Overtime – Episode #589: Marianne Williamson, Vivek Ramaswamy

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

All right, here we are in Overtime.

Marianne, for you, you've been evasive about your political future lately, but you're a champion of progressive candidates and ideas.

Could you see yourself potentially being an effective leader in Congress?

Well, you ran for president.

What about Congress, I guess is the question?

I actually ran for Congress once.

Oh, you did?

Yeah.

I didn't win that one either.

What year was that?

2014.

Oh.

So what's the answer?

I don't know what I'm going to do.

You don't know what you're going to do?

Come on.

No, I think about it.

You're in your own head 24 hours a day to never get it.

I think about it.

Of course I think about it.

A lot of people think about running.

Some of them will and some of them won't.

When I was in position to do it, I sure would tax you more.

Well, you know?

Oh,

she wouldn't get you down there.

I think she should be like John Climpsey Adams.

after Okay,

he became a congressman after becoming president, and he did it with a president of the president.

Then I have to become president.

Exactly.

I think you should go in that order.

Yeah, that's what I say.

Second, John Quincy Adams.

You do see, like, we did that issue tonight about the PPP program, $800 billion.

It's outrageous.

I know.

But do you understand why people who pay a lot of taxes, because the rich do pay the most taxes?

I mean, look, I'm not saying that's not right.

Of course, the rich should pay the most taxes.

But do you understand why people go like, what am I, I'm giving up all this money.

I mean, I don't remember the last year I paid less than more, less than half.

I pay more than half.

I'm not a, you know, I'm not Amazon with an army of lawyers.

I'm just one guy.

HGO is very generous.

But the government, I'm in the 39% federal.

California takes 13%.

That's over half.

You take over half and you still have everything fucked up.

You understand why people are like, well, I would give it, except you will fuck it up.

You really think that most people.

Well, I'm just saying, only we redid the issue.

$800 billion, and only a quarter of it went where it should.

So look, I don't think capitalism is a perfect system, but I think it is the least imperfect system of allocating capital, because when you leave it to the government, it actually hurts the very people who it is supposed to help in the first place.

You actually saw billionaires print much more money over the course of the pandemic precisely because of these government policies that then fed a stock market that became addicted to loose monetary policy and loose fiscal policy that guess what?

Make stocks go up.

And who owns stocks?

Rich people.

So no surprise that there's a populist outrage both on the right and the left.

But we need to find a different way of ultimately separating politics from letting free market capitalism be free market capitalism.

If some guy ends up with more green pieces of paper than the others, so be it, as long as we're all equal in a democratic system of governance.

That's the right thing.

I feel like this table is a bunch of French aristocrats a week before the masses made it to the Bastille.

This is not about what you think.

It's not about what you think because you are, and I, listen, I'm very glad free market capitalism has been wonderful to you, wonderful to you, it hasn't been bad to me.

I understand the high side of this party.

If you're in the party, it's wonderful.

Not enough people can get into the party today.

We're saying the same thing there.

We're saying the same thing.

They're locked up by government policy that actually favors the people who are in charge.

Like, this duplicate is

again with the PPP thing.

It's not that we're, I'm gonna, I'll give you half, but then what are you doing with it?

You're not giving it to the people I want it to go to.

You're giving it back to these assholes buying jet skis.

You know, I mean, it's like, that's what.

Most of the people, most of the people who do not want to pay higher taxes, who have a lot of money, are not complaining about where the PPP loans went.

They, you know, as Martin Luther King said, if they give it to poor people, they call it a handout.

If they give it to rich people, they call it a subsidy.

But this didn't go to poor people.

That's the whole point.

go to poor people.

But those same rich people are the ones who do not want to pay, for instance, something like

President Biden, if he wanted to, could declare a national medical emergency and expand Medicare to everyone tonight.

If President Biden wanted to, he could cancel all the purchases.

I'm glad you brought that up tonight.

The next question that we are sent in, why isn't universal health care making any progress even in a liberal state like California?

The majority of people want it.

And you said not because of the insurance companies?

The majority of Americans.

No, no, I didn't say that.

It's indeed not just because.

But that's what happened in California.

It was that million dollar check from the insurance companies.

Well, it's only the pharmaceutical companies.

The pharmaceutical companies make more than the insurance companies, a lot more.

And their goal is not to make you healthy, it's to sell drugs.

So look, so I actually think that

I actually think there's truth to a lot of what you guys are saying, but at the end of the day, they're able to deflect accountability for these questions by actually changing the subject.

That's a big part of what we were talking about with this cultural elitism, is ultimately part of the reason that you see Pfizer decide or big corporation decide that there's going to be a certain number of people who are going to staff its ranks who are diverse.

These are the press releases you see from pharmaceutical companies today, not actually how we're going to bring down the cost of drugs.

Can I interject a little factual that I recall?

I may not have the facts exactly right, but they have done this, they've studied this.

Why can't we have universal?

Because it is popular as an idea in California.

In the United States?

Okay, but when they do, when they crunch the numbers here in California of what it would cost to have universal health care, it's like taxes would have to be like 80% for everybody or something.

It's insanely,

the numbers, and that's why they give up on it.

The numbers just don't work.

Because, again, the corruption in the system.

Because

again,

the pill, the COVID pill that they're working on,

I think it costs $17 to make, and it's going to sell for over $700.

That's the problem.

We can't tell the gougers to stop doing that.

There's a different way to get to universal health care, and I think it's really important because no one's talking about it, is actually you might take the administrative bureaucracy that's responsible for administering those dollars, just like the bureaucracy that administers PPP, by the way, they waste a lot of money, send it to the wrong places.

And I would say, let's actually dissolve that entire apparatus, CMS, Center for Medicare and and Medicaid Services, take the money and distribute it to the people who can't afford to buy private health insurance to actually buy private health insurance.

And if you crunch those numbers, it's about $5,000, $6,000 a person, which gets you most of the way there.

So get rid of the bureaucracy and give the money back to the people.

That's what I'm saying.

No, what we need to remove is the profit-making middleman of insurance companies.

That's what needs to be removed.

And you're still helping the insurance company.

You're still giving the money to the insurance company.

I think the last time I read about it, and maybe the number is slightly over, I think that the profit of the health industry was something like $11 billion.

Right?

Does that sound right?

I don't know actually.

Okay.

And our health care bill is like $2 trillion.

Yeah.

I'm just saying, it's not all there.

It's not all there.

Exactly.

It's the same people.

The insurance PPP that are allocating health care dollars, that's the problem.

It is.

The insurance companies, yes, they did some terrible things.

Way than they used to 10 years ago.

When Michael Moore made sitco, they got away with whatever they wanted.

And after that movie, things changed.

But

right now,

we do not stop this gouging.

We do not stop.

I've read this.

There's a hospital like in one part of the city that charges, you know, $1,800 for a knee replacement.

And a hospital two miles away, and it's $15,000,000.

You know, I mean, there's no line or reason to what they can.

We've all been, or known someone in the hospital or been in the hospital, and you get the bill, and you're like, the slippers are $45.

And the same reason gay people are getting PPP checks.

It's just...

And people go over to European countries where it's a fraction of all of that.

Right.

They do have socialized medical systems.

Okay, but what does that mean socialized?

How is that going to stop this?

I mean, if it can, yes.

If that's what is involved in socialized medicine, I'm all for it.

So what's going on in Europe, though, Marianne, is this is just an important issue to see for Americans actually to bring money back.

And this is one of the things that actually would give even the last administration a good amount of credit for at least spotting this issue.

They're free-riding on what happens in the United States.

So, I ran a biotech company.

I can tell you any company that runs the numbers of whether a drug is worth developing looks to the United States first because they know the United States pays the highest price.

If the United States paid the same price as Europe, that drug wouldn't have gotten developed.

So, what Europe figured out is actually the drug is going to get developed anyway, and once the company's already gotten it to market, they're going to give it to us anyhow so we can get it cheaper.

So, that's actually what you're seeing there: gamesmanship on the part of Europe free-riding the innovation in the United States.

That's a complicated issue.

But I think the right issue is get rid of the bureaucracy.

And I'm not arguing with you about how fucked up our system is.

One reason why we went through this nightmare with COVID is because hospitals are run like airlines.

Airlines want to sell every seat.

Hospitals want every bed filled.

That's why, oh my god, the hospitals are overrun.

Yes, because you don't want to have any empty beds lying around.

They want them to be overrun.

Not overrun, but they want to be at capacity because that's good for the profit.

Hospitals themselves shouldn't be a profit thing.

That's the point.

Yes, I understand.

None of it should be about profit.

You know, no, another thing that's really fucked up about the system is actually the number of COVID case counts or deaths due to COVID are overcounted.

Because if somebody shows up for a different cause, let's say they're hit by a car, but they ultimately actually happen to test positive for COVID, they actually get higher billing rates in return for actually counting that person as positive for COVID, which just tells you that people in a system, whether or not we like it, respond to incentives.

We have to take that into account when we set up the system.

That's what I say.

All right.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Thank you.

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