Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / Why Is Healthcare Still A Trainwreck? Can It Be Fixed?

Transcript

Why Is Healthcare Still A Trainwreck? Can It Be Fixed? · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:08
  Well, good morning, Frands. It's a wet day and again a lot
• 0:13
  of localized flooding in much of the broadcast areas would be safe as you're driving.
• 0:17
  Remember if you are in and around Leon County, your schools are gladed
• 0:21
  by one hour across the board, high school, elementary, and middle school
• 0:25
  all starting one hour later. Welcome to Thursday of the Morning Show with Preston
• 0:29
  Scott. That is Grant. I'm Preston. Great to be with you April
• 0:34
  eleventh. Appreciate you sharing time with us. We try to make the most
• 0:38
  of it. And we have a guest here from the Americans for Prosperity Organization
• 0:43
  and I've had guests with AFP for a while and Dean Clancy is the senior
• 0:51
  Health Policy Fellow at AFP. Dean, welcome to the show. How are
• 0:54
  you. Oh, it's great to be here. Thank you. Let's talk
• 0:58
  a little bit. You're expertise piece is healthcare, and you know, in
• 1:03
  fairness and it's really tough for me to be fair to the Biden administration because
• 1:07
  the resident has been a disaster, but he he's inherited a mass that his
• 1:14
  predecessors inherited, and his predecessors have inherited. But let's first start talking about
• 1:19
  Bidenomics. How is how's Joe made things worse? Well, you know,
• 1:26
  he's got an incredible record. Prices have soared, it's harder to get groceries
• 1:32
  and gasoline. The job market continues to be iffy. A lot of people
• 1:38
  have just stopped looking for jobs. There's been some improvements, but not nearly
• 1:44
  what he boasts about. And when it comes to healthcare, well, health
• 1:49
  insurance premiums are at an all time high. It's getting harder to find a
• 1:53
  doctor and a hospital that's in your health insurance plans network. That's directly a
• 1:59
  result of the so called Affordable Care Act that he called a big deal fourteen
• 2:05
  years ago. And of course he has no accomplishments to run on to speak
• 2:08
  of on things like immigration, foreign policy, energy and so on. So
• 2:14
  other than that, he has a fantastic record. Bidenomics is working. Healthcare
• 2:20
  though, as we said, is our focus. And what specifically has he
• 2:27
  done that has been responsible for the continuing spiral of the healthcare cost problems in
• 2:32
  this country, Well, he's doubled down on an approach that predates biden which
• 2:40
  where the government basically misregulates and over subsidizes and missubsidizes healthcare so that prices just
• 2:50
  always keep rising and almost always faster than inflation. And of course he supported
• 2:55
  the Affordable Care Act. When he came into office, he doubled down by
• 2:59
  making those subsidies much more lavish. He's also imposed price controls on prescription drugs
• 3:06
  in Medicare, which is very popular, but it's leading to drug shortages and
• 3:09
  will stifle new cures. Economists across the political spectrum agree about that. And
• 3:16
  the other day he had an event with Senator Bernie Sanders where he tried to
• 3:21
  tout all of this as a great accomplishment. But at Americans for Prosperity,
• 3:25
  we do a lot of polling. We talk to people on their front door,
• 3:30
  and what we found is that the high cost of healthcare is now the
• 3:34
  number three issue on their list, exceeded only by inflation and jobs. That's
• 3:39
  where we are with Bidenomics and Biden's healthcare record. I'm surprised that immigration is
• 3:47
  not on top of that, But let's set that aside for a second.
• 3:52
  Dean, how do we reset things? You know, I mean, it's
• 3:58
  easy for us, and it's quite honestly, it's low hanging fruit to dump
• 4:02
  this on Biden. He deserves blame for his portion of this. But the
• 4:08
  problems with healthcare in this country predate Joe, They predate Obama, They predate
• 4:12
  a lot of things. Where policy analysts have experts found where healthcare got off
• 4:19
  the rails, Yes, yes they have. And by the way, on
• 4:25
  immigration, you're right it is number four. Both healthcare and immigration are in
• 4:29
  the top five consistently throughout this presidency as a concern of voters. Where did
• 4:34
  we get off the rails? Well, it actually goes all the way back
• 4:38
  to World War Two, when the federal government, under pressure from labor unions
• 4:44
  during wage and price controls, decided to just not tax employer provided health benefits
• 4:50
  even though they are a form of compensation they technically should be taxed as income.
• 4:56
  When they did that, it drove a movement to everybody g group health
• 5:00
  insurance instead of just purchasing you know, individual health insurance, you know,
• 5:05
  directly from an insurance company. And what that did was set off an inflation
• 5:11
  because people relied a little too much on insurance, and so they've become disconnected
• 5:15
  from the price. They don't ask how much will this cost? In nineteen
• 5:19
  sixty, about half of our expenses were paid for out of pocket in medical
• 5:25
  care. The Morning Show with Preston Scott on News Radio one hundred point sevenfla
• 5:39
  shared earlier in the program of a friend of mine who was being asked to
• 5:45
  pay thirty three thousand dollars a month for a five month course of a medicine
• 5:53
  to treaty condition. And I don't know where you come up with one hundred
• 5:57
  and sixty five thousand dollars to pay for a Pfizer drug like that, Dean
• 6:01
  Clancy with us from Americans for Prosperity. Dean. That's one example, and
• 6:06
  there's countless others just like it. I don't even know where to begin.
• 6:12
  Sure, some prescription drugs are very expensive. Part of that is because they're
• 6:18
  new, they're breakthroughs, and there's a patent a monopoly granted by the government,
• 6:24
  and that helps the drug maker of the inventor recoup their costs of research
• 6:30
  and development. But those drug companies do play games to try to prolong those
• 6:34
  monopolies, and the government has distorted things so badly that the prices can be
• 6:41
  ridiculous. The good news is most prescription drugs in America are actually rather affordable.
• 6:46
  It's largely a success story. But people who do see those outlier drugs
• 6:51
  that cost so much. That causes a political problem and the result has been
• 6:58
  caused by politicians for price controls. At AFP, we think that's a mistake.
• 7:01
  We should try to have more competition to drive down drug prices, not
• 7:05
  more government. See I would see in this one case, I would say,
• 7:11
  you know, shame on the doctor. I mean, you know,
• 7:15
  a person can't afford that, and so why even put that out there.
• 7:19
  If the person cannot afford that type of medication, go with another treatment,
• 7:24
  go with a different set of protocols. Well, sure, if there is
• 7:28
  an alternative. It may be that there is none. And of course this
• 7:31
  is precisely why people have health insurance, is to deal with large unexpected expenses
• 7:39
  like the one we're talking about, and people need that. But unfortunately the
• 7:43
  government has basically driven up the cost of insurance for everybody, and it doesn't
• 7:47
  need to be that way. It would be much better if you know,
• 7:51
  we don't need to take away subsidies for health insurance. And by the way,
• 7:55
  almost all Americans receive some kind of subsidy. It could be directly through
• 7:59
  a government program or indirect through the tax code. But we all get some
• 8:01
  money. Why not let people take that money directly as cash basically that they
• 8:07
  can use for the health insurance they want, the amount of coverage they want,
• 8:11
  and then what they don't spend on insurance, let them save that in
• 8:15
  a tax advantaged health savings account which they can use for their copays, deductibles,
• 8:20
  prescription drugs, doctor's appointments, you name it. This is very easily
• 8:24
  doable, and if we did it, I think you would see costs coming
• 8:28
  down because we would have more you know, more people shopping for value,
• 8:31
  demanding price transparency, more competition, you know, what makes markets work in
• 8:37
  every other part of the economy besides healthcare. You know, one of the
• 8:41
  things that strikes me as we're discussing about this, Dean, is that you're
• 8:46
  starting to then untangle the web, and you start to see how broad the
• 8:50
  web is. For example, this really involves tax code. You know when
• 8:54
  you said earlier that the benefit should be taxed, well, certainly not under
• 8:58
  the tax code we have right now. And so you then have to address
• 9:03
  tax code. And we even we haven't even gotten to tort reform and the
• 9:07
  need to go there to address this, and so I just wonder what the
• 9:11
  practical ramifications are of fixing this and whether it can be fixed. Bear with
• 9:18
  me, we're gonna take one more break. Here with me is Dean Clancy.
• 9:20
  These are the Americans for Prosperities, the senior health policy fellow there.
• 9:24
  We're talking about healthcare in America. Bid Noomics, of course, has been
• 9:28
  a disaster across the board. It's only exasperated the problem or exacerbated the problem
• 9:37
  with health care costs. But it predated Joe, it predated Barack Obama and
• 9:43
  the foolishness of the Obamacare that the Supreme Court unbelievably codified. You know,
• 9:52
  this is a massive problem, and unpacking it is going to be very difficult.
• 9:56
  We'll get to a little bit more with Dean next. Apologies if I
• 10:07
  sound scattered. I think it's the nature of climbing the mountain, the mountain
• 10:13
  of the healthcare challenges that this country faces. You know, I talked earlier
• 10:16
  about the fact that and Dean Clancy with us from Americans for Prosperity. Dean,
• 10:22
  I just mentioned the misnomer of the word insurance in and of itself,
• 10:26
  that If you force insurance companies to cover people with pre existing conditions, that's
• 10:31
  no longer insurance. If we want to do it, that's fine, but
• 10:35
  let's call it something else, because insurance is about managing risk, and so
• 10:39
  to a certain extent, we have some semantic problems to add on top of
• 10:43
  everything else. No, you're right, we call it insurance, but it's
• 10:46
  really prepaid health benefits, and it's not insurance. True insurance, you're right,
• 10:52
  is based on risk. And when you do it that way, healthy
• 10:54
  people have an incentive to sign up early and to stay enrolled in the insurance.
• 10:58
  Risk, which is good for everybody, brings prices down. We've messed
• 11:03
  that up with government policies that basically turn insurance into a political benefit. That
• 11:09
  you know, it's all about mandates and price controls, and it is a
• 11:13
  mess in your mind. Give us the three things that you think need to
• 11:18
  be done in order in order for us to get a movement of this going
• 11:26
  in the right direction. With regard to healthcare, well, the one big
• 11:31
  thing we need to do is what we at AFP call a personal option.
• 11:35
  That's a personal option means reforming healthcare to put you, the patient in charge.
• 11:39
  And the three big components of that are first, fund patients, not
• 11:46
  insurance companies. We've got billions going to insurance companies through Obamacare, Medicaid and
• 11:52
  other programs. Let's let individuals take that money and take control and spend it
• 11:56
  themselves on the insurance they want. The second plank is let everyone have a
• 12:03
  tax free health savings account, so they can spend what they don't you know,
• 12:07
  those subsidies, whatever they don't spend on insurance, they can put it
• 12:09
  in the account, and they can buy the medical services and see the doctors
• 12:13
  for example, that their insurance doesn't cover, you know, with them in
• 12:18
  control. So hsays for all. And then the third thing is let everybody
• 12:22
  have the option of paying for healthcare directly, you know, instead of going
• 12:28
  through insurance. Just pay your doctors directly, maybe on a monthly subscription basis.
• 12:33
  This is a movement right now. They call it direct primary care.
• 12:37
  You pay a fixed fee every month, no extra fees, and your doctor
• 12:41
  is available to you essentially around the clock. It's great. Patients love it
• 12:46
  and doctors love it because they're practicing medicine instead of working for insurance companies.
• 12:50
  So those are the three planks. Of the personal option obviously part of that
• 12:56
  with at least two of them. Best as I can tell, would be
• 13:00
  the requirement for us to know what certain procedures a menu of prices for services
• 13:09
  right well, and you would get that, You would get price transparency,
• 13:13
  would you would see shoppable services up front? Right now? Healthcare is like
• 13:18
  a grocery store where there's no prices on the shelves and some of the aisles
• 13:22
  you're not allowed to do unless you get permission from your health insurance company,
• 13:26
  and you might find your grocery store is not even in your health insurance network.
• 13:31
  You know, it's crazy. Whereas with the personal option, it'll be
• 13:35
  like today's grocery stores. You'll see the prices and the products upfront, and
• 13:39
  you'll decide what you get and how much you get. And it'll work because
• 13:45
  markets work, even in healthcare. Dean in closing, what are the biggest
• 13:50
  impediments to this? Are they in government or are they in the healthcare provider
• 13:56
  the insurance provider sector. The biggest opposition is all the special interests that are
• 14:03
  making a mint off the status quo. That's health insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers,
• 14:09
  you know, doctors, hospitals. They're all kind of we're all victims
• 14:13
  of a system that has become very hard to reform. But the hope is
• 14:20
  that if enough voters can let politicians know that they're demanding change. I do
• 14:24
  think you can get change. It will be incremental, but move in the
• 14:28
  right direction. The other big problem is healthcare politics is highly polarized, with
• 14:33
  Democrats favoring government solutions Republicans favoring market solutions, but it's been hard for them
• 14:41
  to find centrist incremental solutions. We think the personal option is exactly that it
• 14:46
  shouldn't be controversial, and we've been working to line up support in Congress.
• 14:50
  We've actually got several hundred members of Congress now who have put their name on
• 14:56
  one or more of these personal option reforms that I'm talking about. And if
• 15:00
  we can just get the right person in the White House and the right people
• 15:03
  controlling Congress, I think we have a chance to move forward and make health
• 15:07
  care better. Dean, thanks for the time today. I appreciate you bringing
• 15:11
  some clarity to what is an absolutely muddy situation. Thank you for your time.
• 15:18
  Oh it was my pleasure. Thank you. Dean Clancy with US Americans
• 15:22
  for prosperity my guest. He is the Senior Health Policy Fellow with AFP.
• 15:28
  Interesting set of potential solutions. There something to think about. Twenty seven past the hour