921 - Health Scare feat. Tim Faust (3/31/25)

All I wanna be is El Jumo.

All I wanna be is El Jumbo.

Bring me bones and presses.

All I wanna

By the way, Felix, speaking of people who have been vindicated, I've really been enjoying the Cartman posts that you've been retweeting.

Yeah, holy shit.

People are...

Every time I think that we've reached our

lowest level of Republicat intelligence, we go lower.

There are like viral posts of people being like, Cartman was right.

I just want to make clear to our audience here.

Though Cartman may hold up a twisted mirror to the values of society, he's not your role model, okay?

He's not the hero of the show.

Well, I mean, like, are we going to condemn Johnny Cash for killing a man in Reno?

I mean, come on, no.

He's also not a villain.

You know what I mean?

I think there's a little bit of Cartman in all of us.

And, you know, sometimes he speaks truths that are uncomfortable.

And I think we just need to hold space for Cartman and for everyone in South Park.

Most people didn't see this because it was on a podcast in Spain, but Anna D'Armis talked about how when she first came to Hollywood when she was like 19, Eric Cartman helped her out a lot.

And she expected him to like take advantage of her because that's what she was used to and like older, more established actors.

And he was like, come on, honey, I'm like twice her age.

Like, and he would never talk about it.

He goes to hospitals.

He doesn't let people take pictures unless it's the families.

That's just the kind of guy he is.

No, he's been getting a lot of, he's been being unfairly demonized for quite some time here.

But, you know, like I said, please consider, please consider Cartman.

You know, he may not be a hero, but he's not a villain either.

Okay.

Let's not demonize him.

Remember the airport protests during the Trump Muslim ban during Trump one?

Do you know who texted me to come to LaGuardia that night?

Mr.

Eric Cartman.

I mean,

I know it wasn't Kyle.

Yeah, no, yeah.

Kyle has really been making a disgrace out of himself if you've been seeing his Instagram stories.

Okay, we should probably start the show.

It's Monday, March 31st, and we've got some choppa coming at you.

Joining us for today's program is our old pal Tim Faust, who's here to talk to us about Medicaid and sort of the horizons of American healthcare.

Tim, welcome back to the show.

Hi, everybody.

It's been like six or seven years, and I'm glad to be back in the trap.

Yeah, back in the trap.

No, I want to get into some of the sort of the whistle-stop tour of Wisconsin you're doing right now, but I wanted to start the show with some like health-related news, and that is soda.

Soda news.

I have two stories here about soda and how it's leading to sort of perhaps a rift in the second Trump administration.

Real quick, the first one is from the New York Times headline, states can bar food benefit recipients from buying soda, Kennedy says.

Health Secretary Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

announced on Friday that the Trump administration would begin allowing states to bar recipients of federal food assistance from using money to pay for soda, a core component of his Make America Healthy Again agenda.

Whether Mr.

Kennedy has the legal authority to enact such a change, however, is unclear.

Mr.

Kennedy does not have authority over SNAP, commonly known as food stamps, which falls under the Agriculture Department.

Governors would have to ask for a waiver for the requirements of the program, which are set forth under federal law.

I mean, you know,

any long-time or even casual listeners of this show

will know where we stand on this issue.

We are a pro-soda podcast.

And I think.

A fucking heroin addict who eats bugs is going to tell you that like soda is too bad for you.

Why don't you fuck off, Bal?

Well,

here's the interesting thing, though, because the next article is from the Daily Beast.

MAGA influencers caught red-handed shilling for big soda.

Well, I mean, I think that they were probably just sharing relevant public health information.

I don't know if that's shilling or not, to say soda is good and delicious to drink.

Yeah, I mean, like, are you shilling for toothbrushes if you say that you should do that twice a day?

Even though they take more lives than they save?

A string of MAGA influencers appear to have been caught taking money from big soda to undermine the government's attempts to ban people from buying soda with food stamps.

Last week, a host of influential pro-Trump personalities, such as Ian Miles Chong, comedian Chad Pranther, and MAGA meme account Clown World, raised eyebrows on X when they all appeared to abruptly change their views on Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.'s push to pass legislation which would ban food stamp recipients from spending their money on soft drinks and junk food.

A new war on soda has begun, targeting purchases made through Snap.

I don't believe it's the government's role to decide what people should or shouldn't eat, Miles Chong wrote on March 20th.

Promoting better health for Americans is a reasonable idea, but not when it involves curbing Diet Coke purchases.

This is a real rogues gallery.

So Clown World,

for for people who have been following Brace's incredible run on Twitter, they will know that Clown World is a man in his mid-40s who just announced to

his adoring audience of people who love watching videos of

a gay nine-year-old being hit by a car and then commenting like, this is the Darwin Awards under it.

He's a mid-40s man who's like, I'm enough with the hangovers.

I'm quitting drinking.

So you can imagine a very depressing conversation between this sort of mid-40s wasteoid, who, by the way, I agree with everything he posts.

I think all, like, that's all clown world stuff.

Whenever there's like a, you know, a single mom fail where she like dies in a house fire and it's her fault.

You know, I'm posting a clown emoji.

But he was probably doing this to distract from his horrible alcoholic deeds.

So I unfollowed him.

But

you can imagine the horrifying conversation, the horrifyingly depressing conversation between this middle-aged waste oit and like his slightly older version of himself, Luther sponsor, where he's like, Everything's been turning up great ever since I put down the bottle.

I got a sponsorship from Mondez International or PepsiCo, $30

for every 10 billion impressions on my soda tweet.

And then Ing Miles Chong, who, like,

I mean, what sodas are even available to him?

Well, they've got a second.

Do they sell?

I mean,

yeah,

I would imagine there's like a durian fruit soda that you can throw at attackers because of the infamous spell of the durian.

It will tick poison damage on them.

Perhaps Ian drinks an exotic soda made from the scales of a Komodo dragon or a monitor lizard.

I don't know.

But I don't say he's not drinking normal Baja Blast.

This is one of the few areas where I am in complete agreement with the far right on this one.

I think the last ember of the American century that we're living in is that they're doing really amazing things with diet soda these days, right?

I wake up, I have to fucking look at Elon Musk.

I live in Wisconsin.

He put $20 million into one of our state elections.

I can't escape having to think about the dumbest shit happening at all times, the worst people having a great time, but I can get a Shirley Temple Diet 7 up whenever I want.

This is so fucking good, Tim.

I've been ordering that online.

And like, here's a little treat for you.

If you're working out that day and you need a little, like, some sugar for your recovery, which I think is good, buy grenadine and pump like a pump or two, pump and a half into it when you're, when, you know, days you do cardio or whatever.

Are you a fan of the monster rehab lemonade, Tim?

I certainly am.

Yes, my wife got me on it.

That is, oh my God.

It tastes better than real.

It's healthy.

It's his rehab on it.

What's healthier than rehabilitation?

It's basically medicine.

It's plant medicine.

Yeah.

If you're trying to put all the poor people in the mines,

you know, because with the tariffs now, we're going to be rebuilding American industry.

You want all these six-year-olds who will, they'll have to earn their own lunch at the missile factory.

Why wouldn't you want them drinking monster rehab?

I would like to go into whatever hospital they they give birth to orphans in, where they give birth and neither parent is there.

They're just materialized.

I would like to go in there and just put a little can of monster rehab in a baby's hand so they grow up to be strong and work.

Put a little droplet of monster rehab on their tongue as they're sleeping in the NICU, and that gets them out faster.

That's just good health policy.

That's how you save money by making the babies stronger through the power of plant medicine.

Well, I mean, Robert F.

Kennedy is, you know,

trying to make our cures illegal.

I mean, he says he wants to make America healthy again, but he is preventing people from accessing one of the most powerful natural medicines that exist, which is a delicious carbonated beverage.

I mean, that will just instantly improve your day.

Sometimes just one sip of a soda is all it takes to just lighten my mood.

And so

it's not an accident that they're taking this away from people.

Is it in a coincidence for Mr.

Robert Kennedy, the only doctors that don't don't lie are dentists for some reason.

The worst doctors?

It says the Clown World account, which posts right-wing memes and talking points to over 3 million followers, soon posted its own pro-soda message with nearly identical talking points.

The government wants to block soda purchases for Americans on Snap, they wrote.

Remember when NYC tried this and it completely backfired?

Conservative commentator Eric Daughtry also posted a message with Klopp copied Clown World's rhetoric almost word for word.

Furthermore, nearly every account involved in the tweeting spree invoked Donald Trump and his infamous Diet Coke button as a manipulation tactic, posting pictures of said button at the Oval Office and images of the president drinking Coke on a golf course.

It says, Things came to a head on March 22nd when conservative journalist Nick Sorter posted an expose of the offending posts side by side on X, alongside claims that they had been paid to adopt a pro-soda stance by social media PR company named Influenceable.

That's a great name for it.

I mean, I like that they all saw these posts popping up and

I did have the instinct that they were being paid off because the soda and junk food industry in general loves that.

And it's a real sign of the times because the last big scandal about this, it was a body positivity influencer.

You know, one of those people,

there's a real, a real infographic stratification problem where the top 1% of Instagram influencers are producing 99% of infographics that get shared by Julia Fox on her stories.

One of those ladies, she was getting paid by Mondez, which is one of the big junk food conglomerates, to say that concepts like food deserts and junk food were classist and racist in origin.

But now it's actually like it's the opposite.

It's based to be into soda and junk food.

So you got all your bases covered.

I like that they all, like, you can tell that like the email said, you know, bring up the New York soda thing that Bloomberg did, talking about donald how donald trump loved soda and they just took that as in story they didn't try any of their own original thoughts like influencers are usually fucking stupid but these guys all of these guys are just known for posting videos of like police shootings and being like i like this so they've like they don't

like creative input at any point you know uh just one last thing i want to read here it says here following the expose a number of the accounts deleted their posts and issued statements after getting caught red-handed.

Daughtry deleted his post and said, that was dumb of me.

Massive egg on my face.

In all seriousness, it won't happen again.

Clown World, meanwhile, was more bullish, saying, I made a post and deleted it within the first hour.

I withdrew from the campaign entirely and removed my post.

I haven't received a single penning from Big Soda or anyone else for this.

So then why is he deleting it?

I would have thought you'd have the courage to like stand on business and supporting soda when it's under attack.

But no, these cowards are fleeing with the slightest amount of scrutiny or pressure they're abandoning their uh their sugar-based principles i will step in where he's fallen i mean i i'll say it right now on the podcast i talk to hundreds of wisconsin nights a week when traveling around the u.s i'm happy to convert the entire speech into pro-soda propaganda i have no problem

i will hit the road on the diet coke presents the festival of aspartame delight um road show right now i'll get in my car um and all i ask for is one of those diet coke buttons that's all i need

i just i love i love how he's like, I don't know why you're yelling at me.

I deleted it in shame and pretended it never happened after only an hour of being yelled at.

How long,

I mean,

can you, I know like sports betting and online gambling in general is so pervasive.

Can I bet on when this guy relapses if it hasn't happened already?

If that's all it takes?

I hope you're enjoying another cool carbonated beverage in no time.

And the clown memes will keep coming.

Tim,

I want to get to you to your bailiwubic, which is healthcare policy.

But like, I brought up RFK Jr., and you know,

he wants to make America healthy again by getting rid of soda.

And I'm just wondering, do you see like, surely it cannot be an accident that we're seeing like a huge resurgence of like medical quackery at a time when like healthcare or just any or even the Democratic Canard access to healthcare is getting more and more impossible?

Like,

is the way, what do you make of the Make America Healthy Again plan?

Look, public health faceplanted, I think not unintentionally in the years

since the lockdown, right?

There was offered no vision of what public health could be or should be.

It was reduced to absurd squabbles over whether you should individually mask

at whatever event or whatever, which, you know, masking is important, but there's a broader public health structure which needs to exist.

And the Democrats, when they were in power, totally abandoned it, right?

We never got like air ventilation requirements.

We never got OSHA mandates.

The Democrats totally walked out on any idea of there being any concept of public health.

And so, of course, a bunch of fucking dumbasses are going to fill the void with magnets and bullshit.

Like, they've always been there.

And, and, and naturally, as people get suspicious of the world around them when there's nobody providing a vision, a message, a structure in which health can exist, of course, they're going to turn to the dumbest shit on earth.

That's always what happens.

So, no, I'm not surprised.

And this is, uh, you know, I don't want to blame everything on the Democrats, but this is one I think it's pretty much an own goal.

Yeah, it's we've talked a lot about how, like, the generalized make make America healthy again and the whole like Kennedy raw milk, uh, seed oil, whatever the fuck thing has been popping up since about 2021.

How it's an unfortunate, it's unfortunate that it is such a consumer signifier movement and just pure quackery.

Because, you know, American food is a huge fucking problem, but they found a way to talk about that issue without

any talk of nationalization or upping standards of production or quality or anything.

But yeah, yeah, no,

even further, it is a response to the absence of healthcare as an issue in American politics.

When COVID was first starting,

I remember saying that this has the danger of being like what Sandy Hook was for the gun control people, right?

Where perhaps at the start, they think silver lining, maybe this will make people talk about this incredibly important issue.

But in reality, the fact that it it happened and did not spur on any type of permanent change of any type means that, well, you know, what fucking will?

And we're living in the consequence of it.

We had the chance.

Like, every all the pieces were there, and the Biden administration actively walked away from it to get back to business as usual.

And this is the consequence of that, right?

Like, people, I think, very reasonably are suspicious about, you know, big pharma, big healthcare companies, insurance, and that's all correct.

And in the total void of alternative offered, these guys pop up.

There was a bill in Wisconsin the other day, anti-trans legislation, and

one of the legislators speaking in favor of it talked about how big pharma makes billions of dollars off of hormones, which obviously is fake, but it feeds into that whole like big pharma conspiracy that we've been given no alternative to.

And so, of course, it's been and folded and spindled and mutilated into some really horrible anti-human policies.

And they seeded the ball.

Yeah.

And like, I think like, Tim, you make a good point.

Like, in the absence of any kind of infrastructure or even just public consciousness about public health and that like, you know, a measure of a society is like one of the things that I would, you know, gauge a civilization on is like, how easy is it for you to obtain medical care if you're in dire need of it or just see a doctor?

Like, you know, is it going to bankrupt you to get cancer?

Is it going to cost you 40 grand to have a kid in a hospital?

So like in the absence of that, where like people are victimized by the insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, even the medical establishment, I think like the Make America Healthy Again agenda is about like placing the onus on the individual and just being about like, it's about individual health and it's about individual consumer choices so that you can like stave off the horrible specter of cancer, which is something that affects all human beings.

And there's really not much you can do to prevent it.

But like

placing all the onus on individual responsibility and behavior about like, well, just cut these cooking oils out of your diet.

Only eat beef tallow, you know, like just like all of these like increasingly boutique diet regimens that are popping up in lieu of like a public health care program in this country.

Absolutely.

It's, it's, you know, alienation is a term gets thrown around a lot, but here it is again.

This is atomized.

This is alienated health policy by aggregate individualism.

And that's not how you do it.

We've got measles is back.

Like children are dying of measles again.

And it just, it's like, I think it was Roald Dahl,

when his daughter died of measles, wrote this very beautiful letter about how now we have this vaccine, so it won't happen to children like mine in the future.

Sorry, dog, like it's happening again.

We made it 30 years.

And then not only that, but RFK Jr.'s response to this is like, well, measles outbreaks happen every year.

No, they don't.

It's like quite concerning when it does happen.

And then, oh man, did you see that, like that one couple whose kids died, whose kid died of measles?

And they were like, well, the other four were okay.

It's not that big a deal.

yeah i just like i don't even know what to i i just we're we're we're we are now retreating not just from like a notion of like a public good or that like one of the things your taxes should pay for is so that everyone can see a doctor and not go bankrupted by a medical emergency we're we've gotten forget that idea we are fleeing now entirely from like the germ theory of disease is it the isn't like the big thing that these people say that like they're the only people that actually care about their families That's like their main thing.

That's the reason why we're doing any of this.

That's the reason why planes are falling out of the sky.

That's the reason everything is so fucked up and why you're, you know, we're coming to your school board meeting and screaming about how one of the kids in this book looks gay.

It's because we care about our families and you don't.

But also, like, if our kid dies from English sweating sickness or a form of mantavirus that has not existed since the time time of Richard the Lionhearted.

Well,

shit happens.

Well, yeah, I mean,

I think like it's catering to this idea that like only you can protect yourself.

And like if you find like if calamity finds you and you're unprotected, it's your own fault.

What do you want anyone else to do about it?

It's the great smoky the verification of American healthcare.

Only you can prevent disaster.

Well, only you can prevent cancer.

And like when I think about like cancer, because it's just like, it's one of the most common things people die of.

and like other than lung cancer and I remember being like when I was growing up like there was like the height of like public awareness about smoking and big tobacco and lung cancer is the only cancer that you can blame on the person who gets it and I think it's just like it gives people a monocome of control because they're like well smokers gave themselves cancer so it's their fault whereas basically every other form of cancer just happens and it's like largely due to circumstances whether it's in your dna or you're exposed to some environmental hazard and i think it like really scrambles because it's so frightening to think about, but like it's the complete lack of control you have over it that's so disturbing to people.

And I think we're all in the middle of an experiment to just kind of try to habituate people to this idea that like, yeah, people die.

It's fine.

There's nothing we can do about it.

That's why I like Medicaid so much, which I know we're going to talk about, right?

In disability activism, there's the phrase temporarily, temporarily able-bodied, which I like a lot because we are just all temporarily healthy.

We're all just temporarily able-bodied, you know?

I get in a car accident on the way to the bar, you know, in a couple hours, all of a sudden, bam, my life changes.

Or if you have a weird cough, or if you get hit by some sort of strange microwave or whatever, we're all this close.

We're all so much closer than we expect from being in some sort of like medical calamity, financial precariousness, homelessness.

Part of staying sane is blocking out that possibility at all times.

But it's programs like Medicaid that serve as the bulwark against that, right?

Medicaid is the only thing that might keep any of us from having our lives completely dismantled if we get into a car accident on the highway um and they're coming to hack away at it and uh it's it's it's we can we can talk about why but uh that's why i really like programs like medicaid because they are the one thing keeping us all like close but not exactly on the brink i mean to get into that like tim you've been you've been traveling around uh your your your home state of wisconsin and you've been like doing uh town halls i mean like honestly like you know you're you're filling the void that uh politicians should but you're you're you're talking to people about healthcare policy and you're talking to them about Medicaid.

And you reported to me that people are angry, confused, and they don't know what to do.

So, like, what is going on right now with Medicaid, like the new CR, the new budget?

Could you talk about like how that bill will cut Medicaid and what the effects of a Medicaid cut is likely to be on this country?

Sure.

Let me get you from the top.

So first off, the House passed a budget resolution which called for up to $2 trillion in government spending cuts to supplement a $4.5 trillion tax break, which, of course, all of which goes to the 1%.

And to do that, they got a hack away at a bunch of government programs, the largest of which they asked the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid, to cut its spending by $880 billion over the next 10 years.

And they didn't literally write down and say cut Medicaid.

However, it's literally impossible to hit that $880 billion target without taking a massive chunk of it out of Medicaid.

The Congressional Budget Office, which is all the nerds in D.C.

who do accounting, concluded that if you cut literally every other program other than CHIP and Medicaid to get to that goal, you'd need to have $600 billion still come out of Medicaid.

So these cuts, I mean, it comes out to 10% of Medicaid's 10-year budget.

Medicaid right now spends about $900 billion a year.

It's the second biggest government healthcare program.

Medicare is a little bit bigger.

And the Senate is passing its own budget resolution maybe this week.

And, you know, there's a lot of deliberation of what kind of cuts they're going to go for.

Some theories are that they're going to go for a much, much smaller number of cuts just to get something out there and then like hash it out in the process.

The thing is, like, part of the reason all the reps are getting screamed at in their poorly conceived town halls is because people are aware that, to some extent, that Medicaid threats, Medicaid cuts, farm cuts, like social security cuts are directly threatening their lives and threatening their ability to live.

And nobody wants to go on the record of saying, I'm voting to cut Medicaid.

So they're using this like totally snake language of, oh no, the budget doesn't say to cut Medicaid as a way to get out of having to cop up or admit to the things that they're going to be voting for.

So we'll see what the Senate passes in the next couple of days.

The parliamentarian might rear her head once again.

She's in the mix about how they like

whether current spending counts as spending or whatever.

We'll see if she gets the deference that she's deserved as the most powerful person in Washington.

But

that's the stage that's set.

They want to cut Medicaid by up to $880 billion over 10 years, $88 billion a year, or just like a 10% cut.

And that fucks up a lot of shit.

So Medicare, by contrast, Medicare is a health insurance program for seniors, people above age 65.

And it's run entirely out of Washington, D.C.

It's a completely federal program, federally administered.

And Medicaid is jointly administered by states and the federal government, right?

Absolutely, yep.

So Medicaid is a hybrid program where the federal government puts in some money in Wisconsin at 60%

and the state government puts in the remaining amount, 40%.

And that ratio is different from state to state.

I think overall, it's like 68 to 70% of Medicaid spending is federal money.

and the rest comes from the states.

And then the states administer that program.

Originally, you know, Medicaid was kind of slipped under the radar in the 60s.

Medicare got all the got all the attention, got all the hot air.

Medicaid kind of snuck in there as an extension of the Aid for Families with Dependent Children program, which is why it kind of has the structure and regulations and criteria of other benefit programs.

So states run their own Medicaid programs.

Medicaid programs can look fairly different from place to place.

It's like a big umbrella program with a lot of separate programs inside of it.

Often they have different names from place to place.

California, where I was on Medicaid, it's called Medi-Cal.

In New York, I think it's Empire State of Health, which is cute.

And

yeah, in Wisconsin, it's called Badger Care is our big one.

That's cute.

So people don't always know that they're on Medicaid, even when Medicaid is like one in five people use Medicaid.

It covers one-fifth of the population.

Half of the births in America are covered, 41% of the births in America are covered by Medicaid.

It is a insanely wide, everybody is one degree away from somebody who uses Medicaid, unless you're like a pervert.

But people don't always understand the breadth by which these things kind of bind us together.

Well,

I want to get drilled down onto what you said about how Medicaid is.

provisioned out like a benefits program, kind of similar to SNAP or food stamps, in that there's like a lot of criteria that you have to meet to qualify for it.

And it basically is like, how, are you poor enough to qualify for some basic level of public health care?

So like, Tim, in 2025 in America, like for like an individual, how low does your income have to be to qualify for Medicaid?

It depends on your family size and whether you have kids or whether you're disabled.

I think 138% of the federal poverty line is, sorry, please hold.

If you're a single person, you need to make less than $21,600 to qualify for Medicaid.

In most states, That expanded Medicaid under the ACA.

If you're a family of two with no kids, it goes up to $29,000.

So like Medicaid is one of those things that I have a very deep and very sincere love-hate relationship with.

Medicaid contains some of the worst parts of liberalism, right?

Like it's got this fixation with means testing.

It's really rooted in this idea of like there are some deserving poor and there's some undeserving poor.

So we got to shunt all these disabled and sick and poor people into this labyrinth of paperwork just so they can live like a normal, dignified life, which ultimately is a way to kind of wash your hands of their destruction over time.

But at the same time, it is like the, in my opinion, load-bearing pillar of the entire American social infrastructure, right?

Even through all the bullshit, Medicators predicated that on a belief that people deserve the freedom to live safely in their own bodies.

And it's the mode by which we help people around us lead lives with dignity and autonomy.

And this allocation of people and resources, I think, is fundamentally what makes society worth living in.

So, you know, Medicaid is that.

And Medicaid's also a ton of fucking Byzantine paperwork you got to fill out and sometimes update every month.

It's got so much good and so much bullshit at the same time.

Well, it's basically like it's an additional job to just maintain your Medicaid coverage.

Like with all the hoops they make you run through.

And I guess like the perversity of it to me is to say that like, well, obviously we as a society, we're not heartless.

You know, if you're destitute, you should be able to see a doctor.

But if you make $22,000 a year in income, that, yeah, you're on your own.

Or let's say you make 30 grand a year.

Yeah, it's time to pay for health care out of pocket.

We're not subsidizing you, loser.

But like, this creates this, I mean, like, like all sort of social welfare programs in this country, it creates this sense of competition and resentment among people who are like still poor, but not technically poor enough to meet the absolutely like bare bottom of like what being destitute and well and it's like it's like shameful if if you're at that level because then you're other other someone else is quote unquote paying for your health care and then on the opposite end you have medicare which is like the good uh government like public health care program that everyone loves but for some reason you have to be old to get it yes so like yeah and but like at the same time like no one no one gets mad at uh people senior citizens for uh using medicare right because they're like oh because they will they paid paid into it.

Well, I mean,

wouldn't like a better system be like we all just pay taxes and we have one healthcare plan that we can all use?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm, I, I'm extremely on record of saying that like a common sense and also much more equitable healthcare model is Medicare for all.

We all pay into it as we are doing now, and that money is allocated to take care of all of our healthcare needs for all people.

It's simpler, it's more efficient.

I mean, ultimately, you know, it can be used to save money if you care about that.

I think spending money in healthcare is totally fine.

um but that's like that's like a simple model that is replicate that's found across the world it's our very dumb and like patchwork system or non-system of healthcare that's been built over the past 70 years um that uh we have this insistence that only the the private sector can be can administer uh these healthcare programs to people.

And I mean, people like Medicare because often, you know, the Facebook comments section constituency are the ones benefiting from Medicare in the first place.

And so

it's hard to criticize the thing that keeps you alive when you've got emphysema or when you're sick.

But

something you were saying

does speak to me.

A lot of people are afraid.

Everybody knows somewhere deep inside of them that they're so close to the chopping block.

And

the pendulum could swing for any of us at any given moment.

We try really hard not to think about it, but that knowledge is there.

And so that fear gets kind of twisted around and pushed pushed outward when you see somebody, quote unquote, enjoying a benefit that you don't have yourself or whatever, right?

It's the opposite of fuck you got mine.

It's fuck you, I don't have mine.

And I think that's like the source of a lot of this political tension and political discord, which gets reflected onto like a tendency to oppose benefit programs or to oppose Medicaid.

But Medicaid, you know, is an insanely popular program.

I think it's 70% of Americans like favor have a favorable opinion of Medicaid, including two-thirds of conservatives.

It is a program that people like.

When Medicaid's on the ballot box, it outpulls Democrats considerably.

Well, I mean, and to that point, that's what they're trying so hard to pretend like they're not going to be cutting Medicaid, even though it is a program for supposedly poor people or

the takers in society, as Mitt Romney

qualify them as.

But yeah, like,

even when like, I remember like the Medicaid expansion, like, even like when red states like turned down federal funding for federal money for Medicaid.

But at the same time, like whether it's Medicaid or even like the Department of Education is a huge source of not just employment, but like money for these states that otherwise, like, so like it's this weird thing where like they know that like that it's something you can run against and like oh government waste and spending and you know social welfare programs, but like what would it look like?

if if Medicaid was cut by 800 billion dollars or whatever, whatever they're talking about.

We're kind of entering the bilimos universe where nothing is forbidden anymore.

So it's hard to imagine exactly what this looks like.

But I'll tell you this much.

Half of rural hospitals in America are more or less underwater.

And Medicaid is the only thing propping them up.

Yeah.

And so when you cut, like in states that didn't expand Medicaid, hospitals close at four times the rate as they do in states that did expand Medicaid.

Medicaid is like the like little like a shiv that's keeping the entire rural hospital system together.

Well, Well, because without medicine, no one would be paying these hospitals.

They just wouldn't have patients.

These are low volume areas.

They're going to collect, collect from, yeah.

Exactly.

They're low volume areas where there's not enough people getting care to justify keeping a hospital open on its own terms if that hospital intends to make a profit, which is of course the point of providing medicine in America.

Same with clinics in low-income neighborhoods where everybody doesn't have insurance or is on Medicaid, you know, doesn't pay enough.

You see clinic closures.

I live in Milwaukee, north side of Milwaukee, some of the worst healthcare outcomes anywhere in the U.S.

And healthcare clinics, children's clinics pull out of there.

It's not profitable to keep a clinic open that takes care of poor people or people in rural areas.

And Medicaid's the one thing like holding this little thing together.

But yeah, like you said before, like you said, like this, this $880 billion, it isn't like thrown into the lake or set on fire.

This is salaries.

This is county health programs.

This is a major economic driver.

Like in Wisconsin,

we spend $11 billion on Medicaid, $6.6 billion of which comes from the federal government and $3.4 bill from the state.

And that $6.6 billion shapes the way that our entire state economy works.

You take that away.

I mean, the projections are that with a 10% cut, Wisconsin would need to make up $1 billion to cover it.

We can't afford that.

So our choice is either increase taxes.

spend money we can't afford from our small surplus, or cut payments to hospitals and providers.

Those are the only three options.

Those are the breaks.

And that devastates a lot of different people.

I was in a small town, Wild Rose, Wisconsin, the other day, population like 685.

And I was giving a little speech.

And I talked to this older gentleman in the back who said, you know, listen, you know, I'm on Medicare.

And a couple of years ago, I had a heart attack.

And I went to the hospital in town.

It was a Thetacare hospital.

And they saved my life and I'm alive.

But this is a town of 685.

If they cut Medicaid, will that hospital stay open?

You know, if I have a heart attack in two years, will I stay alive?

Yeah, where do you go?

You know, if you live in a rural area and you have a heart attack, where are you going to go?

You just fucking die on the highway, man.

Like you, you,

they, there is no alternative.

Like there is, there is no infrastructure in place.

This is the thing keeping it together.

And I don't know.

I host these town hall events both through work and with the socialist legislators in Wisconsin on the side who have been tremendous about this, going out into the state and talking to folks.

And the point of it, you know, there's the edutainment section.

You know, I talk about what's going on and why it matters, give them some razzle-dazzle.

But one of the most important parts, and this kind of ties into, you know, what I think people can do about this,

one of the most important parts is getting to hear from people about how Medicaid shapes their lives.

You know, I've heard so many really moving stories.

Can I tell you guys a couple of Medicaid stories?

Please, yeah.

So I've got, I can think of three.

One is mine, one's a close friend's, and one is this one that I heard in a small town that like, I'm going to hang on till the day I die.

My Medicaid story is that I'm one of the guys that got swine flu.

Or

that's what I think.

Back in 2009, I had something that was like what COVID felt like that knocked me out for two and a half weeks.

And I was making $12,500 that year, right?

I was fucking broke.

And I didn't have insurance.

California hadn't expended Medicaid yet.

That wasn't an option under the ACA.

So I just sat in bed and shit a lot and fucking like, I like put all my, every, everything I had on credit cards, took out a loan from a family member to pay to pay rent, totally financially ruined me for years, right?

I couldn't pay my student loans, couldn't pay my credit card, I couldn't get an apartment under my own name until like 2017 because of the consequences of not being able to afford getting care and just having to stay at home and just fucking suffer.

I did go to a clinic and they gave me like a $400 bill.

So that didn't do anything.

So

from then on, I learned that when you feel sick, just don't do anything, right?

You can't afford to get healthcare, just suck it up.

And so a couple of years later, you know, I had like this weird chest thing and I just ignored it for like a week.

And then one day, my roommate wakes me up and I'm delirious.

I have a fever of like 103.4, I think, like some insanely high number, which, you know, for like Arizona in the summer summer.

Yes.

And all of our doctors in the chat know that that's a fever number you generally don't want to have.

So my friend rushes me to, my roommate rushes me to the hospital, and they wheel me into the ER and I stay overnight.

I had double pneumonia.

Turns out you can have two pneumonias at the same time.

And I was maxing out my pneumonia levels.

And when I leave, you know, I go to the receptionist desk and they gave me a bill for like about $4,000.

And I broke down crying right there in the hospital.

And I was lucky.

California had just

extended Medicaid, the Medi-Cal program.

And this really nice lady at the hospital helped me get the paperwork together to go home and go on the computer and apply for Medicaid.

And it wiped away that entire bill.

Like I would not have the life I have now if I didn't have Medicaid.

Like it literally like shaped the way that I live my life, made my life richer.

And that's like, that's the case for millions of people across the country who are, you know, were just that close to disaster and for whom Medicaid provided like an essential lifeline.

Tim, I was going to say, like,

based based on based on your story and what we've been talking about, I was thinking about something you posted earlier today from the CEO of Uline, which is a big Republican contributor.

And like it was in some materials they were distributing and they talked about how like the ACA allowing people to stay on their parents' health care until 26.

The example that they used was like, this is bad because it allows people to leave jobs they would otherwise like it allows people to leave jobs and to look for greener pastures because they wouldn't be reliant on employer-backed health care.

And I'm thinking about like, you know, the crisis, the crises that you're talking about or what getting hit with a $4,000 bill when you have double pneumonia and no money does to you, does to your psych, just your

mental health as well as your physical health.

And I can't help but think that like a main component of the way our healthcare system in this country is structured is with the intention of like relying on that fear of the thing out there that's going to happen to you, the doom that could happen to you, the sword of Damocles that's hanging over all our heads.

I think that fear is a really strong lever of social control and discipline.

And I can't help but feel that like our healthcare system is like a major, major way in which that fear is leveraged against people to keep them in jobs they otherwise wouldn't want to be or just keep them in a box, basically, or just like the keep the horizons of their future just permanently diminished.

Look, whether or not your shitty, abusive boss likes you is the determining factor in whether your kid gets chemotherapy.

You don't unionize.

You don't organize.

It wasn't the original intent, but American healthcare, America's healthcare model is a tool of

domesticization.

It's got a

dampening factor, right?

It keeps employees pliable and

moldable.

It is a tool of employer domination.

It prevents organizing.

And one of the things I like about Medicare for all, and one of the reasons that, you know, when we fight for it, and I don't think that fight's over, that they'll come like hell against it, is because employers really like the ability to control their employees' lives.

It makes them subservient.

And

freeing up your ability to live freely in your body from whether or not your boss likes you is like a basic principle of like equity, but it's one that they really take advantage of in the current employer-based healthcare model.

And I want to get to the

people you spoke to in these town halls.

But Tim, you know,

I have now, thanks to my better half, become somewhat Wisconsin-adjacent.

And I will occasionally go out to God's country to get out of my New York City Northeast bubble and, you know, be among God's people, go to the lake, you know, have a brandy old-fashioned.

But like, I just, and Tim, in these town halls you're doing, I want to hear what the Medicaid story, but like, could you just talk a little bit about like, who are the people who talk to you?

Who are the people that you're speaking to and like what is just the mood and energy or like of people in wisconsin and i would assume all over the country right now people are scared and they don't know 100 why they're scared and that makes them angry and they want to know what they can do and my job is to attempt to to bridge those things together and i've i've really been enjoying it like it's a scary situation but i feel like people i talk to leave more confident in their ability to do something about this, right?

One thing I like about the one of the contradictions inherent in Medicaid that is being blown up right now, and I think in a really interesting way, is that this is going somewhere.

Because Medicaid is so fractured across the states, we don't see it for what it is, which is like, this is a like unifying like health struggle, healthcare justice struggle.

But when they attack it, blanket like this on the federal level, we are kind of forced to see the way these ways these programs bind us together, not just within your city, but like state to state across the country.

They've created, I think, a radicalizing model, which is the thing we need if we want to build any form of mass politics in this country ever again.

And I think the Medicaid struggle is activating a lot of people who otherwise would be sitting at home scared.

So a lot of the folks that come out are elderly.

Not all of them.

I talked to a lot of younger folks too, a lot of single parents.

What's it like

to bridge the gap between you and elderly Wisconsinites?

Because Tim, I don't know if you're aware, Tim, you look sort of like a heavy metal guy.

Like you look like you could be involved in some some sort of satanic panic or something like that.

But like, what is it like to have these people come up and tell you their stories or connect with you?

I mean, I love it.

And, you know, admittedly, I do, I do hide the nose ring and wear a button down.

You just push it back up.

I got to play a little bit to the crowd.

But if you extend a hand to somebody and say, I understand why you feel the way that you do, and it's reasonable, and we'll get through this together.

85% of the time they'll reach their hand back.

And it's slow, and it's tedious.

And on an individual level, it doesn't feel like it does anything, but it's the continual aggregate doing this over and over again and having people do it to people that they know that makes a difference.

And like, you know,

I'm always really flattered when people tell me they're not flattered.

I've always feel very honored when people tell me, you know, the worst thing that's ever happened to them.

Happened on the Medicare for all tours, it's happening now, right?

People tell me, listen, here's a way that my life fell apart.

And here is this program, or here are these people that helped put it back together.

And I'm afraid I'm going to lose it again.

I'm afraid I'm going to go back to a world where I just go die in the street, or I get warehoused in a nursing home, or my kid, or my sister, or my mom just has to go and fucking roll over and die.

And when people share that, it is like a powerful experience.

When your neighbor shares that, you know, when somebody in your small town who you see at like the big Israel flag gas station shares that, it can't help but change the way that you see like the infrastructure that kind of like the invisible infrastructure that shapes all of our lives.

And it does make a difference.

You can't always persuade people, right?

That's something I've learned the hard way over the past 10 years.

Some people you just can't reach.

But there's a lot more folks out there who are just scared and need someone to help

them visualize how these things tie into their lives and tie them together.

And I want to getting people to talk about their healthcare stories, their Medicare stories to me and to their neighbors is like the beginning of weaving these things together.

Yeah, I think that's true in a lot of things.

It's true in entertainment with an audience.

It's true socially.

And I think it's true to a large extent politically that, you know, the average person you meet, whether they are a fucking genius or on the opposite end, and usually they're not.

Whether they are or not, people more often than not,

if they don't fully understand

the broader implications of something, if they don't fully understand what you are trying to bring before them or convince them of,

more often than not, they are going to appreciate that you are giving them the opportunity to rise to the occasion, whether that is morally, socially, or with a policy that maybe they haven't thought about in these terms before.

When you get down on your knees and go,

here's a way to do life,

like it resounds with a thud.

I think that

with a lot of the people you're talking to, maybe not all of them have thought about like, you know, the idea of nationalizing everything or the concept of, you know, a maximalized rent-seeking healthcare system.

But they appreciate that someone is giving them the opportunity to speak about their life in their own terms and not deliberately trying to dumb themselves down for that.

And I'd also just like a confirmation from another human being that like their physical, their financial or like mental difficulties are not entirely their fault and that like someone is to blame for it and they're right to be angry.

But here's what, and also there's like maybe something to be done about it.

Right.

And it's important to, you know, help direct that blame, right?

Like a big part of what I talk about, you know, at the end is that this is all in the service of a tax break at the end of the day, right?

This is all in service of giving Elon Musk another fucking $20 million or whatever a year.

Your right to be safe in your body, your right to have the dignity that you are, that you deserve, you know, by virtue of birth is being taken from you so some fucking asshole can buy another fucking yacht.

That is what's at risk here.

It's not the person next to you who makes $11,000 a year who is your enemy.

It's very clearly the guys.

This is like, this is as naked an act of class warfare as I can imagine, short of getting out the guns.

And people,

you know, that's the beginning of a longer conversation about things like Medicare for all.

But people are getting it, man.

Like,

you know, a lot of it's wrapped in the whole like, you know, it's the billionaires that fund their campaigns, which is a little bit rudimentary, but still true.

But people are responding to that.

People get mad about that.

That's not a partisan take, you know, I'm hearing that from conservative people and like, you know, the aggressively non-partisan people as well.

This is an act of class warfare that they can visualize and respond to.

And that's how you begin to build kind of the the the the the bringing in more people uh to the long-term fight i know this big tent i keep hearing about yes uh a big tent on my terms um but i i think i think that is important and i i i i do i like having that that that kind of conversation uh tim what was the what was the medicaid story that you said that was shared with you at one of these town halls that you'll take to your to your grave sure so i'm gonna anonymize it um as as thoroughly as i can um i was in a part of wisconsin talking to an audience and this guy got up and he's a single father and

he has two kids.

And one of the kids was in some way, doesn't really matter how, like horrifically abused a few years previous.

And, you know, that kind of shit ruins a kid's life.

The kid got arrested at like age six, like got kicked out of school.

The father had to drop out of the workforce to take care of his kid.

And Wisconsin has a pretty good kids' Medicaid program.

It's called the Katie Peckett Program.

And that Medicaid program paid for the kids' therapy, paid for the kids' rehab.

Medicaid covered the dad's health insurance while he was at home taking care of the kid.

Like Medicaid literally kept this family from totally dissolving into violence and confusion and chaos.

And the kid's doing good now.

I met the kid.

He's running around.

He knocked over a table and broke something.

Good for him.

But like...

That is a manifestation of like, what's what I'm talking about?

This is the social safety net.

This is what's keeping people from like total disaster.

And so I think about this kid and I think about this dad.

And, you know, I've heard a lot of healthcare stories.

And that's one that I, I mean, that never even had, had occurred to me, that like that act of violence upon a child is, you know, not made whole, but like addressed and made better because of a program like Medicaid.

And that really blew me away.

I mean, I, I, I think about this in the context of like, how much money is too much money to spend to like save millions of people from absolute despair and ruin?

Because like, even if you think like, well I've you know I'm responsible I don't I don't need that money or whatever like why are they taking money like what like what is the knock-on effect of like of living in a society that is now continuing to accelerate down this path of just being like none of my business doesn't affect me who cares they're lazy or they're stupid or they're bad people and they don't they don't deserve my money like and then like you said tim in service of no it's much better to give all of that money to people who if they spend every if they spent a billion dollars every day for the rest of their life they they would never be poor like they have so much money that like they could not get rid of it if they tried to they will never not they will never not be obscenely wealthy and it's just like what what what is the knock-going effects like you said of like just getting rid of uh basic medical care for people at the level of like destitution I uh you know last actually I have the shirt on right now uh last December uh Luigi Mangione elevated the conversation about um violence in American healthcare and

you know, I thought about that for a long time.

And my opinion, and I think one that people generally share, is that Luigi Mangione shooting a healthcare CEO is just an inversion of the violence that already exists in the American healthcare structure, right?

They're enacting violence against us.

You know, it's, it's, Engels will call it social murder.

It's murder by a million cuts and policy choices, but it is fundamentally a violent model.

And this is an extension and acceleration of that.

And I think when you impose these models of murder upon people, they too will turn violent.

You know, you're locking a dog in a crate and beating him.

And I, like we were saying before, like the one good thing that's happening right now is that you're making good kinds of soda.

And that's against the contrast of like people being beaten down in ways big and small, in ways they see and don't see right now.

And I don't know, man, like I do have a genuine fear that this ends in a lot of random violence.

People losing their shit and freaking out and lashing out at each other.

You know, it might not happen tomorrow, but

that's where we're going.

We're just creating, we're injecting more violence into American healthcare, all in the service of giving some fucking asshole, you know, another million dollars.

And that has an effect on people.

Yeah, and even it's not anything as like, you know, drastic as murder.

I just think about like what the aggregate level of stress.

and misery that's caused by like the fear,

like the financial and like physical fear of what health insurance represents in this country just what that does to like the air you breathe walking around in any community city or town the people you interact with on a day-to-day basis your friends strangers just the aggregate level of fucking anchor and fear that exists out there that like is either going to be turned inward and into like

an individual's own self-destruction or like cast outward in another form of self-destruction which is like you know violence against others and medicaid has been associated associated with, it's been shown to be associated with like reducing recidivism.

You know, when you get, when you get out of jail, you're given nothing and you've got nobody and you're, it's, it's very easy to go back to jail again because there's no support.

In states that expand Medicaid, recidivism decreases significantly, right?

These programs do decrease violence.

They are violence prevention tools.

And absolutely, and in their absence, you know, what's going to happen?

Tim,

before we get to the end of the show, I want to talk like you've been in the stump for for Medicare for all for a long time, but like you also talk about like this concept of health justice.

And like in a better world, we would be like, I think like the idea is that like that's what we'd already have.

But like I've long said that like something like Medicare for all would like do the most amount of good for this country in the shortest amount of time.

And it would like, and it's like the easiest lift to do because it's like a bill exists, it's broadly popular, and I think it would do the most amount of good in the shortest amount of time in terms of like increasing people's just quality of life, dignity, health, happiness across the board.

And it would be overwhelmingly popular.

But like, what's the next horizon after that in terms of like what a just, what like a just healthcare system in the wealthiest country in human existence would look like?

Look, healthcare doesn't come out of a box and it doesn't just happen in the hospital.

If you care about the conditions of pregnant people, waiting till birth is way too late.

You know, like sickness and illness and health happen earlier in your life.

Is there lead in your water?

You know, do you live near a nuclear waste disposal site?

Do you live in a place where you have access to food that's healthy that you can eat?

Are you allowed to buy hot food

with your SNAP benefits?

Do you live in a place where you can live safely or are you at risk of being assaulted for your gender or your identity or your race at all times?

These are the fundamentals of where healthcare comes from.

And I think Medicare for all, and this is one of my pitches for it, and it's a little simplistic, but I really believe it, is that once you force a single actor, a single payer, to bear all the costs of providing care and all the costs of what happens when care is not provided, you finally have a thing you can wield as a tool for realizing a broader movement towards health justice, to realizing housing as health care, to realizing the environment as health care.

You know, healthcare is apportioned by lines of race.

It's no coincidence that the neighborhoods in the U.S.

that are the sickest are also, you know,

the most, the blackest, have the most people of color.

Like these are, these, these things are apportioned along these lines.

And I think you need to have the power and the leverage in a place with unlimited money to really tackle these issues.

And it is a movement that takes a long time.

But that's, I mean, that's the vision of health justice beyond a relatively simple payer mechanism, right?

Medicare for all is easy.

Health justice is hard, but you got to, one is necessary to achieve the other.

Yeah, and it would be, I mean, to me, it's just like, it's like the basic measuring stick of like whether you live in a civilized society or not.

And it's one that we're not just failing, but like

we're getting worse at this with every week.

And I think it's just contributing, as I said, overall to like an ambient sense of just anger and rage and just like paranoia that just, I think is getting.

I think people are sicker physically and mentally than maybe they've ever been.

And I think the exponentially increasing forces of just shredding this idea that we owe anything to anyone other than ourselves or our immediate family is going to have, unless it's dealt with strongly and soon, is going to have,

I think, almost apocalyptic connotations for what living in this country is going to be like in another 10 or 20 years.

Yeah, I think about that.

You know, there are multiple iterations on this quote of this idea that

how many great minds are trapped in prisons, or

more commonly, maybe trapped in lives of pure subsistence,

looking for the next thing that will get them through the day.

How many great minds, how many people, how many of the next great researchers or artists or whoever, whoever can solve any problem in whatever community, whatever family, are

dedicating 80%, 90%, 100% of the time that they are not already at work

to navigating the Byzantine phone banks of the system that is set up for maximized rent seeking and profit.

No one can look you in the face and tell you, this is the most efficient way we could possibly do this, which is the argument for

every other fucking immiserating, awful system in America.

you know, for nothing else, this is the most efficient way that capital and time can flow.

No one thinks thinks that with this.

No one even fucking tries that one.

It's to the point that all of these companies, United Health, whatever, all of them, all of their ads are basically the same thing.

Hey, we know this is really shitty, but we're trying to make it at least somewhat acceptable if you're a real person, meaning that you make above $80,000 a year.

If you want to talk about unlocking human potential, you could take this massive weight off of people's necks.

Yeah, which is why I don't want to hear a a single lick from the abundance agenda on anything until

they can solve the problem of just giving people healthcare in this country.

Yeah.

There's going to be nothing abundant in the future going forward if we allow private health insurance companies to maximize profit off of our lives and death.

It just makes everything else seem so fucking ridiculous.

We're going to have a perfect economy with no waste where there's no poverty.

There's going to be a 150% literacy rate.

Kids are going to come out of the womb knowing how to code.

Or on the other side of things, we're going to have nuclear-powered fucking airliners and we're going to go to Mars and we're going to Seastead and we're going to go to the center of the Milky Way.

You can't even take a four-year-old to get their a caset without paying more than like a car costs.

How are we going to fucking do any of that?

I did read parts of the abundance healthcare platform, and we're not going to go into it, but it might not shock you to learn that they fundamentally do not understand how healthcare works.

Like, isn't that kind of

literally at all?

Adam Gaffney, former president of physician for the national health program wrote a really great uh paper um for some magazine um about the supply side economics of abundance it's worth reading if recommended but felix i've i have something on what you just talked about if you can give me a second which is about like work and how many people are like trapped in this maze of paperwork i've got another medicaid story i can do pretty quick uh i got a close friend named steve he's i think he listens to the show so shout out steve uh Steve has muscular dystrophy.

He weighs 90 pounds, sopping wet.

His body is attacking itself.

You know, he's like about my age.

He's like 34, which means he's like living 15 years longer than he was given.

So every day, every day is pretty cool.

And Steve is the kind of person who not too long ago would be shoved into a nursing home and just kept there, warehoused in his own terms, so

somebody could make money off of his like sustenance being kept alive, but literally nothing else.

He's just a, he's a matrix pod.

sitting in a room waiting to die so somebody can make money off of off of him sitting there.

Medicaid gets him, lets him get home health.

For a long time his mom couldn't work because she had to stay home and take care of steve uh they got home health uh financing through medicaid medicaid pays somebody a friend to come over help steve clean himself help steve eat help steve like take care of like the basic things of of being a person and his mom can go off and like have a life that she wants to live she can go off and she can she can work she can do things that she thinks are interesting steve also can now work Steve is a substitute teacher steve is an actor he was in uh who lose rami if you saw that um Steve can have like a rich and robust personal life.

I mean, frankly, Medicaid is a problem that it doesn't let him have enough money to do that, but like Steve can live a dignified life of being able to do things that are interesting to him, follow his passions.

Like Medicaid unlocks his ability to do that kind of work.

It's exactly what you're saying, Felix.

Like how many people are trapped in the cage of a body that we all have who could be doing more interesting things to make their world and therefore our world so much richer, who are prohibited from doing so because of the fucking stupid way our healthcare system is arranged.

This gets like the broadest possible point.

Like Felix, you said the word profit.

And I think that's what it comes down to is that like if markets are like the most efficient way for human beings to like to distribute resources and to get people the goods and services that they need to live.

Like that, I mean like the logic of that runs into a fucking wall when it comes to things like healthcare and housing and education.

Because like, if profit is still the like defining motive of like how we structure our healthcare system, then like, if you can make money off people not getting healthcare or bankrupting them, then obviously that's what they're going to continue to do.

And like, it's not that the Democrats don't understand this.

They understand it very well.

They just exist to make sure that that profit seeking, that profit taking from people's sickness and death and pain continues unabated.

because the answer is the answer to the question how much money would you pay to keep yourself alive or that or a loved one alive the answer is any money you have for as long as you have it and

they know this and like that's why health insurance is such a

huge industry is because they know that like because we're all trapped in these bodies and we're all going to die one day and we'd very much like to keep living there's nothing that they can't charge us to keep to keep our lives going and as long as they're allowed to as long as profit is allowed to be a consideration in how we distribute the limited resources of doctors, healthcare, and medicine in this country, then like you're seeing the result right now.

And

that is the fundamental thing that I think needs to change is that there needs to be a movement based around the idea that there are certain aspects of human life that we all need to just have a bare minimum existence that may not be existing.

Not just our lives possible, but all of our lives possible.

And that is things like a roof over your head, food, education, and crucially, healthcare, being able to see a doctor, being able to have your illness treated, or being able to like deal with calamity.

And as long as like, as long as you can make money, like there's, there's no logical reason that people should be allowed to make money distributing these very basic goods and service, these very basic material goods that every human being needs.

Yes.

I mean,

I think you nailed it.

I mean, this is the kind of thing that gets me up in the morning.

This is the kind of thing a lot of us know somewhere.

Everybody knows they're being fucked over.

That's the thing i find at these town halls every single person knows somebody is them over and making money off of it and healthcare is the biggest venue that i know of in which that relationship is is expressed and experienced and you know being able to paint a picture of how that over is happening and what one can do about it you know i i will do that until the day i die if if they let me i i think this is really important for a lot of people to be able to understand because like you know the logic of the market is like you're you have a fiduciary responsibility to like charge as much money as possible for something to make as much profit as possible on every given interaction on everything you charge on everything you bill for it's to make it's not to like save people's lives or to make this country healthier it's to make the uh you know money for people and like i i have no problem like if you're like uh taking that into consideration selling fucking i don't know sneakers or video games or something like that but like when it comes to things that people need to keep continue to be alive it seems like a civilized society would not allow for that level of just greed and just like just fleecing of people because like it's not a real negotiation it's not like everyone's it's like the the myth of free exchange where it's just like oh it's a contract that two individuals freely uh enter into and you know decide on a rational price for the exchange of uh good and service no because like no it's like if your kid was kidnapped would you start negotiating with the hostage takers about like uh could you drop them off at my place around nine and like okay can we knock 20 20 000 off your asking price look i mean like I'm not made of money here, but like, come on, there's got to be some wiggle room here.

No, you just pay the money because you want your kid to be alive.

The things that people use to try to justify or perpetuate the system, and it is, it's sort of sort of

akin to the commercials that we talked about from the actual providers and insurance networks, which is, you know, hey, I know it's really shitty, but,

you know, this is more the Vox writer point of view.

It employs, you know, X millions of people, you know, some,

you know,

three million odd people or something like that.

If you are just taking all administrative positions into account, which, you know, A,

for the people that are making like

subsistence level income, paycheck to paycheck, or barely enough to cover like 60% of their rent, well, in a nationalized healthcare system, we would need a gigantic fucking bureaucracy.

And I'm sure there would be positions for those people who have experience.

For the people, though, that have made very nice lives for themselves,

not even reducing people to little economic units, that'd be one thing.

But maximizing the amount of cruelty and capriciousness of the system so as to beat down the will of every individual health consumer to challenge a denied claim or anything like that, I could give a shit.

I mean, when the Supreme Court finally decided that child porn was illegal, did we have this conversation?

What about the guys that imported from the Netherlands?

I don't know.

Let's give them retraining, I guess.

Felix, the group of people you're talking about in the justice ID, they would be lucky just to lose their jobs.

And I'll leave it there.

I'll leave it there.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Be happy if it's ending there.

Yeah.

I don't think I'm going to get to the

Daily Wire Children's Entertainment Division today.

Yeah.

No, we have to be able to do that.

Rest assured there's more bad news on the horizon.

Yeah, we will be able to do that.

There will be no season two of Mr.

Bertram, unfortunately.

I mean, like, this

probably way worse than when the author of Berserk died, right?

It's close.

It's a real downer.

Yeah.

Well,

so as not to leave things on a downer tune, let me just ask you, like, so you're out there, like, this is resonating, but like, when people, people listen to this, they think about it, they are overcome with both fear and the sense of hopelessness because they're just like, well, what can I do?

So, like, what do you find as a way to like, to not be like passive in the face of like, you know, these calamitous social and economic problems?

Like, I mean, what do you counsel people when they ask you, what do I do?

Great question.

So, we can't win tonight.

You know, we we can't win tomorrow this is a long-term fight and the infrastructure which can win it has been emaciated intentionally and unintentionally unintentionally for decades but here's like a discrete tangible thing you can do like here's a thing you can put in a box um

get five friends one of you probably has a medicaid story get into the offices of every legislator you that is that represents you on the state level and on the federal level.

Make an appointment to talk to the legislator or if you have to, their staff.

Tell that person the story of how cutting Medicaid will ruin their life or whatever ruined their life and get it on film.

And it's this aggregate representation of here are the lives that you are affecting.

Here's the documentation of it.

That is the foundation of, and doing it with other people.

That's the most important part.

That is the beginning of a foundation of building.

a bigger movement, a mass movement.

Those five people who you go with who tell their stories are not going to go home and say, great, we did our job, we were all done.

That is how you begin to build a bigger organization.

And whether you find one that already exists in your town or in your state, great, join up with them.

Or whether you want to build something yourself.

I spoke in a town hall a couple weeks ago

in, I think it was Ripon, Wisconsin.

And in Wisconsin, we have these big budget town halls that the state runs that are bullshit.

And the conversation went directly from, I want to go to Representative Derek Van Ordenza, or at Derek Gorthon's office and tell him how Medicaid is ruining my, would ruin my neighbor's life to let's go like do a physical demonstration on the floor of the budget meeting.

The transition took literally 45 seconds and they got their information together, they shared numbers and they're carpooling to do it, I think, tomorrow.

Like that is the,

we live on the computer and computer is bad.

It's all computers.

Everything's computer.

And it's shoving us all fucking psycho.

Get with people that you know, take those stories, put them at the front of the line, shove them down the fucking throats of the people who are harming you, and build something off of that.

Tim Faust, I want to thank you so much for your time and for your work in just all the good work that you do in terms of, you know, raising awareness and just advocating on behalf of people's lives, Tim.

You're truly an angel.

I will say,

I put this offer on Twitter and it stands, if you put together a town hall with a couple of guidelines, you can email me.

I will come speak at it if I can make it out there, if I can drive there or if it's reasonable to fly um this is really important to me these town halls are productive um so yeah if you're sitting at home and you're with an organization and you want to throw a town hall dm me on twitter email me um and i will show up at your doorstep uh in all my sweaty glory

to make tim come to you that's a that's a call to action out there folks all right uh we're gonna leave it there for today uh uh yeah no actually i have one plug to make i know i already plugged it on last week's show but it's just been announced that there's going to be like a wider national distribution of the documentary I saw the other week, The Encampments, about the protests that happened at universities

last year.

I want to just make a pitch here that it was a really strong piece of work.

And

per this entire conversation, watching this movie almost made me grind my teeth to nubs in anger.

But by the end of it, it left me feeling like invigorated, even in the face of like the truly horrific repression of uh speech and activism that's going on in this country right now.

I think if you see this movie, if you make an opportunity to see this movie or see it with a couple friends, you will leave the theater feeling invigorated by the courage and dignity that these students displayed.

And I would really like to just like make another strong pitch that if it's playing in your area or you can get a chance to see this movie, I would definitely recommend seeing it.

It is a much needed antidote to basically like all mainstream coverage of Palestinian solidarity in this country.

And it's much needed.

And like I said, I was surprised by how good the movie made me feel, despite the undiluted evil that it portrays.

And by that, I mean the Columbia administration, not the students themselves.

I hope I made that clear.

Spoilers, there are a few evil students.

Yeah, the kids at Omega House, those bastards.

Yes, that's my pitch for the encampments.

I see it if you get a chance.

All right.

Once again, thanks to Tim Faust.

We'll We'll talk to you soon, everybody.

Signing off.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Guess who just got bad today?

The wild boy said it through the wings.