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July 20, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:09
Why Health Care Costs So Much | Dr. Keith Smith and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine Radio.
A couple of years ago, I was actually in Oklahoma, two guys in an alley.
You know, they just jumped out, gave me this for no reason whatsoever, and then actually ended up saving my life.
It was quite a coincidence. Dr.
Keith Smith is the co-founder of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, also known as the Refugee Camp for those fleeing the Canadian healthcare system, such as me.
Of course, in Oklahoma, owned by 40 of the top physicians and surgeons in central Oklahoma, Dr.
Smith serves as the medical director, CEO, and managing partner while maintaining an active anesthesia practice.
I assume that you're also a consultant for Ben Carson's speeches as that skill set.
We've chatted before. How are you doing, Dr.
Smith? What's new? I'm great.
It's great to be with you again.
The statement, I think, that got the most shock in the last time we talked, which I'd like to open with again because, you know, we've got, I don't know, 150,000 new subscribers since we last chatted, was the statement that you've made that goes something like this.
And I'm paraphrasing. Healthcare is not actually that expensive and that is something that really people find quite shocking, of course, with all of the Obamacare stuff and seeing the constant escalation of their premiums.
What are you talking about?
Healthcare is not that expensive.
Don't you see the bills people get?
Well, there's a vast difference between what people are charged and what it actually costs to deliver care to patients.
And there's even a more vast difference between the idea that people that have coverage think that they actually have access to healthcare, as you very well know.
So the amounts that you see on our website are actually the amounts that we believe it costs to actually take care of patients.
And not built into that are all the empire-building charges that the typical corporate institutions stick into people's bills to sponsor sports franchises or sports.
Or build on endlessly to their huge fortress.
We're not trying to build an empire.
We're not going to even franchise.
We would like other people to copy us with a very simple notion that they should be honest in their pricing and put forth pricing, not put patients in a very awkward and impossible situation of trying to discover it.
And then start some market competition and then everything that happens in healthcare will look like other industries that operate under an unfettered market.
Right. So when people get a bill, you go to the hospital and they get a bill, they think that that bill is really just about their healthcare and everything else is cut to the bare bones in order to provide as cheap a service as possible.
What are some of the costs that people don't see that are baked into that bill over and above the sort of healthcare services that are being provided?
Well, here at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, for instance, we don't have an administrator.
So you go to a large health system and there will be dozens of people, all of whom make a whole lot more money than I'll ever make, and I'm not really sure what they do.
I know that they do not actually lay hands on or take care of patients.
I know that for sure. So here at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, we do not have an advertising budget.
You go drive down any road and you'll see billboards advertising health plans or health insurance companies.
Or you turn on the television and you'll see very expensive ads where so-called not-for-profit hospitals are advertising how great they are and how they provide all this charitable care for the poor.
And it really is just a bunch of propaganda and lies.
I've joked that it's interesting that the not-for-profit hospitals have to charge 10 times what we do to not make a profit.
That is, I think, a comment on their inefficiency and maybe worse.
And so costs of overhead with government regulations, also I think for hospitals the costs that have to be passed along to others for things like the mandate to treat people in emergency even if they can't pay and other things like that.
I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about the degree to which that adds to overhead?
Keep in mind that the hospitals have very effectively used the excuse that they have to comply with all of these regulations as just that, an excuse to overcharge and to price gouge people, and they hide behind that veil and do that all the time.
The other thing to keep in mind about the dysfunctional health care system in the United States, which really operates like the meanest Mexican drug cartel you can imagine, big hospitals are actually paid to the extent that they claim that they lost big hospitals are actually paid to the extent that they claim There's a program called the Uncompensated Care System that operates like the opposite of Enron, where Enron overstated their gains in order to make more money.
The hospitals actually make more money to the extent that they claim that they lost money, because these losses that they claim Like the $95 they don't collect for the $100 they charge for an aspirin.
That loss goes to Washington, D.C. and forms the basis of the kickback they subsequently receive.
So there's a lot of propaganda.
There's a lot of lies.
There are a lot of excuses, all of which serve the interests and line the pockets of these corporate hospitals.
And it's cronyism.
I mean, it's what it is. They've worked very hard and paid a lot of money to To gain these favors while the legislators auction off what few liberties we have left to these guys.
And there is a general misconception I think about healthcare in the United States that it is driven by a lot of free market principles and this is what the free market does to healthcare.
And of course you guys, since you put your prices right there on the website and operate a fairly lean organization, I think you're an example of being closer to the marketplace.
To what degree would you say the healthcare system in the United States is dominated by laissez-faire free market principles?
I would say if you include plastic surgery and LASIK surgery and this growing free market movement, I would say it's somewhere between 10% and 15% of the industry.
It is growing very, very rapidly.
There are people that have seen the wisdom of embracing market discipline like we have, and I'm actually helping them to copy us.
Then there are people who see this free market movement as very scary, and they're joining up, kicking and screaming, but they're joining nonetheless.
The market has a way of doing that.
Fear really will drive people oftentimes to do the same thing, particularly when the alternative is bankruptcy.
Yes, nothing stimulates one's concentration like the prospect of an imminent hanging, as the saying goes.
I actually had a Canadian on here named Bill Gairdner who is another free market advocate who pointed out that he could get far better care for his dog because it's not socialized healthcare in the veterinary industry.
He could get a scan for his dog the next day where he'd have to wait months in the Canadian system.
When it comes to areas like LASIK and plastic surgery, what are the kind of innovations and price drops that you see where they're most governed by free market principles?
Well, what's happened since we put our prices online is patients all over the United States are printing out our price list and walking into their local hospital telling them to step up or I'm flying to Oklahoma City.
Now, we've now treated patients from all 50 states except Hawaii, many Canadians as you know.
So there is a very competitive price movement that has begun in the United States.
There are companies in the United States, large companies, that have rejected the entire idea of buying health insurance for their employees and rather have taken risk on themselves and walked into the space that typically is referred to as self-insurance or self-funding.
These companies pay their employees' healthcare bills out of operating revenue rather than subscribing to the insurance scam.
So you can imagine those companies have the sticker shock of these ridiculous bills, and they are signing up with us on a regular basis and willing to fly patients, pay all of their travel and lodging expenses, and even pay them per diem for incidentals to get them to come to our facility to spare them one of these bankrupting experiences in their local so-called not-for-profit hospital.
So this is a growing movement.
It's very threatening to the status quo.
The cartel is either acting like this is not happening or worse, they're actually donning the badge of transparency when they're anything but.
And I figured this would happen.
There'd be faux transparency, faux free marketers who say, yeah, we post our prices, but ultimately there are many asterisks and things that are not included.
Right. Bedpan and sheets are extra.
Now, when you refer to insurance as a scam, again, the majority of the world perceives America to be this laissez-faire Wild West free market paradise for healthcare and then look at the disastrous and say, well, that's what happens when you liberate the economy in healthcare.
When you refer to insurance as a scam, in a free market, it's not.
It's a choice. You can roll your dice or not.
Why do you call it a scam?
Well, true insurance like you buy for your car or your home is not a scam.
You have a claim and you file the claim and they pay the claim.
But you do not buy insurance for an oil change.
And you do not buy insurance for new light bulbs in your house.
But that is how we've been conditioned to think of insurance in the health industry.
There's a reason for this and it's because there are a lot of people who line their pockets because it's set up that way.
Many years ago, major medical insurance policies were truly good insurance policies and you could buy an insurance policy that covered health and medical uncertainty.
That's the purpose of insurance after all.
What we do now is we prepay for healthcare and because a third party intermediary is involved, the prices are driven Very, very high.
The patients many times do not have the sticker shock, so they don't care what it costs.
That's actually changing, and the good news is the government never gets anything right.
Here in the United States, they have prohibited entrepreneurs from issuing insurance policies that people actually want.
Anybody in the insurance industry has to promote a product and a service that really nobody wants, but then they're forced to buy.
So insurance really is a scam, but the good news is, in an effort to severely line the pockets of the cronies, the current administration drove deductibles away.
So high, they inadvertently, very unintentionally created a consumer market where so much money was coming out of patients' pockets that they were actually shopping.
And they're comparison shopping.
And they're finding facilities like mine where the entire expense for a surgery is less than their deductible under one of these new silly plans.
So fortunately, the good news is the government just screws everything up that they ever get involved with.
And they're actually assisting us in this movement.
People ask me, am I scared the government will come shut us down?
And I say, no, I lay awake at night afraid that someone from the government will come here to help me.
Because that would be the kiss of death.
Right.
So they've made these deductibles.
And I've heard like $5,000 deductibles made.
Maybe they're even higher than that, but $5,000 deductibles.
So I think some people are basically saying when it comes to Obamacare, I'm going to pay the fine for not having insurance because the deductible is so much greater than the fine.
And if something should happen, then I can go to a place like the Oklahoma Surgery Center and get something done cash out of pocket.
And I'm going to pay for surgery probably less than I'm going to pay in a year or two of insurance premiums that fundamentally remain unusable for me because the deduction is so high.
So this rational calculation, it's in a sense driving more people because Obamacare, of course...
I would argue it's sort of in response to two things.
Number one is that young people who are mathematically literate were doing the math and saying, well, wait a minute, why am I paying for all of this healthcare for stuff I'm never going to use that's largely for older people and so on?
So the young healthy people who are essential, you can't have an insurance company where only the sick people apply.
It's like having insurance for car crashes that only kicks in.
You can get it only after you've had a car crash.
It wouldn't work at all. I think young people were opting out and they kind of needed to be herded back in.
Also, I've heard some arguments that say the number of illegal immigrants, 10, 20, 30 million or whatever, who are piling into the emergency wards when they get desperate is also driving up the cost of healthcare.
So I think people were kind of roped back into healthcare to prop up a system of cross-subsidization, usually from the young to the old, from the healthy to the sick, and from the legal to the illegal.
I don't know. That's just sort of my thought.
I wonder if you had a bigger picture view of that.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right.
And judging by the number of young and even, I mean, people in their 40s and The 50s and 60s, judging by the number of people who come to the surgery center of Oklahoma and leave their Obamacare card in the car and come inside with a cashier's check for $3,740 to pay for their knee arthroscopy, that is a very rapidly growing portion of our business.
And judging by the number of people that we see, I think you're right.
I think that this has turned out to be a very good gamble for people to not pay for these ridiculous insurance policies that have been mandated.
When they say, I know you've seen this, the government is that institution whose ideas are so great they have to be mandatory.
And I think these insurance policies have gotten to be so Horrible and not seen as the value that in the marketplace there were enough people that were just simply choosing to be uninsured.
That was probably a big part of why the United States decided to inflict the Unaffordable Care Act on people was to make sure that we were required to buy these policies that otherwise, left alone and to our own devices, we would never buy on our own.
So maybe you can help me unravel a central paradox that I always have trouble with when looking not just at American healthcare but healthcare around the world.
And it seems to me something like this.
Healthcare is increasingly expensive, out of reach, people are going bankrupt and so on.
But at the same time, it seems that people are – let's just talk about Americans.
Americans seem to be taking less good care of their health even at a time when they're increasingly complaining about healthcare costs.
So for instance, obesity of course is a huge problem in the United States.
At the same time that people are complaining that healthcare costs are so high.
I wonder if you can help me unravel this paradox of people complaining about something and then doing everything they can to drive up their own cost of consumption with bad health choices.
Yeah, I think about Ambrose Bierce and his Devil's Dictionary.
He defined accountability as...
And I think that there is a general amount of unaccountability that probably explains some of what you've described.
The other problem in the United States and really all over the world is really almost like a conspiracy to keep people unhealthy and to keep them fat.
I mean, the foods that are terrible for people are cheap and readily available.
So As the economy continues to take hits from the great usurper of choice, the government, and people's opportunities become more limited, as does their income, then it becomes more difficult for them to actually eat well and make better choices.
And after all, this huge safety net is perceived as underneath everyone.
I think that As the incredible stories about lack of access, particularly to quality care, begin to materialize, you'll see some turnaround of what you've described, where people will realize, you know, I've got to take care of myself because nobody else is going to do it.
And, you know, if I get into trouble because of my lifestyle, I may just be left holding the bag.
So I think that we may see a less sedentary turnaround, very paradoxically, From the government getting involved in an industry where they really don't have any business at all in healthcare.
So I hope that answers your question.
That's how I see that. Yeah, I mean, some bad luck with me.
It was bad luck. But of course, a lot of people, 70%, as the estimate that I've heard, of healthcare issues are, I don't know, it's euphemistically called lifestyle-related, which is basically, you know, people making bad choices and other people in their life not intervening to talk them out of those bad choices.
And I think there is this general sense that...
You know, doctors are magicians and whatever you do to your body, they can come in and fix with some magic.
But there's a lot that people can do to take healthcare costs in their life and get them under control.
A lot of those have to do with better choices, but it just seems weird.
You know, you look back at movies from like the 1940s and 1950s and everybody looks so skinny, you know, and you head down to a beach at Disney World and You wonder how many mammals have washed up on the shore.
So it seems like there's this paradox that people are more afraid of healthcare costs but are making worse decisions and thus exposing themselves to more.
And there's only so much that the healthcare system can provide.
You know, if people are, they get diabetes, they're directly taking away healthcare from other people because doctors can't treat two people at the same time.
And it is an act to some degree, I would argue, of general or collectivist irresponsibility to make these bad choices which then drive up costs for everyone.
And that's the tragedy of the commons, really.
And that's one of the nice things, I think, about the resurgence of the free market in healthcare is that it promotes individual responsibility.
And individual accountability.
And so I think there's a very, very good chance that we will see a turnaround in this trend.
I'm actually very optimistic.
As powerful as these legislators think their pens are, they're not nearly as powerful as the forces of the market.
And in the United States, there really is a growing movement of people that are embracing market discipline and the individual responsibility that goes along with it.
Another thing I think that is a bit of a free rider that the socialist healthcare systems have is the amount of research that goes on in the United States.
It seems to me quite staggering.
I was going through this list of medical innovations that have come out of America and the remnants of the free market system do seem to be kicking up a huge amount of innovation that is not being matched as you would imagine.
I would caution anyone that is bemoaning the United States disproportionate contribution to research to consider that the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine and the editor of the medical journal Lancet both resigned and discussed because they claimed At least 70% of the articles that were in their journals were trash and were completely biased toward the folks in whatever corporate healthcare industry that funded this research.
The government funds a lot of research, and as you can imagine, the results of many of these studies are consistent with receiving the next grant or consistent with the views of whoever in government was agreeable to funding these studies. the results of many of these studies are consistent with So a lot of the research that goes on that's not directly linked to innovation is frankly not very good.
There is some that is. I don't want to broad stroke it too much, but there's a lot.
And that's just not me.
That's New England Journal and Lancet saying that.
The innovation is stifled by the government itself.
The Food and Drug Administration is just a complete disaster and exists to protect the existing players in the industry and to really hamstring true innovators and upstarts and underdogs to make their cost of entering the market so prohibitively high that the big dogs can buy them or take them over or stomp them out.
The FDA really works as the strong man in healthcare innovation in the United States, and we'd see a lot more of it if the government would just get out of the way.
And that's no different than any other industry, I know, but it's certainly true in healthcare as much as people would like to say that it's not.
Yeah, I mean, Dr.
Mary Ruart, who's been on this show, has talked about the degree to which the FDA, by keeping life-saving drugs that are legal in other countries and continents, out of the hands of America, is responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans who can't get access to medications that are perfectly safe, acceptable, and used in other countries.
But, of course, competing treatments are using, or the FDA keeps competing treatments out.
I wonder, to some degree, whether there's industry influence over the FDA to keep competition out.
Oh, yeah. And they also approve killer drugs.
They also give the green light and stamp of approval to drugs that are killers and then cover up the fact that they knew that.
So there's no doubt in my mind the FDA acts as a strongman for the existing crony players to keep the upstarts from effectively competing with them.
Right. Now, for those who are coming from socialist-style healthcare systems, I just wanted to mention what an astounding experience it was to work with you and your team on my health issue.
Because I grew up in England.
Oh, Lord. I mean, just about everything was socialized there in healthcare, including dentistry.
That's, of course, British people are famous for their lovely teeth.
But... It was an incredible experience.
You know, I would almost suggest to people in socialist healthcare countries, you know, go run into a wall and then fly to Oklahoma.
Just once in your life, you need to experience free market medicine.
I mean, let me give you a quick example of what it's like to be trying to get healthcare in Canada.
Okay, so I'm on a conveyor belt, see?
And the doctor has about 18 seconds.
They're like, hey doc, I've already got this problem.
I wonder if you can... They're just going through the whole time.
They're just shooting you out like a cannon.
Yeah, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. So keeping people's attention, you know, your team sat down with me.
We went through everything that was going to happen.
I actually – the shunt was – the doctor came to me.
Like this is amazing. You know, this is like literally expecting a doctor to come to you is like expecting to climb Mount Everest by having the mountain rise up underneath you.
The doctor to come to you. And help you.
I took out the chance after the surgery and so on.
It was an unbelievable experience and it was really nice, of course.
I mean, the relationships were great. It was fantastic to feel like I wasn't begging, you know, because in the healthcare system, you're like, well, I can't upset anyone because then they can just shove me to the back of the line or just not pick up the phone or whatever.
To have actually weight in an economic interaction is so refreshing.
When I think about the amount of taxes I've paid for the healthcare system, which I then had to flee, it is a really shocking experience and incredibly powerful.
When my ideology matches life circumstances so powerfully, it is an amazing thing.
Do you talk to other doctors, like the ones who are currently in I guess more government-focused or government-centric or Medicaid or Medicare-focused practices, do they seem to have the same kind of relationship with patients that you have?
Because it seems that would kind of decay away to a quasi-Canadian experience.
Yeah, unless a physician rejects almost all of the mainstream thinking in healthcare, even here in the United States, they're not going to be able to operate or practice the way that we do.
The way that we're set up is very simple.
Our livelihood depends on success stories like the one you just told.
If patients are not satisfied with us, then they move on and we all are broke.
So there is total accountability and we've embraced that because we know that competition makes us all better and it tends to drive prices lower and create even more efficiencies and opportunities.
That's a very scary prospect for somebody who is involved in a cartel system basically where competitors are locked out.
But our ability to spend time with and directly relate to and communicate with patients and really judge their satisfaction from that interchange Is unparalleled and is a direct result, I believe, of rejecting many of the tenets of American healthcare.
And what we have in the United States is not a failure, really, of the free market.
It's an absence of the free market.
What you experienced is a very different brand where all the players involved all know that your satisfaction is key and that results are predictable.
Any other business that the Department of Motor Vehicles doesn't rely on your satisfaction.
That's really not one of their priorities.
That's not the top of their list.
They know you have no alternatives.
You're coming back.
We do not operate in that way at all.
There was a moment, I don't think I've ever told this to the listeners, but for those who don't know the history, very briefly, I had a lump developed on salivary gland.
And the doctors up here basically said, oh, it's nothing.
We'll remove it at some point and so on.
And they took a biopsy.
was fine.
But anyway, so the doctor I talked to said, well, you know, we'll open up your whole jaw line here to get at the salivary gland and remove it.
And of course, you guys did a great little thing down here where as I get an increasingly old guy turkey neck, it's going to be buried in there.
And so and then they said, oh, by the way, it'll be months until you can get this lump removed.
Although it's, you know, it's benign or whatever.
And it was, you know, getting fairly goiter ish, right?
So so I thought, okay, well, I'll go down and get this benign thing removed.
I do public speaking. I don't want people to say, what's grown out of your head that we need to know about?
And so what was interesting was as I was going to be wheeled into the operating theater, into the operating room, my cell phone rang.
And it was my doctor's office or the doctor's office in Canada.
And they said, oh, listen, something's opened up in two days.
Now, I could have, and you guys were fine.
You said, if you want to go back, you can go back.
So I had free surgery in Canada.
First of all, my first thought is, hmm, I wonder why his surgery opened up.
You know, that's usually maybe someone died who was under his care or whatever.
But even though I had the alternative to get right back on a plane and get free surgery in Canada, I got to tell you, no doubt in my mind.
Because basically, they were setting off a cherry bomb on the side of my head.
I'm going to pick up the remnants. And you guys went in, I don't know, with what kind of weird...
Bizarre spider leg surgery technique that you use.
But even when I had the choice of imminent surgery that was going to pay for or free surgery back in Canada, I just basically hung up and said, nope, taken care of.
Thank you very much. And I think that's a really powerful thing for people to understand that there's nothing more expensive than free, particularly when it comes to your health.
That's a story without a question, so I just wanted to mention that for her.
And I remember that very clearly.
If you remember, I was the one that wheeled you back to the operating room, and I remember when your phone rang, and I remember that very clearly.
We had a brief laugh about that before you drifted off to sleep.
So, you know, PJ O'Rourke, the The quasi-libertarian comedian said, if you think healthcare is expensive now, wait until it's free.
And I think that's a great way to sum up what happens when you ultimately just throw caution and accountability to the wind in healthcare.
Yeah, and I mean, I've been perfectly cancer-free since you guys operated.
I still go in for my blood work and so on, so I also wonder the degree to which the doctor in Canada might have actually got it all, and of course, you guys did, which was literally a life-or-death decision.
Oh, well, it cost me a little bit of money.
Yeah, well, you know, it still cost me less than a funeral, and that's pretty significant.
Now, I just wanted to mention one or two other things.
I ask you a question about sort of what people can do.
One of the things that, as a free market guy, you sort of, oh, these prices are outrageous, right?
A lot of people have to pay for these, as you say, $100 ashpots and so on.
So most people would say, okay, well, what we should do is we should just, let's go up and open a hospital and start providing this stuff for free.
Now, what are the kind of regulatory hurdles?
I remember reading something about a certificate of need or something like, what are the hurdles that are stopping people from just going in and undercutting these outrageous prices?
Well, in the United States, there are several states that have these certificate of need laws.
And what it basically says is if I want to go start a hospital, I have to go before a board and demonstrate that the community actually needs this hospital that I am willing and able to fund on my own.
And the members of the board Invariably are the big hospital administrators for the existing players in the marketplace with whom this new hospital would compete.
So there's just no passing the certificate of need barriers.
Those laws are coming under more scrutiny and review in the United States because it's just so obviously unveiled in any competitive.
And I think that Those laws will actually begin to break down and we're starting to see that.
The other barriers, one is in the Unavailable Care Act where the government basically said there can be no government payments to any hospitals that are owned by doctors.
So that prohibited the construction of hospitals that have any portion of physician ownership attached to those facilities.
Surgery Center of Oklahoma were completely owned by the doctors who operate and work here.
So that was a gift from Washington to the American Hospital Association to gain their support of the Unavailable Care Act.
So what's happening now, though, There are physicians who are building hospitals and they're saying, well, we just won't take any government patients and we won't take any government money.
But that obviously provides an access issue for a lot of people.
There are lots of regulatory barriers.
The certificate of need laws and the anti-competitive stance against physician-owned facilities are obviously two.
One of the other things that's happening is the giant hospitals, they've been on a buying spree of primary care doctors' practices.
One of their favorite things to do is to walk into a small town and buy all of the practices there, and that starves off all referrals to the local hospital, which they can then pick up very cheaply.
That local hospital then just serves as the entry point to the conveyor belt to the mothership.
And that's been a strategy by these big so-called not-for-profit hospitals that charge so much money.
And they have enough money to go out and really engage in these hostile takeovers.
So if you are wanting to start a hospital in an area, you know, you're going to have to have some source of referrals.
You're going to have to have physicians who are willing to come there or send their patients there.
But you're constantly looking over your shoulder, waiting for the Leviathan Hospital, you know, to come in and basically buy any and everyone that you're associated with.
And it just completely shuts off the water supply and patient supply to a facility.
So cronyism is alive and well in healthcare.
The other thing I caution people, it's really easy to take your eye off the ball and blame these cronies, blame these big insurance companies and these big hospitals.
But all they've done, after all, is purchase these favors and purchase these advantages from the real goons in the equation.
People really should not take their eye off the ball, but it's the state, it's the government in D.C., That has auctioned off all of these favors.
And that's really where we need to focus.
Because whenever something's wrong, the average guy says, well, we need to appeal to government to solve this when government caused it in the first place.
And invariably, they use our own welfare as their alibi for completely taking over our lives.
So I've been harping on that recently, that as greedy as some folks are, and by greed I mean actually taking what is not their due by actively entering into exchanges that are not mutually beneficial and being perfectly okay and by greed I mean actually taking what is not their due The real culprit is the state and it's the government.
So when people are at their dinner potties or wherever they're hanging out with their friends and this sort of topic comes up of...
You know, we need to have socialized healthcare.
It's so expensive and so on.
If you could sort of give the elevator pitch that people can replay in their brains, what is it that you would like people to say to those who are feeling cornered into, you know, the Democrats obviously have wanted socialized healthcare for 50 or 60 years.
Well, of course, the source of every problem in healthcare in the United States is the government.
Anything you want to discuss, whether it's high price, whether it is lack of access, any part of that, rural healthcare issues and access, every bit of that is by design.
It's come from Washington, D.C. So the idea that we want to actually throw the solution to this problem to the very people who caused it seems illogical to me.
That's a response many times I give people.
The other way to think about this is I'm not a utilitarian at all.
The idea that we need to do this because it works better oftentimes ignores what I would consider the moral flavor of taking from one person their property and giving it to another.
I oftentimes will use this scene where you tell a family, cancel your vacation, because this fellow across You don't even know is sick.
And he needs all that money you were going to go spend on yourself and your kids at Disney World.
So, you know, cancel your vacation.
Somebody you don't even know is sick really kind of, I think, helps people understand.
And there really is a difference between charity and theft.
And we're called, I think, to be charitable toward our fellow man.
And people typically are.
Whenever somebody asks me that question, yes, but what about the poor?
And I ask them, what poor person, what poor individual do you have in mind?
Is there someone you would like to help?
Because I know what my intentions are toward the poor.
Why don't you tell me yours?
But there is this very easy trap where the folks on the big socialized medicine fan side, they want to consider the poor in the aggregate.
And if we're going to consider the poor in an aggregate, then we ultimately wind up talking about a system.
If we're talking about the poor in the aggregate, then we also need to talk about the virtues and the benefits of the free market in the advocate.
That's the only apples to apples comparison.
And when I think about the money that we have saved people here at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma and the extent to which that could have been used to ameliorate the needs of the poor, that's an aggregate-to-aggregate conversation.
But typically, when somebody says, what about the poor, I'll ask them, what person do you have in mind that we can help?
And they typically go running off because they have no intention of getting their checkbook out.
I think it was Rothbard said there's nothing easier than conspicuously spending other people's money on your favorite project.
So that is the way, that's the nature of the conversation I typically have with someone.
We can talk about it doesn't work.
How about the fact that Canadians are coming to Oklahoma City?
I mean, what else do you need to say?
Seriously. So that's the utilitarian side, but I reject it, I think, on a premise that's far upstream of that, and that's that it's simply wrong to consider that you have the right and control to somebody else's property, and that's what it boils down to for me.
Right. Yeah, no, I literally will get people on my show calling in and demanding how the poor would be educated in a free society and to which my reply is, well, I'm handing out 7 million free lessons a month.
What are you doing? Unless you're actually operating on a poor person for free while asking that question, I don't really – because it's just a way of clogging up the works and stopping anybody who wants to do anything really good with this imaginary sympathy for an imaginary group that these people aren't actually getting off their butts to help.
Yeah. So, I really want to make sure people get your vital statistics at the website.
And also remember, even if you can't make it to Oklahoma, you can, as you mentioned, take the Oklahoma price list.
It would be one of the few places that actually do put your prices on the web.
And you can shake it in people's face and say, you know, like you're going to buy a computer and you say, there's a cheaper computer across the street.
So, let's get your information, your hours of operation, how long you've been around the website and so on.
Make sure people can find you To get to you or to at least use your stuff as marketing leverage.
Well, our website is surgerycenterok.com and we've been open 19 years this coming May.
We opened in 1997 and your listeners might appreciate we have never taken a dime of government money and never will.
We're located in Oklahoma City and one of my One of my favorite statistics I just got this morning, and it's not really a statistic, it's a story.
I had a surgeon come into my office and say he set a new record from the time the patient called to the time they were actually on our surgery schedule was 30 minutes.
So it is a very efficient, very fast, it's directly.
And the other thing I'd like to mention, Stefan, is There is an organization that I've started called the Free Market Medical Association.
And the reason I started it is there are so many facilities and physicians in the United States that have desire to copy what we're doing.
So if people will go to marketmedicine.org, there's a picture of a United States map, and there are dots all over it where there are We're good to go.
That's something else I would like to mention.
We don't want to franchise.
We're not trying to get rich.
We want everybody to copy us.
So there is a real change.
And the free market can dominate healthcare like it does the few industries that are left that have embraced it.
That's something worth checking out is that free market medical association website.
Yeah, we'll put links to all that below to make sure that people can find it and I really strongly urge people have conversations about freedom within healthcare proactively because generally the way that the system works is that people are healthy so they don't really care about it that much and then when you get sick you're too busy dealing with being sick To activate for change and then when you're done, you're so relieved to have it in the rear view that you just want to get on with your life.
There's never a sweet spot where you're really motivated and effective in working for greater freedom in healthcare.
I think you have to kind of grit your teeth, confront people, talk about these difficult issues because waiting until circumstances kind of dictate the need for you is almost always waiting too late.
It's like criminal reform.
If you're not Arrested, you don't care.
And if you are arrested, you're too busy fighting the system.
And afterwards, you're too relieved to have it in the rear view to circle back and do it.
So I really strongly urge people to really have these conversations with people about healthcare because it is such an essential issue.
I lived my whole life.
I'd never been in hospital, never broken a bone, perfect health my whole life.
Then, boom, out of nowhere, Satan touches my neck and off I go on this wild adventure.
Now that it's in the rear view, of course, my urge is to just never go back there again.
It is really essential that we talk about these things because more so than just about any other issue other than direct incarceration, it is a life and death issue for millions of people in America and around the world.
I wanted to give you guys one last compliment, other than thanks for not feeding Canadian worms with my body, but when I came back, my doctor was like, wow, where did you get that done?
I told the story and she was like, holy That's great.
How did they do that?
Oh my gosh, how funny.
So yes, if you have a problem, if you stub your toe, if you have something in your eye, call the Oklahoma Surgery Center.
These are the guys to talk to and I can't thank you enough.
My family thanks you enough.
My listeners, thank you a lot for the fantastic work.
I mean, you know, we paid. It was an economic relationship.
But I just wanted to continually express my appreciation to you, what you've done, the stand you've taken, your staff, your facilities, everything that happened there was fantastic.
And the outcome has been, you know, cancer-free for years, no signs of any problems.
And I just, from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for all of the fantastic stuff you've done for me and for the world as a whole.
Well, it's... It is certainly our pleasure and honor to have participated in your care, and I'm thrilled that you've done so well.
All right. Thanks, Emil, and we'll talk again.
Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.
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