that we'll segue nicely into the next part.
Okay, so that's Medicaid.
And Medicare is for the elderly, is that right?
Correct.
Correct.
Medicare is just strictly, once you hit the age of 65, I believe, you're going to be enrolled in Medicare.
There's parts A, B, C, and D. And each part deals with either your, you know, your clinic visit or your drug spend down.
And they all have kind of different parts that they pay for.
But it basically, once you hit a certain elderly age above 60, Um, they kind of change it every so often to, you know, kind of fudge with the federal budget, but, um, that's when you, that's when your health insurance kicks in and that again, it all falls under the umbrella of the, excuse me, the social security act.
So Medicare, Medicaid, child support, um, a lot of these social programs, they all fall under the social security act.
So now getting back to.
What you were saying about the Medicaid population, it seems to be growing disproportionately, and one could attribute that to kind of like the sugar-infused, live fast, die hard, poor nutritional habits, kind of broken family.
Diet that Americans kind of participate in.
And dangerous neighborhoods so kids stay at home on tablets or they don't roam around the neighborhood.
They don't exercise.
They don't go play baseball in the corner lot.
They're home.
They're eating a bunch of processed crap.
They're vegging and that's lifelong health effects.
We're seeing the rise of the video game generation hitting middle age now.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so there's a health effects.
It's a public health disaster and it's just people aren't maybe necessarily putting it together, but I think people are starting to realize it.
But as a Medicaid investigator, you see these things firsthand.
You see a 20-year-old with a diagnosis that they should not have and you wonder what kind of nutritional habits they've had and what kind of movement patterns they've had their entire life and what that's done to The degradation of their neurology to the point where they can't care for themselves and they need a personal care assistant, as it were, at the age of 22.
So there's that, you know, as an explanation for sure, and then this is where it segues into the foreign populations understanding that America has a giant honeypot called Medicare and Medicaid, and they know when they get here, first priority is to sign up for as many social safety net services as possible.
And if they're not aware of them, the liberal left will find a way to make them aware.
There's an entire industry of getting immigrants signed up to welfare and social service programs.
Right, right.
And in that, of course, is Medicaid.
And what we will see as an investigator We will see physicians' identities being purchased and used from the black market, from the deep web.
We'll see them, these doctors, supposedly filling out service authorizations for these foreign populations.
What is a service authorization?
So a service authorization, generally, this is, again, this is pretty ubiquitous across all state Medicaid programs.
It's basically documentation that you need these services.
You need non-emergency medical transportation.
You need a personal care assistant with you so many hours a day.
You need to be put in adult daycare.
Or you spent too much time in prison and you got punched in the head too many times, so now we're going to put you on a brain injury waiver when you get out.
Things like that.
Just to point out as well, even outside of the fraud element, I've often thought about what it's like to be a doctor.
You're sitting across from someone who is going to get hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free stuff if they can just convince you of something.
You may have your doubts.
Right.
But saying no, when it's not your money that's being spent, just seems like an enormous hassle.
It's going to get you a lot of hostility, might get you reported, might get some complaint lodged against you.
So just signing that document, when it's not your money at stake, so that people just kind of go away, I can see that being really tempting.
Like, why would you want to push against the stream?
It's not your money.
It's a lot of hassle.
What's the point?
Exactly, exactly.
And there is absolutely no incentive for the physicians to push back.
They really have zero incentive.
And every incentive for them to acquiesce.
Exactly, exactly.
And again, that's just doctors doing what quote-unquote they think is in the patient's best interest.
Just maybe in their best interest to get through the day.
Well, and if you say no to someone, and it does turn out that they needed it, you could get sued.
But if you say yes to someone, who's ever going to find out that it wasn't particularly needed and it's going to track back to you and it's going to cause lots of problems?
Right.
Right.
And we have a tremendous, we have a tremendous, tremendously difficult time proving that somebody didn't, you know, qualify for these services or Especially some of the diagnosis codes that they will have.
What we will see a lot is a diagnosis code for general depression or some kind of orthopedic diagnosis, which basically consists of, can you touch your toes?
Nope, can't touch my toes.
Okay, well you need a personal care assistant for the next 10 hours.
If you can't bend over to pick things up off the floor, you know, how are you going to function?
Things like this.
And you have general depression, so you need somebody to take care of you.
We see these broad sweeping diagnosis codes used.
And a lot of times they'll just be in that same situation where the doctor just wants to move this patient through the system without a lot of pushback.
There are many times where we'll see fraudulent patterns again of physicians Identities being used, service authorizations being signed by people that aren't the physician, that are the company owners for these personal care assistant companies, and these home health aid corporations.
And they will just be doling out service authorizations for these Medicaid recipients so that they can authorize them for services.
And then it goes even deeper.
What we'll see is We'll see the Medicaid recipients working hand-in-hand with the owners of the personal care assistant companies, or the home health aid companies, whereby the owners know that the services really aren't being rendered and the services weren't really needed in the first place.
So what will happen is they may pay the personal care assistant, the person who is working to take care of them, they may pay the personal care assistant And also split the check with the recipient and we'll see trends like this when we request bank records and we go in deeper into the investigation, which we're rarely allowed to do.
And I think for political reasons.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about, you said sort of foreign populations.
This could just be my particular perception, but I always get the feeling there are a lot of Russians involved in this.
And I don't know if it comes from living under communism and learning how to fine-tune and scam a corrupt system and so on, but that's my particular perception.
Is that something way off base?
No, no, not at all.
There are definitely Russian connections.
We've had agencies that are dominated by Russian ownership and they are running very complex schemes and these Medicaid schemes are sometimes just the, you know, this is just play money.
There's a lot deeper things going on like money laundering and tax evasion and other forms of crime and they get all lumped in with the Medicaid and sometimes as investigators we stumble on this and then we have to make our recommendations or referrals to the FBI or the Federal Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General.
And it's kind of out of our hands.
So your inkling is correct with regards to Russians being involved in this.
Also, there are the East African populations are very keen on coming here and abusing and committing fraud.
in the Medicaid and Medicare realm.
They're very, very keen.
They're very, very good at it.
What we will see is, they're so good at it at this point, is that they will have multiple agencies waiting to be opened.
They will go down and file with their respective Secretary of States.
They will file business filings, slightly different names than their current operation.
And they anticipate us catching them and shutting them down administratively.
Sometimes we'll shut them down with criminal charges, but a lot of times we'll just shut them down administratively because the criminal side of things, the states, criminal agencies like the Attorney General and the FBI at the federal level, they're already so inundated with Medicaid fraud that We a lot of times just have to take matters into our own hands and administratively terminate them.
And when we do that, what they do is they just get online or they have a trusted family member hop down to the Secretary of State and activate that business filing for their alternate business.
And they will have those files and those papers filed under a family or a friend under their name.
And then they just take all the Medicaid recipients that they were fraudulently billing for, those numbers, and they'll just move them over to the next business.
And it's a real hellish game of whack-a-mole that we never win.
When you say that there's politics that prevent the pursuit of particular sectors or areas of fraud, what do you mean?
So, I liken it to our job as investigators We are kind of the black sheep of government, especially in human services.
In human services, the idea is to dole out as many dollars as you can.
And we're there, as the stewards, saying, whoa, you're doling this money out to the wrong people, or we've got to claw this back, or this is an overpayment.
We have to terminate this agency.
They're not using the funds appropriately.
So I liken our job to kind of the lab for the drug dealer.
And like you had referenced, these social programs almost become like a drug that people get hooked on.
And so Medicaid is no different.
And especially if you're an owner making millions and millions and perhaps billions of dollars off the taxpayer.
So you get hooked on this.
And the human services division A lot of times in most states is by far the largest line item in the state budget.
And if you look at the federal level, if you zoom out, it's 50% of the federal budget, Medicaid and Medicare combined.
So there's a lot at stake here.
There's a lot of money flowing and that money buys votes.
And I would argue that if you're going to buy votes, especially on the liberal left end of things, the best way to do it is via human services and doling out as much cash as you can through Medicaid, food assistance, rental assistance, and everything else.
So I say sometimes to my colleagues that we're kind of like the lab for the drug dealer that calls and says, hey, you know that million dollars of cocaine that you put out on the street?
That wasn't good stuff.
Maybe you should do something about that.
And as the head of the lab for the drug dealer, I say, really, how long would you be alive after you said that to the leader of the drug cartel?
Or if you said it to the customers.
Right, right.
In essence, they don't want us to see what we see and find what we find because, generally speaking, Medicaid investigation departments are paid for through the Human Services Department.
So it's hard to independently find fraud, waste, and abuse when your boss, who issues you a paycheck, is also the one that sends the money out the door.
They kind of look bad when they're sending money out the door, and then you're telling them three months later that millions of dollars that they sent out the door, they sent it out in error, or it's being used for fraud.
So we don't have, um, we're not independent.
Therefore, um, a lot of times things that we find, um, are tried to, you know, they're attempted to kind of be glossed over.
Well, I would also imagine there's this weird thing that happens in the world these days where whenever there's a hamperance into an investigation, I simply assume that there's a lot of non-whites who would otherwise be targeted.
You know, like, I mean, if for 30 years the British police is not looking into child rape games, then I'm going to assume that a lot of them are not white because they don't want to be accused of racism.
And I wonder if You know, Russians excluded, I suppose, whether there's any of this, that if the newspapers were to print a whole parade of people ripping off Medicare, Medicaid, and so on, and they were not white, that they'd be like, oh, you're just a bunch of racists, you're only targeting this group because you hate it, right?
That kind of stuff.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And we encounter that on a daily basis.
You hit that right on the head.
A lot of these populations from foreign countries, the media, are the state level commissioners and the commissioners that go up to the hill, the state hill, and talk to the politicians, especially on the left, because the left wants to approve large health and human services budgets.
They go hand in hand and they don't want to talk about that stuff.
They don't want to talk about what we see and what The realities are on the ground.
And what proportion would you say of the fraud in the system, we don't have to particularly talk about race, but what proportion of the fraud that you've seen would you guesstimate is committed by foreigners?
Ninety percent.
Ninety percent?
Yep.
Ninety percent.
Ninety percent.
Or more.
Ninety percent.
I can say that unequivocally, everything I've seen.
And again, I know it's real, real tough to guess, but do you have any sense, or has there been any work done to your knowledge, to estimate, I guess, the two important numbers?
One is the scale of the fraud, and the second is the percent who are caught.
Big data and government fraud programs, they have not yet met.
Um, the extrapolating the, the percentage of fraud versus how much money is, goes out the door in total, uh, hasn't been done as far as, um, I understand and have seen.
Um, so that is something that, um, I don't know if there's people in your, in, in your audience.
Big data and Medicaid and fraud, that's something that the program really needs because it's just not there.
But the politicians really don't.
Right!
They just certainly don't and they don't want it.
The commissioners and the politicians for sure.
Do you have any, again this is all very much seat of the pants calcs, but do you have any sense of the scale of the fraud?
Because some of the Investigations and pursuits and convictions that I've read about are some pretty staggering sums of money.
Yeah.
We're talking billions of dollars.
Billions of dollars per state.
So, if one does the math, it starts to add up really, really fast.
Billion here, billion there.
Pretty soon we're talking about some real money.
Right, right, exactly, exactly.
So it's very significant.
And I mean, on that note, you know, the scale of the money, and I talked about foreign owners having multiple agencies, what we have also seen evidence of is what they will do is they have habits of also opening non-profits.
And they have nonprofits that are open that sometimes are recognized by the IRS and they filed appropriately, sometimes not.
Sometimes they're filed appropriately here, but they're not recognized by the nation that they're using the nonprofit to benefit.
So you'll see things like clean drinking water foundation, something, something, you know, save the children, something, something.
I'm sure that's all in Flint, Michigan, but yeah, I know what you mean.
It could also be overseas.
Right, right.
And so what we will see is, we'll see earnings from the agency flow through there, and that just automatically gives them a 25% off coupon from their profit margins, obviously.
It's a good way to send money overseas and not have it examined.
Um, as thoroughly as it should be.
Um, as if you were to bring maybe a couple million of, you know, a couple million dollars through the airport.
Um, you probably won't get very far, but if you bring 900, if you bring $9,000 through in a bunch of suitcases, you'll, you have a greater chance of making it through, but, uh, they can transfer large sums of money to those nonprofits and where that money goes, um, as a state, uh, investigator, I can only, um,
Yes, but from the investigations that I've seen that have gone to the federal level and beyond, I'm sure that those Medicaid dollars have become intermixed with terrorism and terroristic agencies.
Is there any incentive for the investigators To pursue, I mean, in other words, do you get a percentage of the monies that are saved?
Because, I mean, the people who are ripping off the system have a huge incentive to learn everything there is about it, and, you know, they pass knowledge amongst each other, I'm sure, and so on.
If the investigators are just, you know, earning middle-class salaries, no matter what happens, it seems there would be a huge imbalance of incentives.
Exactly.
And that's the idea, is that you're a state investigator, you're working on behalf of the taxpayer, You're here for the good of the people, and that's your incentive for the day.
So you don't get a bonus if you take down some multi-million dollar scam?
None.
In fact, if you start to see the underpinnings of a multi-million dollar or perhaps billion dollar scam, and you start to go down the proverbial rabbit hole, as they call it, you will be dissuaded from doing that.
All angles and all levels above you and even within your own colleague group.
So what would people say to try and get you to avoid going down that path and what is it that they're really concerned about?
The biggest strategy is what they will do and I think that this was just set up intentionally.
The mantra is We have so much fraud to dig through.
There's so many cases.
We have hundreds of cases that are open.
We don't have time for this.
And you kind of look at them and after years of doing it, you realize that a lot of these cases that are coming in are the sharks, the sharks feeding off the sharks kind of, you know, situation where fraudsters are tattling on fraudsters.
Oh, trying to take out the competition?
Right, but they're not doing it at a very high level.
They're doing it at this very low level.
We're talking $50, $100 overpayments, $200,000, $5,000 overpayments, cases that amount to nothing at the end of the day, yet these Medicaid departments, these investigation departments, have to take everything very, very seriously and do their due diligence.
Otherwise, they could find themselves on this, you know, the nightly news or in front of a Senate panel for not doing their due diligence on some small, piddly little case.
And what happens is... So it's the show, right?
It's like, no, no, we've got hundreds of cases, but if they're small to piddly, then it's just part of the theater of accountability.
Yes.
Yes, exactly.
It's pure theater.
And then what happens is you, as a good investigator who's trying to go down the rabbit hole and is pursuing something possibly very, very big, is dissuaded by this theater and the pressure to keep up the masquerade and the numbers.
And you're there like, well, you've got 20 other cases hanging out.
You've got to look into these.
And you know, you know that these other 20, if you can do high level data extrapolation, Just on your own as an investigator, you have already looked at these, given a cursory look to these cases, and you know they're not worth anything.
But you know this other case is worth millions, perhaps billions.
And the reason to not pursue that, I'm still sort of trying to grapple it, is it diversity appearance?
Is it corruption within the department?
Is it fear of criminal reprisals?
Or is it just some combination of, do you know what is the central pillar that is preventing the pursuit of the bigger cases?
And that's a very good question.
You know, I don't, from what I've seen, I can't put my finger on One central focus or fear that administrators, managers, the commissioners, and the politicians have, but kind of a repertoire of everything that you just mentioned.
There is fear of political lashback, targeting certain political groups.
That's a huge fear.
There is a fear of the media, the standing media.
Getting hold of what you're doing and bringing down the hammer for doing what you're doing.
And these state agencies not having any type of robust PR team that can defend against, you know, the media coming down with their hammer.
Right.
So if you're in Minnesota, you start to investigate and your investigation leads you empirically, say, to certain sections in the Somali community, that's a real powder keg, right?
Huge powder keg.
That's what I say.
Multiculturalism leads inevitably to multilegalism, where there are different rules for different groups.
It's just the way that, unfortunately, tribalism and the leftist media works.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And there's, I can only imagine, between the politicians and the commissioners, there's benefits and finances most likely being exchanged.
for looking at this and not looking at that.
Yeah, I mean, it's the kind of thing where if you're a Somali doctor, let's say, and you've got a bunch of Somali patients who are saying that they are in pain or depressed or anxious or back pain or whiplash, whatever it is, right?
Then it seems to me kind of inevitable that if you are a Somali doctor, we know that there's in-group preferences, that you're going to... It's unlikely to me that you're going to say, well, my Somali brother and sister, I'm going to say no to you because I wish to defend the interests of the largely white taxpayer base.
Sorry, I mean, it sounds cynical, but it's like...
Does anybody think this works in the real world?
Does anybody think this is how things play out in general?
There's some exceptions and all that, but thinking group preferences are very powerful.
It's kind of why we are who we are.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So for the people who are feeling frustrated, a little paralyzed by this conversation, what would you suggest that they do?
I'm just a big one for, hey, let's just raise awareness.
Let's just talk about these issues, get the information out there.
Because people are always like, ah, what's your solution?
And it's like, I don't know what the solution is.
Right.
But, well, although I'm not a big fan of any government program that I can think of, but I think the solution is, can we just have conversations about this?
Can we just say that when Ocasio-Cortez says, let's extend Medicaid to everyone, that it may not be 100% of the provision of wonderful health care to needy people?
Right.
Exactly.
And you know, I gave that some thought before we had this conversation.
It is.
It's so big and so broad, it will leave even the most astute investigator some days just kind of sitting in your chair just awestruck at what you're dealing with and the apathy for what you're finding.
And I guess if I were to impart anything to the listeners is that there's the conversations and the taking political steps and thinking about You know, how you interact with the economy and government.
And I would say, you know, the crux of all this, I mean, the root of it really stems from the Social Security Act.
And, you know, well-intentioned a long time ago, over the years, it's been corrupted and turned into a giant honeypot.
Power corrupts!
If only people had warned us about that at a later time in human history.
Right, and the Social Security Act, I mean, if there's one piece of legislation that needs to be revamped or possibly just go away, it's the Social Security Act.
And doing it are two different matters.
You want my grandmother to die in a snowdrift?
But the reality is, I mean, you can do the math as well as I can, as well as everybody who's listening to this and watching this, so we can do that.
It doesn't, like, what we want and what would be ideal, I mean, it's going to end.
Like, mathematically, it's going to end.
It cannot be sustained in any way, shape, or form, and we can either have a soft landing, Or we can have a hard landing.
And everybody who puts these conversations away, or anyone who gets mad at people for having these basic conversations...
I mean, I just hope that they understand that they're condemning millions of people to a life of destitution, a life of lack of medicine, a life of... Because it simply can't be sustained.
Mathematically, that which cannot continue will not continue.
So, it kind of doesn't matter if you like it, it kind of doesn't matter if you think it's a great idea or a bad idea.
It's just not gonna... We have to prepare for the end of massive government redistribution programs, and anybody who says it's wrong to talk about, it's like, okay, well, you are condemning millions of people to a life of misery, of lack of health care, of hunger, of potentially death, because you're just not willing to have a conversation about how we transition out of a system that simply cannot continue and will not continue.
And I just find it's kind of weird that people like You know, fingers in the ears and scream at everyone, you're a cold, heartless, racist, sexist, whatever.
It's like, yeah, but, okay, that's all a bunch of noise, I suppose, but the math is still the math.
Right.
And we do have to, like, it's either going to be some way that we transition out of this that's more helpful and beneficial to the sick and the poor, those genuinely in need, or it's just going to be like, hey, no checks tomorrow, and then good luck with all of that, right?
Right, and I wish every one of the listeners and anyone that they have these conversations with that have the pushback, I wish they could have sat in my chair and looked at the financial spreadsheets that I looked at every day and looked at the millions of dollars and then looked at the unsustainability.
I just wish they could see the math that I see.
Bring people in from a foreign country, a foreign culture, incentivize them in an amoral sense to become dependent on an utterly unsustainable system.
Ha!
You could not plan for disaster anymore coherently.
So, I really want to thank you for your time and for lifting the lid on this hellscape of corruption and predation known as, well, all government redistribution programs throughout the entire history of mankind.
But it is an interesting view and it is a fascinating thing that people need to understand that The welfare state and redistributionism and so on was calibrated for a particular demographic and the demographics have enormously changed and I've talked about the impact of that in a variety of ways.
But, you know, if you design a health insurance policy for a million people and there are only 10,000 smokers in those people, then you can charge a certain rate.
And if suddenly you have, out of those million people, half a million smokers, well, you have a whole different situation.
And the lack of capacity for the system to adapt to new demographics is, well, I mean, it's just accelerating the device.
And so I really, really do appreciate this kind of view in the system and also want to say Happy New Year.
