February 1, 2025 • 28 mins
Newt talks with Representative Chip Roy about his new report, “The Case for Healthcare Freedom: A System for a Healthier America,” which outlines a plan for healthcare reform in the United States. The report advocates for empowering patients and doctors rather than insurance companies and bureaucrats, promoting the use of health savings accounts, direct primary care, and a competitive insurance market. Rep. Roy emphasizes the need for price transparency and reducing regulatory barriers to foster competition and lower healthcare costs. He also highlights the importance of addressing the root causes of poor health, such as diet and lifestyle, and providing accurate, science-based information to the public. Their conversation also addresses the broader implications of healthcare reform for the federal budget and the potential for a transformative shift in the healthcare system.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of Each World. On Wednesday, January twenty second,
Representative Chiproy released a new report entitled The Case for
health Care Freedom, a System for a Healthier America. The
report is a painstakingly researched, forty seven page report on
America's health crisis and how to address it, presenting ideas
(00:25):
on how the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans have the
opportunity to deliver transformational reform to our health care system.
The report asserts that healthcare freedom is this simple idea
that American patients and doctors must be empowered to decide
and provide healthcare, not insurance companies in corporate or government bureaucrats.
(00:46):
We should have the freedom and incentives to make informed,
healthy choices about the food we eat, the medicine we take,
and we should be able to insure ourselves against financial
risk of a health event in a robust, competitive market.
Here to discuss his plan, which I am deeply intrigued with,
to make America healthy again. I'm really pleased to welcome
(01:07):
my guest to Representative Chip Roy. He is currently serving
his third term in Congress representing the Great State of
Texas's twenty first Congressional district, which includes South Austin, North
San Antonio, and the Texas Hill Country. Chip, Welcome and
(01:32):
thank you for joining me on News World.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Mister speaker. Great to be on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
I really appreciate all you do and all you've done
since being in public service, and you're still iniminately involved
with what we're doing, and I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Listen, do you talk about healthcare freedom and your newest report,
could you define what you believe that means for the
average American family.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Yeah, and you just read the description that we put
in the report, but I put it in basic terms.
And I say this as a cancer survivor. Thirteen years
ago I finished my last CHEMOT treat and I think
thirteen years ago last week when I was working for
our mutual friend, Governor Rick Perry, we had just finished
his presidential campaign and frankly, I was helping on yours
for the remaining pieces of it. When I came through that,
and I was blessed to be able to go to
(02:12):
M d Anderson. And as Obamacare has gotten entrenched, which
by the way, it's not just Obamacare, right, it's decades
of having created this monstrosity where you no longer have
anything resembling healthcare that is free market oriented. So my
simple notion is empower patients and doctors with expanded health
savings accounts access to what we call direct primary care,
(02:34):
which means you've got access to a doctor directly, you
have their cell phone number, you actually have care. And
then decouple that from the requirements that we currently have
on insurance and to make sure that we can have
people be able to go get real insurance in the market.
And once you do that, you've now changed the whole
dynamic and you've freed it up so that people can
be able to go out and get the care of
(02:55):
their choice. You've said it very well. We need to
get back to care because we're using health care with
care and it's not the same thing. And I think
what we can do if we are bold and transformative,
would not just help individual families and individuals be able
to go get care from doctors of their choice rather
than insurance companies and bureaucrats, but it would actually drive
(03:16):
down the prices and it would actually help our deficit
and debt pile up. With the federal government, we have
five trillion dollars that we're spending annually on healthcare. You
know that, but yet somehow we spend three times more
per capita than Italy, but we have a five year
shorter lifespan than they do. The average family and their
employer pays twenty five thousand dollars a year for their
(03:37):
quote health insurance, but that insurance is so disconnected from care,
right they're not able to go get care. And now
you've got families that are getting subsidized up to six
hundred thousand dollars in income because the way we so
distorted the system. And all of this has a lot
of corporate crony components in it with respect to how
much the corporations are spending seven hundred and fifty million
dollars spent by Big Healthcare in lobbying the government, which
(04:00):
is more than defense contractors.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Well, your tackling is really important. Now. A key part
of what you would do, if I understand it, is
to use a substantially bigger tax advantage health savings account
so people could shop around in a transparent market. For
me and my family, how would that work?
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Well?
Speaker 3 (04:19):
So for right now, for the average family, you go
spend out of your pocket. Call it eight hundred dollars
and your employer pays sixteen hundred dollars and that money
goes to ETNA or bulieve Cross or whatever, and then
they are giving you so called insurance. But for that
you have a really high deductible, a really high codepay,
and so all of that adds up to something like
(04:41):
twenty five thousand.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Dollars a year.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
But yet you're still spending a lot out of pocket.
But all of that is deductible, tax deductible for your corporations.
So what we want to do is take what is
an existing product that I think something like sixty million
Americans use with health savings accounts, but we want to
make them robust and central to the entire health care operation.
(05:06):
So what that means is you would get the tax
advantaged as the individual when your employer is funding your
health savings accounts, so they would get the tax break,
but it would be equal. So if I'm self employed
and I put money in the account, it's a tax break.
If the employer chooses to give you the money in
the health savings account rather than giving it directly to ETNA,
(05:27):
they get the tax break for that, which means you're
getting the benefit. You've got the dollars. Once you've got
that money is sitting there in a health savings account,
and you can go shop. Now you're on a level
playing field. Right now, I need to get my oil changed.
There are probably fifty places within ten miles a year
that I can go compete and get my oil change.
But if I call up ATNA and get some representative
(05:48):
on the phone, or call up Blue Cross and they're
in Kansas City and they answer the phone, I say,
all right, what doctor can I get? They're going to
give me a list of like three and a fifty
mile radius that are in network.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
I have very few choices.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
They're in a corporate environment and you don't have the
ability to get their cell phone work with them directly.
You have to go through some big website. This allows
us to go out and goes shop for both insurance
but also importantly direct primary care and other models like
health sharing ministries. All of those things would be allowed
to be expensive for you and you'd have control.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Of the care. Now why does that matter? Last point?
Speaker 3 (06:24):
If you look at, for example, a knee replacement, and
you know this well, right, you go to the hospital
and you need your knee replaced, and you say, well,
how much is that going to be? And they said, well,
that's going to be forty eight thousand dollars, but your
insurance will paper x and you're going to pay you
fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, But it's fifty thousand bucks.
If you go to the surgery Center of Oklahoma, they've
(06:45):
got a robust model and they put all their prices
up and it's direct care, and they just give you
the price and it's fourteen five hundred dollars. Now, why
is there that difference in price? Because we've propped up
and funded this robust system where all of the insurance
company and big hospitals and so forth are making the
prices go up, and because we've been intertwined Medicare and
(07:06):
medicaid into all that. If you want price transparency, give
the individuals the money and give them the same tax
breaks the corporations get. So they've got it and they
can use it.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
To take your example, you're going to have an amazing
number of hospitals fight you. I've been an advocate for
years of having a transparent pricing system and it's amazing.
Virtually every element of the health systems against it. They
don't want us to know what we're paying for.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
And that's because that would actually break the system down. Look,
this is part our fault. I represent the Hill Country.
Lindon Johnson's ranch is in that district. This goes back
and if you go look at nineteen sixty four nineteen
sixty five, with the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, everything
that you see with the widening price increases. If you
(07:56):
go look at the charts that show private healthcare funding
versus government, in nineteen sixty four or five, it was
basically ninety five percent private and five percent public, and
those lines started converging, and then in the eighties and
then into the nineties they started converging more, and then
through Obamacare, they've converged almost down to the equal and
then now they are fifty percent. It's basically fifty to
(08:17):
fifty and what is private is highly regulated. Meanwhile, you've
had a what one thousand percent increase in administrators in
my lifetime, but meanwhile doctors have stayed the same. That's
what you see paperwork, bureaucracy, administration. You don't see doctors
and patients where they've got full control over what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
And we've noticed, for example, that the tension for the
doctors leads to a dramatically higher suicide rate for doctors
because they're so conflicted. They go to medical school so
they can focus on you and end up in practice
and are told to focus on the insurance company or
the government bureaucrat.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Well, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
And most doctors went to medical schools because they just
want to provide care. They don't want to have to
go fill out forms and checkboxes, which is what they
spend half their time doing. And again, we've created that
complex maze. And it's not just Obamacare, it's not just
the sort of recent policies.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
This is a.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
Compilation of policies that have added up to this complex system.
But meanwhile, insurance companies, and I'll not try to vilify
insurance companies, but they're making a significant amount of profit
with the government giving them regulatory constraints on any competition.
And so when you do try to have competition, you
meet resistance. So, for example, health sharing ministries, which are
(09:39):
a religious space, but there are some non denominational and
there's some secular versions of these two where they allow
you to share healthcare prices so you can actually help.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Each other out.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
You put money in a pool, somebody needs a certain procedure,
they don't have a thousand bucks, They get it covered,
and it's worked quite well to be an affordable way
for people to afford predictable but yet shocking events to
their fiscal well being.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
But yet we get.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Told state by state, state capital by state capital, oh no,
you can't do that. That's insurance, and we need to
regulate you like anything you do. To try to break
into that so that people can be people and help
each other out, either through charity or by allowing actual
risk management through true insurance to work. Those get beat down.
That's what we have to free up. Healthcare freedom is
(10:27):
freeing that stuff up. Allow me to go to the
doctor of my choice, Allow me to use tax free capital,
allow me to go to health sharing ministries to defray costs,
Allow me to get an insurance product that will roll
the dice based on my risk portfolio. And yes, we
can still have government backstops, but make those as local
and make those as tightly focused as possible in local
(10:47):
and state jurisdictions.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Do you think there has to be federal preemption of
the state regulatory system.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
I think if you can unwind the federal constraints, which
are also problem, but also I think we do have
to break down some of the state at least as
long as federal dollars are involved, which they're all going
to be in our lifetimes, You're going to have to
break down some of the state regulatory mechanisms that frankly
are propping up some of the problems we have where
(11:15):
we end up with massively consolidated hospitals. I saw a
report I'm sure you've seen in like Pittsburgh and some
other parts of the country where there's like no choice, right,
all of the consolidation has gone into like some one
big corporate entity. And anti trust is a complex and
we don't need to get into an anti trust lecture here.
But we don't have competition, that's the bottom line. We
don't and some of the state regulatory structures are part
(11:38):
of that problem. So yes, we need to reduce federal
and state barriers to competition and choice.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Let me switch totally to actual health, because you know
in your report that forty percent of Americans are considered obese,
compared to just ten percent in nineteen fifty, and that
there are health conditions like cancer research both rising but
also occurring earlier and earlier. What do you think has
happened to the actual health of the American people when you.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Go back to when I first came to Congress in
twenty nineteen, I introduced the Healthcare Freedom Act, which was
built around the model we just described.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
That was a product of.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
My years of experience both as a chief of staff
Senator Cruise working for John Cornyn and as a cancer
survivor working for Repairing and at the Texas Public Policy
Foundation where we studied these things with our mutual friend
Brooke Rollins and others.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
And so fast forward.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
And I've had a lot of work involved on that
piece of this in the last two years. I've turned
my focus in addition, not instead of, but in addition
to the front end, like why are we unhealthy? Why
are we having to go seek so much health care here?
And frankly, it's just simple things. When you eat real, good,
natural foods and you don't eat processed foods, When you
(13:08):
eat properly, you eat meats and so forth instead of
high carbs and everything else, you frankly feel better in
your healthier, and it's just pretty obvious, and I think
people are seeing that in RFK Junior Cali means some
of these other folks deserve a great deal of credit
for having really lifted people's attention on that.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Now. I will also note COVID I.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Think was the great shift, and I think it was
the great shift in other areas in terms of the
tyranny of government and the use of the power of government,
but also how we view vaccines and how we view
the power government and telling us what we should or
should not put in our body, and whether or not
we're getting the real facts. Just provide the information for
the American people, true actual data and information, true science.
(13:50):
Make the NIH and CDC, don't make them revolving doors
for big pharma. Let's have actual scientists saying, here's the data,
here's the truth, here's what we know about COVID, know
about the vaccines. You're free to go choose. You're free
to decide. Because my dad had polio. You don't think
for a minute, I'm not truly happy and that we're
blessed that my children could get a polio vaccine, or
(14:11):
I could get a polio vaccine. My dad is still alive,
but he can barely walk, having survived bulbar and spinal polio.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
We're blessed to have those things, but.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
At the same time, we should look at the science
of all of them, including the polio vaccine, so we
know the truth. Because I think something is happening where
we're over medicated, likely over vaccinated. We're certainly eating bad foods,
and I don't want a big government regulatory complex telling
me what to eat. If I want to go eat
a free too pie, I ought to know what I'm eating,
and we ought to inform people. And yes, we probably
(14:42):
should still ban some substances that are in all of
our foods that are killing people because we're spending trillions
on the back end because we're allowing it to happen.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Part of why the so called Mediterranean diet works. They
don't have processed food. The tomatoes taste differently because in
fact they're fresh. The whole process is just different and
leads to very different health outcomes.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
And you feel better. There's a restaurant on Capitol Hill.
I'm not going to give its name out because I
don't want to have a whole bunch of people go
inundator but it's a great restaurant and she flies all
of the ingredients in from Italy and they make it
all right there, and when I eat there, I feel great.
And you can eat bread, but it's real food, it's
real ingredients, and you feel fantastic. It's not always cheaper,
(15:26):
but that's partly because we don't have a market on
every corner with that stuff, because our markets are filled
with Cheetos and processed food.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
How do you incentivize healthy habits?
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Well, I think that's actually the hardest thing. The easiest
thing for us to do would be to convert our
tax policy and free up direct primary care and free
up insurance.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Like we have the.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Power to do that like this, if we have the
willpower to do it, and I think we should. On
the healthy habit side, I think you've got to have
a little bit more of a connection. And I do
think there is a connection here. If you have health
savings accounts and you know how you can use use
them and you can go pay for a doctor and
get care and get good mental health care and other things,
I think that you will be incentivized to be able
(16:08):
to get exercise, to eat the right diet, and so forth,
because you're controlling those dollars and how they're connected to
your health. But the second and the probably most important
thing we can do is put out real good science
based information. You know, when we grew up, as me
a little bit behind you, not too far, we had
the food pyramids, and we had the four food groups,
and we had these things. They were pounded into our head.
(16:31):
Some of that was good, some of that was bad.
Basically I took away from that a well rounded diet
and so forth. But you know, I grew up on
a farm. We live on ten acres. We try to
grow stuff locally, buy locally, and my kids are healthier
for it, and they're reading Cali's books and all that stuff.
But we got to get that more into the bloodstream,
so to speak. Pun intended of the American people in
the schools and through the USDA and hopefully work with
(16:54):
Brook and everybody over there to do that. There needs
to be synergies there to make that happen.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
That gets back to the whole science because all too
often some of those charts get designed by lobbyists working
for specific big groups. One of the things that I
was really surprised why I were a book many years
ago called Saving Lives and Saving Money with that specific
title to make the case that saving lives is moral
and then you get to save money after you save lives.
(17:20):
But I was surprised at how actively hostile the healthcare
system is to innovation, how many interest groups will combine
to kill breakthroughs it will be better for patients, less expensive.
What's your take on all that? How do we break
through that sort of iron wall.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Not to beat a drum too much, I am going
to do this repeatedly. We've got to empower individuals, empower doctors.
They have to serve as the hub in the hub
and spoke of the system. And we've got to make
insurance companies and frankly, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals more trivial. Right,
they need to be sort of on the side of
the system where the patients and doctors are at the
(17:59):
center of the say them. So we put this report
out last week. Well, it's not news in town that
this is where my leanings are. I've had my bill
out for five six years.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
But let me tell you.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
We put the report out with all of the data
on all of the charts and all of the stuff man,
there was a rumbling down on K Street. I got
a lot of friends that are all down there. You
do too right, and you start hearing, oh they you
sure caught some attention down there with some of the
pharma companies and some of the big insurance companies.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
And I said, well, good nute.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
When I got through cancer, there was a trial drug
called brent tuximab which was created and I was on
the trial at MD Anderson. It's a great drug. It's
now the standard of care for Hodgin's lampoma. I had
Stage three.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Great.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
I'm glad, And I said in a hearing once, I
hope that the company that made that is rolling in money,
because I actually do. I want the market to work
and incentivize people to be, as you just said, innovative.
But what I don't want is for the government to
be then saying you must take these drugs or these
are the only way to do it, and to clant
down through what I would call pejoratively or just in
(19:00):
recognition of the truth, crony capitalism, where the government regulates,
the government tells you what you can have and do.
It constrains competition, it constrains choice, and then you've.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Got the system that we have.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
The only way to sort of fix this is through
empowered and it's true in all things right, Milton Friedman
would be sitting here smiling right empowering me, empowering you,
empowering our wives, our families, our children, and empowered doctors.
Right now, we have too many constraints on doctors and
too many constraints on us for choice.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Free that up and then we can make this work.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
I want to drive this home for our listeners. You
cannot fix the federal budget unless you get a healthier country.
You can't just approach healthcare as a financial problem because
it's people's lives. But when you realize that this is
your data, won't you come in a second? And twenty
twenty three, healthcare spending on America reached four point nine
(20:11):
trillion dollars, seventeen point six percent of the gross domestic product.
Costs are growing about a percent faster than the annual GDP.
It's such a big cost that a third of all
the money the federal government receives is spending healthcare. It's
impossible to talk about getting to a balanced budget until
(20:31):
we deal.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
With health That is one hundred percent correct, We've got
thirteen percent of our total budget, okay, which will be
close to seven trillion dollars this next year.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Okay, So everybody put that in perspective.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Close to seven trillion dollars in twenty five and about
thirteen percent of that is medicare another I don't know
what the percent is of Medicaid, but a sizeable chunk.
I think it's something like, you know, another maybe ten, twelve, thirteen.
So you got a quarter of that. Then you add
veterans in there. Now you're ending up pushing up to
(21:04):
where you're talking about with the third and we just
massively increase veteran spending in the wake of the burn pits.
Now we should have taken care of our veterans of
burn pits. But my point is, to your point, literally,
something like two trillion, two and a half three trillion
of what we're putting out of overyear and seven trillion
is all connected to healthcare. And so if we want
to get deficits down, if we want to stop inflation,
(21:27):
if we want to reclaim the strength of the American
dollar and economy, you have to drive down the prices
in our healthcare system, which again has to go back
through empowering the individual. By the way, we can do
that in Medicaid Medicare. You well know right what we
did in Medicare Advantage, which has some positives and some weaknesses,
(21:48):
but it inserted some competition into the Medicare matrix. That
caused some serious price movement in the right direction, moving
prices down. There are some hiccups with that because it's
in this complexity of Medicare, but we've got to provide
more competition in there. For example, Medicaid you could have
in that robust health savings account model that I put
(22:09):
out there to start with, not just employers putting it
in there, but the government Medicaid subsidies could go into
that same framework, so that an individual can then go
out and go to a direct primary care. I went
to a direct primary care facility in East Austin a
couple of years back, and there are these guys that
were starting it over there because there are musicians and
all of these artists in Austin who didn't have healthcare,
(22:31):
and they said, look, we're just going to do a
DPC model, direct primary care without the insurance company, and
people can come in there and get care and it
was very well received. I need to go follow up
and see how they're doing because they have so many barriers.
But to your point, with the budget, we can get
serious prices driving down if we will change the system
and make it work so we can get savings in
(22:52):
Medicare and medicaid. You don't have to change the benefits
with the respective Medicare with our retirees, but what we
need to do is stretch which what they get with
those dollars.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
If we do that now, we can get over the
next ten years in the budget, we can get all
of that down to a place where we can afford
it Medicaid, Medicare, and also with veterans' health care as well.
And by the way, I have some veterans direct primary
carery models and other things to increase competition, which I
think are adding some value in it as well.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
In your model, if you have this dramatically bigger health
saves account grant, is that taxable income to the employee
or is it outside the tax system.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
That would be tax free to the individual. So the
corporation would take their dollars, they would put it into
the health savings account. That health savings account would be
tax advantaged to the employer for putting into your account
and would not be taxed to you, and the growth
on that account would not be taxed. And if you
transferred that money to your child, that transfer wouldn't be taxed.
(23:49):
Like you would be free to help your family members
as well.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
In terms of helping my grandson, for example, or my daughter.
Does that have to be helped towards a health.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Problem, Yes, the way we designed it.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Of course, you and I both know we can structure
however we want to, but yes, we would put it
in there so that you could give that to your
grandson or your child or whatever. Frankly, the way I
originally drafted it, I said, you should be able to
do it for anybody. If the veteran down the street
needs help, and you have tax advantaged health dollars sitting here,
and you've got one hundred thousand saved up, and that
veteran needs help, and you want to take twenty thousand
(24:24):
and give to that veteran, you ought to be able
to slide it over into their account for health benefits
as a contribution, and then deduct that as a charitable
giving contribution direct to a person on your Street.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I suspect that would really work with people who are
involved in the various sharing ministries you talked about earlier.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
That's right, and that would be hugely beneficial for them,
so that people can move money around and be able
to help individuals out.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Because, like most things that occur, the reason.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Is so hard to get healthcare reform is because nobody
focuses on healthcare prices until it's right in front of them,
and then when it's right in front of them, they go, oh,
my gosh, well I've been paying for insurance.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Isn't it all covered?
Speaker 3 (25:03):
And then they go look at their insurance policy and
they go, well, I've been paying one thousand dollars a
month and my employer's been paying two thousand dollars a month,
but you still want me to pay twenty six thousand
dollars in order to get this service because you know,
my son broke his leg and got a car accident.
And then people go, what the hell, But that's what
we've done. That's not the way it used to be.
And by the way, why are most hospitals, or at
(25:23):
least they used to be saint fill in the blank.
It's because we had a charitable hospital system where churches
got together and said, well, we want to help the poor. Well, great,
well let's create this because it's part of our charitable effort.
We have lost civil society and civil virtue another podcast
for another day, because we've corporatized and governmentized everything instead
(25:44):
of it being community and civil society and charitable giving based.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Oh so, I think the combination of the Trump Revolution,
of Robert Kennedy Junior's commitment to making them Mari get
healthy again, and the budget crisis. I have a hun
much more of your bill is going to become law
this year than anybody would have thought passible six months ago.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Well, nude, I hope so.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
And look, I think this is the area where we
could truly be transformative in visionary. And a lot of
people are just writing off Bobby Kennedy as just being
a reflexive big government liberal on some of these programs,
and I understand, I mean, I get it, but I
think they're missing the truth. I think they're missing the
revolution that's occurring. I think they're missing what's happening. People's
eyes have been opened. They want freedom, they want control.
(26:30):
They're tired of just being told the status quo is
what they have to accept, and that includes what they
put in their body, in both food and medicine, and
it includes the ability to have power to go to
the doctor of their choice and not have to sit
in line at something of the equivalent of the quality
of your post office to go get healthcare through the insurance.
They don't want that, and so I think the opportunity
is very big right now.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
I'm going to ask you back in a couple of months,
because I do believe you're going to be part of
a genuine revolution that leads us to a healthier country,
a dramatically less expensive health system, a more health focus system,
and in that process we'll be taking giant steps back
towards the balanced budget. So you're providing real leadership. Those
(27:11):
years you spent working with people like Rick Perry and
Brooke Rollins and others, you clearly came out of that
as a very innovative thinker and somebody who gets it.
And I'm just delighted you could spend time with.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Us, always happy to do it.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Thanks for always being available to all of us and
providing your wisdom and experience. And let's talk soon about
this and spending and everything more, God bless.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Thank you to my guest representative, Chip Roy. You can
get a link to his new report, The Case for
Healthcare Freedom on our show page at newtorld dot com.
Newtworld is produced by Gingrastry sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive
producers Guardnsei Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork
for the show was created by Steve Penley Special thanks
(27:54):
to the team of ginglishry sixty. If you've been enjoying Newsworld,
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners
of neut World can sign up for my three free
weekly columns at Gingwish three sixty dot com slash newsletter.
I'm newt Gingrich.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
This is neut World
On this episode of Each World. On Wednesday, January twenty second,
Representative Chiproy released a new report entitled The Case for
health Care Freedom, a System for a Healthier America. The
report is a painstakingly researched, forty seven page report on
America's health crisis and how to address it, presenting ideas
(00:25):
on how the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans have the
opportunity to deliver transformational reform to our health care system.
The report asserts that healthcare freedom is this simple idea
that American patients and doctors must be empowered to decide
and provide healthcare, not insurance companies in corporate or government bureaucrats.
(00:46):
We should have the freedom and incentives to make informed,
healthy choices about the food we eat, the medicine we take,
and we should be able to insure ourselves against financial
risk of a health event in a robust, competitive market.
Here to discuss his plan, which I am deeply intrigued with,
to make America healthy again. I'm really pleased to welcome
(01:07):
my guest to Representative Chip Roy. He is currently serving
his third term in Congress representing the Great State of
Texas's twenty first Congressional district, which includes South Austin, North
San Antonio, and the Texas Hill Country. Chip, Welcome and
(01:32):
thank you for joining me on News World.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Mister speaker. Great to be on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
I really appreciate all you do and all you've done
since being in public service, and you're still iniminately involved
with what we're doing, and I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Listen, do you talk about healthcare freedom and your newest report,
could you define what you believe that means for the
average American family.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Yeah, and you just read the description that we put
in the report, but I put it in basic terms.
And I say this as a cancer survivor. Thirteen years
ago I finished my last CHEMOT treat and I think
thirteen years ago last week when I was working for
our mutual friend, Governor Rick Perry, we had just finished
his presidential campaign and frankly, I was helping on yours
for the remaining pieces of it. When I came through that,
and I was blessed to be able to go to
(02:12):
M d Anderson. And as Obamacare has gotten entrenched, which
by the way, it's not just Obamacare, right, it's decades
of having created this monstrosity where you no longer have
anything resembling healthcare that is free market oriented. So my
simple notion is empower patients and doctors with expanded health
savings accounts access to what we call direct primary care,
(02:34):
which means you've got access to a doctor directly, you
have their cell phone number, you actually have care. And
then decouple that from the requirements that we currently have
on insurance and to make sure that we can have
people be able to go get real insurance in the market.
And once you do that, you've now changed the whole
dynamic and you've freed it up so that people can
be able to go out and get the care of
(02:55):
their choice. You've said it very well. We need to
get back to care because we're using health care with
care and it's not the same thing. And I think
what we can do if we are bold and transformative,
would not just help individual families and individuals be able
to go get care from doctors of their choice rather
than insurance companies and bureaucrats, but it would actually drive
(03:16):
down the prices and it would actually help our deficit
and debt pile up. With the federal government, we have
five trillion dollars that we're spending annually on healthcare. You
know that, but yet somehow we spend three times more
per capita than Italy, but we have a five year
shorter lifespan than they do. The average family and their
employer pays twenty five thousand dollars a year for their
(03:37):
quote health insurance, but that insurance is so disconnected from care,
right they're not able to go get care. And now
you've got families that are getting subsidized up to six
hundred thousand dollars in income because the way we so
distorted the system. And all of this has a lot
of corporate crony components in it with respect to how
much the corporations are spending seven hundred and fifty million
dollars spent by Big Healthcare in lobbying the government, which
(04:00):
is more than defense contractors.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Well, your tackling is really important. Now. A key part
of what you would do, if I understand it, is
to use a substantially bigger tax advantage health savings account
so people could shop around in a transparent market. For
me and my family, how would that work?
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Well?
Speaker 3 (04:19):
So for right now, for the average family, you go
spend out of your pocket. Call it eight hundred dollars
and your employer pays sixteen hundred dollars and that money
goes to ETNA or bulieve Cross or whatever, and then
they are giving you so called insurance. But for that
you have a really high deductible, a really high codepay,
and so all of that adds up to something like
(04:41):
twenty five thousand.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Dollars a year.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
But yet you're still spending a lot out of pocket.
But all of that is deductible, tax deductible for your corporations.
So what we want to do is take what is
an existing product that I think something like sixty million
Americans use with health savings accounts, but we want to
make them robust and central to the entire health care operation.
(05:06):
So what that means is you would get the tax
advantaged as the individual when your employer is funding your
health savings accounts, so they would get the tax break,
but it would be equal. So if I'm self employed
and I put money in the account, it's a tax break.
If the employer chooses to give you the money in
the health savings account rather than giving it directly to ETNA,
(05:27):
they get the tax break for that, which means you're
getting the benefit. You've got the dollars. Once you've got
that money is sitting there in a health savings account,
and you can go shop. Now you're on a level
playing field. Right now, I need to get my oil changed.
There are probably fifty places within ten miles a year
that I can go compete and get my oil change.
But if I call up ATNA and get some representative
(05:48):
on the phone, or call up Blue Cross and they're
in Kansas City and they answer the phone, I say,
all right, what doctor can I get? They're going to
give me a list of like three and a fifty
mile radius that are in network.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
I have very few choices.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
They're in a corporate environment and you don't have the
ability to get their cell phone work with them directly.
You have to go through some big website. This allows
us to go out and goes shop for both insurance
but also importantly direct primary care and other models like
health sharing ministries. All of those things would be allowed
to be expensive for you and you'd have control.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Of the care. Now why does that matter? Last point?
Speaker 3 (06:24):
If you look at, for example, a knee replacement, and
you know this well, right, you go to the hospital
and you need your knee replaced, and you say, well,
how much is that going to be? And they said, well,
that's going to be forty eight thousand dollars, but your
insurance will paper x and you're going to pay you
fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, But it's fifty thousand bucks.
If you go to the surgery Center of Oklahoma, they've
(06:45):
got a robust model and they put all their prices
up and it's direct care, and they just give you
the price and it's fourteen five hundred dollars. Now, why
is there that difference in price? Because we've propped up
and funded this robust system where all of the insurance
company and big hospitals and so forth are making the
prices go up, and because we've been intertwined Medicare and
(07:06):
medicaid into all that. If you want price transparency, give
the individuals the money and give them the same tax
breaks the corporations get. So they've got it and they
can use it.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
To take your example, you're going to have an amazing
number of hospitals fight you. I've been an advocate for
years of having a transparent pricing system and it's amazing.
Virtually every element of the health systems against it. They
don't want us to know what we're paying for.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
And that's because that would actually break the system down. Look,
this is part our fault. I represent the Hill Country.
Lindon Johnson's ranch is in that district. This goes back
and if you go look at nineteen sixty four nineteen
sixty five, with the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, everything
that you see with the widening price increases. If you
(07:56):
go look at the charts that show private healthcare funding
versus government, in nineteen sixty four or five, it was
basically ninety five percent private and five percent public, and
those lines started converging, and then in the eighties and
then into the nineties they started converging more, and then
through Obamacare, they've converged almost down to the equal and
then now they are fifty percent. It's basically fifty to
(08:17):
fifty and what is private is highly regulated. Meanwhile, you've
had a what one thousand percent increase in administrators in
my lifetime, but meanwhile doctors have stayed the same. That's
what you see paperwork, bureaucracy, administration. You don't see doctors
and patients where they've got full control over what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
And we've noticed, for example, that the tension for the
doctors leads to a dramatically higher suicide rate for doctors
because they're so conflicted. They go to medical school so
they can focus on you and end up in practice
and are told to focus on the insurance company or
the government bureaucrat.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Well, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
And most doctors went to medical schools because they just
want to provide care. They don't want to have to
go fill out forms and checkboxes, which is what they
spend half their time doing. And again, we've created that
complex maze. And it's not just Obamacare, it's not just
the sort of recent policies.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
This is a.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
Compilation of policies that have added up to this complex system.
But meanwhile, insurance companies, and I'll not try to vilify
insurance companies, but they're making a significant amount of profit
with the government giving them regulatory constraints on any competition.
And so when you do try to have competition, you
meet resistance. So, for example, health sharing ministries, which are
(09:39):
a religious space, but there are some non denominational and
there's some secular versions of these two where they allow
you to share healthcare prices so you can actually help.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Each other out.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
You put money in a pool, somebody needs a certain procedure,
they don't have a thousand bucks, They get it covered,
and it's worked quite well to be an affordable way
for people to afford predictable but yet shocking events to
their fiscal well being.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
But yet we get.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Told state by state, state capital by state capital, oh no,
you can't do that. That's insurance, and we need to
regulate you like anything you do. To try to break
into that so that people can be people and help
each other out, either through charity or by allowing actual
risk management through true insurance to work. Those get beat down.
That's what we have to free up. Healthcare freedom is
(10:27):
freeing that stuff up. Allow me to go to the
doctor of my choice, Allow me to use tax free capital,
allow me to go to health sharing ministries to defray costs,
Allow me to get an insurance product that will roll
the dice based on my risk portfolio. And yes, we
can still have government backstops, but make those as local
and make those as tightly focused as possible in local
(10:47):
and state jurisdictions.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Do you think there has to be federal preemption of
the state regulatory system.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
I think if you can unwind the federal constraints, which
are also problem, but also I think we do have
to break down some of the state at least as
long as federal dollars are involved, which they're all going
to be in our lifetimes, You're going to have to
break down some of the state regulatory mechanisms that frankly
are propping up some of the problems we have where
(11:15):
we end up with massively consolidated hospitals. I saw a
report I'm sure you've seen in like Pittsburgh and some
other parts of the country where there's like no choice, right,
all of the consolidation has gone into like some one
big corporate entity. And anti trust is a complex and
we don't need to get into an anti trust lecture here.
But we don't have competition, that's the bottom line. We
don't and some of the state regulatory structures are part
(11:38):
of that problem. So yes, we need to reduce federal
and state barriers to competition and choice.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Let me switch totally to actual health, because you know
in your report that forty percent of Americans are considered obese,
compared to just ten percent in nineteen fifty, and that
there are health conditions like cancer research both rising but
also occurring earlier and earlier. What do you think has
happened to the actual health of the American people when you.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Go back to when I first came to Congress in
twenty nineteen, I introduced the Healthcare Freedom Act, which was
built around the model we just described.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
That was a product of.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
My years of experience both as a chief of staff
Senator Cruise working for John Cornyn and as a cancer
survivor working for Repairing and at the Texas Public Policy
Foundation where we studied these things with our mutual friend
Brooke Rollins and others.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
And so fast forward.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
And I've had a lot of work involved on that
piece of this in the last two years. I've turned
my focus in addition, not instead of, but in addition
to the front end, like why are we unhealthy? Why
are we having to go seek so much health care here?
And frankly, it's just simple things. When you eat real, good,
natural foods and you don't eat processed foods, When you
(13:08):
eat properly, you eat meats and so forth instead of
high carbs and everything else, you frankly feel better in
your healthier, and it's just pretty obvious, and I think
people are seeing that in RFK Junior Cali means some
of these other folks deserve a great deal of credit
for having really lifted people's attention on that.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Now. I will also note COVID I.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Think was the great shift, and I think it was
the great shift in other areas in terms of the
tyranny of government and the use of the power of government,
but also how we view vaccines and how we view
the power government and telling us what we should or
should not put in our body, and whether or not
we're getting the real facts. Just provide the information for
the American people, true actual data and information, true science.
(13:50):
Make the NIH and CDC, don't make them revolving doors
for big pharma. Let's have actual scientists saying, here's the data,
here's the truth, here's what we know about COVID, know
about the vaccines. You're free to go choose. You're free
to decide. Because my dad had polio. You don't think
for a minute, I'm not truly happy and that we're
blessed that my children could get a polio vaccine, or
(14:11):
I could get a polio vaccine. My dad is still alive,
but he can barely walk, having survived bulbar and spinal polio.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
We're blessed to have those things, but.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
At the same time, we should look at the science
of all of them, including the polio vaccine, so we
know the truth. Because I think something is happening where
we're over medicated, likely over vaccinated. We're certainly eating bad foods,
and I don't want a big government regulatory complex telling
me what to eat. If I want to go eat
a free too pie, I ought to know what I'm eating,
and we ought to inform people. And yes, we probably
(14:42):
should still ban some substances that are in all of
our foods that are killing people because we're spending trillions
on the back end because we're allowing it to happen.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Part of why the so called Mediterranean diet works. They
don't have processed food. The tomatoes taste differently because in
fact they're fresh. The whole process is just different and
leads to very different health outcomes.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
And you feel better. There's a restaurant on Capitol Hill.
I'm not going to give its name out because I
don't want to have a whole bunch of people go
inundator but it's a great restaurant and she flies all
of the ingredients in from Italy and they make it
all right there, and when I eat there, I feel great.
And you can eat bread, but it's real food, it's
real ingredients, and you feel fantastic. It's not always cheaper,
(15:26):
but that's partly because we don't have a market on
every corner with that stuff, because our markets are filled
with Cheetos and processed food.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
How do you incentivize healthy habits?
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Well, I think that's actually the hardest thing. The easiest
thing for us to do would be to convert our
tax policy and free up direct primary care and free
up insurance.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Like we have the.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Power to do that like this, if we have the
willpower to do it, and I think we should. On
the healthy habit side, I think you've got to have
a little bit more of a connection. And I do
think there is a connection here. If you have health
savings accounts and you know how you can use use
them and you can go pay for a doctor and
get care and get good mental health care and other things,
I think that you will be incentivized to be able
(16:08):
to get exercise, to eat the right diet, and so forth,
because you're controlling those dollars and how they're connected to
your health. But the second and the probably most important
thing we can do is put out real good science
based information. You know, when we grew up, as me
a little bit behind you, not too far, we had
the food pyramids, and we had the four food groups,
and we had these things. They were pounded into our head.
(16:31):
Some of that was good, some of that was bad.
Basically I took away from that a well rounded diet
and so forth. But you know, I grew up on
a farm. We live on ten acres. We try to
grow stuff locally, buy locally, and my kids are healthier
for it, and they're reading Cali's books and all that stuff.
But we got to get that more into the bloodstream,
so to speak. Pun intended of the American people in
the schools and through the USDA and hopefully work with
(16:54):
Brook and everybody over there to do that. There needs
to be synergies there to make that happen.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
That gets back to the whole science because all too
often some of those charts get designed by lobbyists working
for specific big groups. One of the things that I
was really surprised why I were a book many years
ago called Saving Lives and Saving Money with that specific
title to make the case that saving lives is moral
and then you get to save money after you save lives.
(17:20):
But I was surprised at how actively hostile the healthcare
system is to innovation, how many interest groups will combine
to kill breakthroughs it will be better for patients, less expensive.
What's your take on all that? How do we break
through that sort of iron wall.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Not to beat a drum too much, I am going
to do this repeatedly. We've got to empower individuals, empower doctors.
They have to serve as the hub in the hub
and spoke of the system. And we've got to make
insurance companies and frankly, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals more trivial. Right,
they need to be sort of on the side of
the system where the patients and doctors are at the
(17:59):
center of the say them. So we put this report
out last week. Well, it's not news in town that
this is where my leanings are. I've had my bill
out for five six years.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
But let me tell you.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
We put the report out with all of the data
on all of the charts and all of the stuff man,
there was a rumbling down on K Street. I got
a lot of friends that are all down there. You
do too right, and you start hearing, oh they you
sure caught some attention down there with some of the
pharma companies and some of the big insurance companies.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
And I said, well, good nute.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
When I got through cancer, there was a trial drug
called brent tuximab which was created and I was on
the trial at MD Anderson. It's a great drug. It's
now the standard of care for Hodgin's lampoma. I had
Stage three.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Great.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
I'm glad, And I said in a hearing once, I
hope that the company that made that is rolling in money,
because I actually do. I want the market to work
and incentivize people to be, as you just said, innovative.
But what I don't want is for the government to
be then saying you must take these drugs or these
are the only way to do it, and to clant
down through what I would call pejoratively or just in
(19:00):
recognition of the truth, crony capitalism, where the government regulates,
the government tells you what you can have and do.
It constrains competition, it constrains choice, and then you've.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Got the system that we have.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
The only way to sort of fix this is through
empowered and it's true in all things right, Milton Friedman
would be sitting here smiling right empowering me, empowering you,
empowering our wives, our families, our children, and empowered doctors.
Right now, we have too many constraints on doctors and
too many constraints on us for choice.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Free that up and then we can make this work.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
I want to drive this home for our listeners. You
cannot fix the federal budget unless you get a healthier country.
You can't just approach healthcare as a financial problem because
it's people's lives. But when you realize that this is
your data, won't you come in a second? And twenty
twenty three, healthcare spending on America reached four point nine
(20:11):
trillion dollars, seventeen point six percent of the gross domestic product.
Costs are growing about a percent faster than the annual GDP.
It's such a big cost that a third of all
the money the federal government receives is spending healthcare. It's
impossible to talk about getting to a balanced budget until
(20:31):
we deal.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
With health That is one hundred percent correct, We've got
thirteen percent of our total budget, okay, which will be
close to seven trillion dollars this next year.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Okay, So everybody put that in perspective.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Close to seven trillion dollars in twenty five and about
thirteen percent of that is medicare another I don't know
what the percent is of Medicaid, but a sizeable chunk.
I think it's something like, you know, another maybe ten, twelve, thirteen.
So you got a quarter of that. Then you add
veterans in there. Now you're ending up pushing up to
(21:04):
where you're talking about with the third and we just
massively increase veteran spending in the wake of the burn pits.
Now we should have taken care of our veterans of
burn pits. But my point is, to your point, literally,
something like two trillion, two and a half three trillion
of what we're putting out of overyear and seven trillion
is all connected to healthcare. And so if we want
to get deficits down, if we want to stop inflation,
(21:27):
if we want to reclaim the strength of the American
dollar and economy, you have to drive down the prices
in our healthcare system, which again has to go back
through empowering the individual. By the way, we can do
that in Medicaid Medicare. You well know right what we
did in Medicare Advantage, which has some positives and some weaknesses,
(21:48):
but it inserted some competition into the Medicare matrix. That
caused some serious price movement in the right direction, moving
prices down. There are some hiccups with that because it's
in this complexity of Medicare, but we've got to provide
more competition in there. For example, Medicaid you could have
in that robust health savings account model that I put
(22:09):
out there to start with, not just employers putting it
in there, but the government Medicaid subsidies could go into
that same framework, so that an individual can then go
out and go to a direct primary care. I went
to a direct primary care facility in East Austin a
couple of years back, and there are these guys that
were starting it over there because there are musicians and
all of these artists in Austin who didn't have healthcare,
(22:31):
and they said, look, we're just going to do a
DPC model, direct primary care without the insurance company, and
people can come in there and get care and it
was very well received. I need to go follow up
and see how they're doing because they have so many barriers.
But to your point, with the budget, we can get
serious prices driving down if we will change the system
and make it work so we can get savings in
(22:52):
Medicare and medicaid. You don't have to change the benefits
with the respective Medicare with our retirees, but what we
need to do is stretch which what they get with
those dollars.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
If we do that now, we can get over the
next ten years in the budget, we can get all
of that down to a place where we can afford
it Medicaid, Medicare, and also with veterans' health care as well.
And by the way, I have some veterans direct primary
carery models and other things to increase competition, which I
think are adding some value in it as well.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
In your model, if you have this dramatically bigger health
saves account grant, is that taxable income to the employee
or is it outside the tax system.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
That would be tax free to the individual. So the
corporation would take their dollars, they would put it into
the health savings account. That health savings account would be
tax advantaged to the employer for putting into your account
and would not be taxed to you, and the growth
on that account would not be taxed. And if you
transferred that money to your child, that transfer wouldn't be taxed.
(23:49):
Like you would be free to help your family members
as well.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
In terms of helping my grandson, for example, or my daughter.
Does that have to be helped towards a health.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Problem, Yes, the way we designed it.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Of course, you and I both know we can structure
however we want to, but yes, we would put it
in there so that you could give that to your
grandson or your child or whatever. Frankly, the way I
originally drafted it, I said, you should be able to
do it for anybody. If the veteran down the street
needs help, and you have tax advantaged health dollars sitting here,
and you've got one hundred thousand saved up, and that
veteran needs help, and you want to take twenty thousand
(24:24):
and give to that veteran, you ought to be able
to slide it over into their account for health benefits
as a contribution, and then deduct that as a charitable
giving contribution direct to a person on your Street.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I suspect that would really work with people who are
involved in the various sharing ministries you talked about earlier.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
That's right, and that would be hugely beneficial for them,
so that people can move money around and be able
to help individuals out.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Because, like most things that occur, the reason.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Is so hard to get healthcare reform is because nobody
focuses on healthcare prices until it's right in front of them,
and then when it's right in front of them, they go, oh,
my gosh, well I've been paying for insurance.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Isn't it all covered?
Speaker 3 (25:03):
And then they go look at their insurance policy and
they go, well, I've been paying one thousand dollars a
month and my employer's been paying two thousand dollars a month,
but you still want me to pay twenty six thousand
dollars in order to get this service because you know,
my son broke his leg and got a car accident.
And then people go, what the hell, But that's what
we've done. That's not the way it used to be.
And by the way, why are most hospitals, or at
(25:23):
least they used to be saint fill in the blank.
It's because we had a charitable hospital system where churches
got together and said, well, we want to help the poor. Well, great,
well let's create this because it's part of our charitable effort.
We have lost civil society and civil virtue another podcast
for another day, because we've corporatized and governmentized everything instead
(25:44):
of it being community and civil society and charitable giving based.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Oh so, I think the combination of the Trump Revolution,
of Robert Kennedy Junior's commitment to making them Mari get
healthy again, and the budget crisis. I have a hun
much more of your bill is going to become law
this year than anybody would have thought passible six months ago.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Well, nude, I hope so.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
And look, I think this is the area where we
could truly be transformative in visionary. And a lot of
people are just writing off Bobby Kennedy as just being
a reflexive big government liberal on some of these programs,
and I understand, I mean, I get it, but I
think they're missing the truth. I think they're missing the
revolution that's occurring. I think they're missing what's happening. People's
eyes have been opened. They want freedom, they want control.
(26:30):
They're tired of just being told the status quo is
what they have to accept, and that includes what they
put in their body, in both food and medicine, and
it includes the ability to have power to go to
the doctor of their choice and not have to sit
in line at something of the equivalent of the quality
of your post office to go get healthcare through the insurance.
They don't want that, and so I think the opportunity
is very big right now.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
I'm going to ask you back in a couple of months,
because I do believe you're going to be part of
a genuine revolution that leads us to a healthier country,
a dramatically less expensive health system, a more health focus system,
and in that process we'll be taking giant steps back
towards the balanced budget. So you're providing real leadership. Those
(27:11):
years you spent working with people like Rick Perry and
Brooke Rollins and others, you clearly came out of that
as a very innovative thinker and somebody who gets it.
And I'm just delighted you could spend time with.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Us, always happy to do it.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Thanks for always being available to all of us and
providing your wisdom and experience. And let's talk soon about
this and spending and everything more, God bless.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Thank you to my guest representative, Chip Roy. You can
get a link to his new report, The Case for
Healthcare Freedom on our show page at newtorld dot com.
Newtworld is produced by Gingrastry sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive
producers Guardnsei Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork
for the show was created by Steve Penley Special thanks
(27:54):
to the team of ginglishry sixty. If you've been enjoying Newsworld,
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners
of neut World can sign up for my three free
weekly columns at Gingwish three sixty dot com slash newsletter.
I'm newt Gingrich.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
This is neut World
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