11-10-25 - 10am - ACH Subsidies

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Michael Michael, great googly movie, son. What in the wide
wide world of sports is going on around here? I
thought that K zero A was a respectable establishment, but
here they got you just a litter and to join
up with a bunch of dad gum goobers. It's a
good thing you've got mister Redby here to fish you
out of that.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Well.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
My earballs are just a tingling with the anticipation for
the mess we're about to meet.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
So you fellas have a droovy day. I bet sion
R I bet they are zero A zero A. That's
right because the number is three zero three, not three
o three. Drives me that it's just one of my
one of my What three three three three three one
zero three three is the text line?

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Keyword, Michael Michael K zero A. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
If you want to send me a text, tell me anything,
ask me anything, tm A or A m A, the
text line is three three one zero three.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Put that is.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Put that on your phone now, just put it in
there and just start it off with Mike or Michael
and just tell me anything or ask me anything. You
can do that too, because those are actually they become
very part part of the program. You may have wondered
why I referred to all of you as goobers. That
comes from my time in Washington, d C.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Because it's not from the candy.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
No, it's not. It's not from the candy. Not from
the candy. You know what I like about the fact
that a Rod's in here trying.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
To record stuff directly between us. It's directly between us,
and I can't.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yeah, that's very very helpful. As I've tried to explain
to people, there is when you worked. For those of
you who don't know, I'm the former under Secretary of
Homeland Security under President George W.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Bush. I don't care what you think about George W. Bush.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
It was an honor to serve any president at that
level in the cabinet.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
So I'm happy to have done that.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
But there was there's this attitude in DC, and it
is a pervasive attitude. And that pervasive attitude is that
all of us, all of us who you know, they
come to us every you know, two years or four years,
whatever the elections like the might be, and they beg
for Oh gosh, you know, it's so good to see you,
mister Brown. Oh, it's so good to see you, mister
A Rod, it's so good to see you, mister redbeerd

(02:13):
And you know, I really am you know, what are
your concerns? Tell me about your concerns and now, you know,
so you think they really care. And so you tell
them I'm really concerned about X y Z and they say, oh,
you know, I am too. You could tell him you're
concerned about you know, mars is going to blow up,
and they say, you know, I'm going to study that.
I'll do a study going on that. And then they'll
conclude your conversation with this. Not only do I need

(02:37):
your vote, but you know, I got that Michael Brown
on the radio and he's really talking, you know, bad
stuff about me. So I really would like for you to,
you know, could you write me a check? You write
me a check for ten dollars one hundred dollars, one
thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, one hundred thousand dollars because
I really need that, because I love god Mother and
apple Pie just.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Like you do.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
And then they go back to d C and then
they forget who did I talk to and they'll turn
their aid who sent emails today? They don't care who
sent the emails. They care about the subject of the emails,
how many left the voicemail, how many made phone calls. Today,
They don't care who it was, unless, of course you're
a big donor you give them a hundred thousand dollars.
But if you gave one hundred dollars, one thousand dollars,

(03:15):
five thousand dollars, whatever it might be in that particular cycle,
they don't really care that much about it.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
And they see.

Speaker 3 (03:23):
Us as goober's now they're just the riff raft that
we have to deal with to go beg for their
vote every two years, four years, whatever it is. And
then they go back to Washington, or they go back
to Colfax and Broadway, the Colorado pollop Bureaus I refer to.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
It, and they just do what they dawn.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
Well, please, unless there's an uprising, and I don't mean
like you know they have against Ice right now, I'm
talking about, unless there is just this massive swell of
opposition to something they're doing. They don't care. They truly don't.
All they care about is reelection. Go back to the
last hour. Why do you think those Democrats suddenly decided

(04:03):
to join with the Republicans to invoke cloture I e.
Shutdown debate so they could eventually get to a vote
on the continuing Resolution. Because they're from battleground states and
they're up for reelection. They're going to be up for
re election in the in the upcoming midterms. And if
you're in a battleground state and you are starting to
get blamed for the shutdown, then they realize.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Oh, the goobers are starting to rise up, and the goobers.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
Are going to, you know, come in and they'll vote
against me if I don't do something. Look at those
numbers I gave you about Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania up three
hundred and eighty thousand Republican registrations. So in Pennsylvania they're
very concerned. Now, a guy like Fetterman, I would put him.
There are a few people that I would put out
there as exceptions. Fetterman, having been through the health crisis

(04:52):
that he went through, probably doesn't really care whether he
gets re elected or not. Although deep down inside, being
a Unit state senator comes with a lot of perks,
and you get a lot of things that other people
don't get. Plus I salary, plus all the benefits of staff.
You get to travel, you get to do all of
those things. So he probably really would like to stay

(05:12):
a senator. But if he had to choose between oh,
being able to speak being a senator, he might choose
to quit and go take care of his health and
his family. He might be an exception. Otherwise, they all
kind of look at you, kind of like, heh, you're
just a goober. And so I refer to ourselves as goober's.

(05:32):
It is a term of endearment. It is not a majority.
I see some on that other text line, which number
I will not mention that you find it offensive, Well,
then you know what, You're probably going to find me
offensive because I live in the real world and I
talk about real issues. I don't care what side of
the isle it falls down on, although I make very

(05:55):
clear which side of the isle I live on. I
live on the right side of the aisle, and so
that tends to skew my perspective. Except having been in
DC for almost six years and having worked at that
kind of level, I understand the inner workings of how
things really go on. So I try to explain that
to you, particularly when I'm kind of going off track.

(06:19):
And you know what I find interesting about radio is
if if I were to. For example, I'm working on
a segment because Trump's thinking about sending us all two
thousand dollars checks, you know, from the tariff revenue. I
think that's a huge mistake and I don't think you
should do it. If and when I talk about that
and I explain why, there will be people in this
audience will go, oh my god, I can't listen to

(06:40):
you anymore because you're anti Trump. There'll be some people
who will say, oh my gosh, listen, he's anti Trump.
I think I'll listen to him. I don't try to
please anyone except to tell you what I really think,
tell you why I think it, and go through all
the reasoning and rationale, and then you can make up
your own mind when the concludes. As many people say

(07:01):
at the end of the day, when the day concludes,
I have to be comfortable that I've told you what
I really believe, and that I give you reasons about
what I believe, and then you can take it from
there and you can do with it whatever you want to.
So one thing I wanted to do this hour is
I wanted to focus on the Affordable Care Act, because
you've heard through at the shutdown that somehow it has

(07:25):
to do with Obamacare subsidies. I want you to think
for yourself for just a moment, what are the Obamacare subsidies?
What do they really do? Is it good or is
it bad? Why do we have it? And you have
to remember, not one Republican, not one Republican, has ever

(07:47):
voted in the affirmative for Obamacare during Obama's term.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
They cram that through.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
Both houses of Congress, the House and the Senate, without
a single republublic can vote. The Affordable Care Act in
essence props up insurers and large hospital systems with subsidies
and tax advantages, and that leads a lot of us
as patients with high premiums skyrocketing out of pocket costs.

(08:21):
And if you look at the publicly available data, it
supports large flows of funds to insurers via these Affordable
Care Acts, so called marketplace subsidies. Then the insurance companies
also get substantial tax benefits, particularly for nonprofit hospitals. And
there are systematically higher prices at hospital outpatient departments than

(08:44):
independent physician offices or you go to an ambulatory surgery center,
for example. So what do these actually fund? What do
the ACA i'll refer to as the ACA. What do
those subsidies actually fund? Have you really ever thought about that?
Have you ever really asked your question? Because you're paying

(09:06):
for it. Never forget, there's nothing free here. So if
there's a subsidy being paid by the federal government to
an insurance company, you're paying for that through your taxes,
and then your children and your grandchildren, your great grandchildren
are paying for it because taxes will necessarily have to
increase if we're going to start covering the ever larger

(09:29):
budget deficits as these subsidies grow. Because when you subsidize something,
you get more of it. If I tell you, for example,
that I'm going to provide widgets to you, and widgets
cost one hundred dollars, but I'm going to provide fifty
dollars of one hundred dollars as a subsidy for you.
Oh you, green vehicles evs. Evs are dead in the marketplace,

(09:52):
really dead. But what happens the government steps in and says, oh,
we'll subsidize your purchase, so people who might not otherwise
purchase an EV go out and do so. For example,
Polis and the Democrats in Colorado decided to extend those
subsidies when Trump got rid of them. Here, so you
pay your pain when you see an EV driving down

(10:13):
the highway until the Colorado subsidies disappear. You're helping pay
that person to buy that car. And I think that's wrong.
I don't think we should do it. So what are
these subsidies that the ACA provides. It's primarily premium tax
credits and cost sharing reductions that are paid to the

(10:35):
insurers directly to the insurers. Now you don't see it
on behalf of the people that enroll in their programs,
and then you get that reconciled through your tax return,
making the payments flow directly to the carriers rather than
you as a consumer as cash. So all of these
ACA related subsidies, what do you think they were in

(10:58):
twenty twenty three? Ninety one billion dollars? What do you
think the estimate is for this year? This is what
the one of the big fights was over. We've gone
from ninety one billion dollars in twenty twenty three is
estimated to be at.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
One hundred and thirty eight billion.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
Dollars in twenty twenty five. Now, these cost sharing reductions
reduce your deductible, your copay, and you're out of pocket
maximums for all lower and moderate income and rollies who
might be who might pick the Silver plan for twenty
twenty five, that's the statutory maximum out of pocket limit

(11:37):
is ninety two hundred dollars for an individual before these
cost sharing reductions are applied. And the cost sharing reduction
plans can lower deductible substantially if but only if you're
under about two hundred percent of the poverty line, So
roughly half almost fifty percent of the people on the

(12:00):
exchange enrollees get some sort of cost subsidy reduction. Well,
that tells me that a large share of marketplace members
in Obamacare are in plans where the insurers receive extra
payments in order to enhance the benefits. Again, that's delivered

(12:22):
to the insurers rather than as cash to the household,
so they get all the benefit up front. And do
you have to reconcile that with your tax return when
you fid your taxes? So how big are these insured
directed flows? The gross federal cost for these ACA subsidies
went from eighteen billion in twenty fourteen to ninety two

(12:43):
billion in twenty twenty three. And as I said, an
estimated one hundred and thirty eight billion this year. Now,
why that reflects both enrollment and richer subsidies under all
of these temporary policy expansions that everybody's been pushing. There's
a flat forty billion dollar cost subsidy reduction figure. Current scoring,

(13:11):
which is how they the Office of Management, Budget and
the General Accounting Office kind of figure out how much
things really cost. That current scoring shows that total marketplace
subsidies are much larger from twenty twenty three to twenty
twenty five, and is estimated at about three hundred and
fifty billion dollars over ten years. If as Democrats want,

(13:35):
they make them permanent. Now what's interesting about these subsidies
is that originally the Democrats, this is the old bait
and switch routine. This is what politics plays out in DC. Oh, look,
we want these subsidies. Back when Obamacare was first being discussed,
we want these subsidies, but we're just gonna be at temporary.

(13:56):
We're just gonna do it temporarily, just temporarily so we
can get through the switchover. So we get through the switchover.
Now people are starting. The insurance companies in particular are
getting the subsidies, they don't want to get rid of them,
so they lobby Congress to keep them. And what does
Congress do. Congress obliges, So then the subsidies stay beyond

(14:17):
then COVID hits, and during COVID they say, well, we've
got to do it during COVID because look, the economy's
gone down, the crapper, we've got to keep doing these,
So they send them through COVID. Then after COVID they say, okay,
now we'll get rid of them, and Republicans say, okay,
in fact, we'll introduce bills to start getting rid of
the subsidies. They introduce a bill to get rid of

(14:39):
all of the subsidies. It doesn't pass because Democrats object, okay,
we'll start trying to transition out of those. Okay, Republicans
present that boom, Democrats kill it. What starts as a
temporary program continues indefinitely, because there is no such thing

(15:01):
as a temporary government program, particularly whether you're getting Let's
just say that you are getting it. Now. Let's let's
take Medicare social Security out of the picture.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
Let's just imagine for a moment.

Speaker 3 (15:15):
That you suddenly are getting your medic your Affordable Care
Act subsidy directly as a cash payment to you. But
you're not very sick, she don't use much of it,
but you still get the subsidy because it's required by law.
So you get a check for let's just pull a
number out of our butt and just say you get
a check at the end of the year for five

(15:35):
thousand dollars. Now next year, regardless of what your personal
situation is, do you want to give up the five
thousand dollars. Ninety nine percent of people will not want
to give up that five thousand dollars. And there isn't
a Republican or a Democrat anywhere except we're starting to
see a few Republicans to say, we can't afford to

(15:57):
keep doing this, so let's eliminate that five thousd dollar payment.
And Democrats starts squeezing, Oh my gosh, you're going to
take away this money from people. And that's when the
fight starts. And that's why you can't get rid of this,
and that's why we have a shutdown, And that's what
the fight's been about. Private insurance, a private not not

(16:19):
someone who may have policies on the exchange, but someone
who has policies on the exchange and privately, and I'm
talking about those who have private policies. Private insurers pay
hospitals far above the Medicare rates on average almost two
hundred percent of Medicare. Cross services outpatient services average about

(16:42):
two hundred and sixty four percent of Medicare.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
So what does that mean?

Speaker 3 (16:47):
Well, don't you, then, if you're an insurance company, want
to drive as many people as possible onto the exchanges
because you're getting reimbursed two hundred and two hundred and
sixty four percent of what Medicare is getting reimbursed. So
you're making more money off reimbursing hospitals because you are

(17:08):
on the exchange. Now, it also indicates that the hospitals
have very strong pricing power based on their hospital systems,
and that supports my contention anyway that consolidation and finance
service drive higher prices. Bottom line is simply this. It

(17:29):
was the full intention of the Affordable Care Act was
to start socializing and nationalizing medicine so that those subsidies,
those direct payments to hospitals would start to become the
fentanyl of medical care. It becomes the opioid of medical
care and they get hooked on it and Democrats don't

(17:51):
want to get rid of it. You have to give
Republicans some consideration, some credit for these saying, hey, can
we at least debate this. That's what the fight's about,
and that's where the money's going. Socialized medicine is the
situation with Michael Brown. Hang tight, I'll be right back.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Hello Michael and Dragon. Good to hear you on K zero.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
Ay, now I don't have to change my radio from
AM to have them.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Anytime I want to hear it. Great luck, you'll need it.

Speaker 4 (18:22):
Thank you. What do you mean now that Michael Brown's
moved over to eight fifty KOA, I guess I'm gonna
have to add another preset to my free to me
iHeartRadio music app.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
That sounds like John Fetterman any sound like he was
in the bathroom? Well, well, why why would Fetterman be
any different? He has to go to the restroom sometimes too,
And you know what do we all do now when
we go to the restrooms, we're always well not in
this building because we don't dare sip anywhere. I do
everything I can to avoid here. But if you have

(18:58):
to go to the restroom or the bathroom. You know,
you take your phone, your iPad.

Speaker 5 (19:02):
But of course, well, of course I've gone into the
bathroom and went, wait a minute, I don't have my phone,
and walk to find my phone and come back. Hey,
this job cannot be completed without my phone.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
Yes see, we've tried to explain to people that this
program is different than any other program because while we're
trying to explain Affordable Care Act subsidies and how bad
they are, we're also concerned about texting or leaving a
talk back while you're doing your business at home in
the bathroom. We'll take them however we can get them.

(19:37):
We were promised affordable care, we were promised freedom to
keep our doctors, and we were promised the system that
worked for people, not corporations. Remember I love that phrase.
Oh you know, I'm for people not profits really, because
if you're not for profits, then you're not gonna stay
in business. Even a nonprofit has to make money in

(20:00):
order to survive. A nonprofit that loses money is going
to go out of existence. A nonprofit simply means you
don't have shareholders that you pay dividends to, so you
have to make up profits to stay in business. It
just drives me batty. So fifteen years later, here's the math.
By the way, I went to corrects one thing. I

(20:21):
have a text that says I'm wrong, and I love
it when I get texted to say I'm wrong. Michael
is from goober number fifty five to fifty four. I
hate to try to correct you.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
No, you don't. You love doing it.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
But Congressman cow cal Ceo, Republican, voted for the ACA
in the House. Seems like the Dems promised him an
approval for a pipeline for his vote. I may be
wrong in that part, but I remember Rush talking about it,
but may have been a different vote. I think it
must have been a different vote because I checked every
source I could, including the venerable New York Times, which

(20:58):
course was never wrong. Not one Republican voted, and I
would be particular here. No Republican in either the House
or the Senate voted yes on the final passage of
the Affordable Care Act, which was passed in twenty ten.

(21:19):
The votes for final passage were entirely along party lines.
All Republicans in both chambers voted no. Now, there may
have been a procedural vote somewhere where this y'ahoo voted
yes on something, but in the final passage no, And
since he was a congressman, it wouldn't have been on

(21:40):
invoking closure to stop debates. So I'm not sure who
the guy is, but all sources indicate otherwise that no,
not one of them did. Let's start with cost sharing
reductions again. If you qualify and pick a silver plan,

(22:00):
sharing reductions lower your deductible and it maxes out your
out of pocket expenses.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
The statutory cap for.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
This year is ninety two hundred dollars for an individual,
and cost sharing reduction can push that burden down a
lot for lower income families, sometimes maybe a few hundred
dollars in deductibles. But remember those cost sharing reduction dollars
land with the insurers who then modify your plan design.

(22:30):
They're not cutting you a check. Now scale that nationally.
Let's scale a big time. Nearly half of exchange in
roll leees receive those csrs today, those cost sharing reductions.
When you add in premium tax credits, marketplace subsidies, that

(22:51):
jumps from eighteen billion in twenty fourteen to ninety two
billion in twenty twenty three. Is I told you are
going to be about one hundred and third eight billion
this year. So the the big debate is whether to
keep those rich subsidies, and that price tag is going
to be three hundred and fifty billion dollars over ten
years if they get to be if they're ever made permanent.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
Well, what about the hospitals.

Speaker 3 (23:15):
Nonprofit hospitals don't pay any taxes that other entities do.
Independent analyzes peg their tax benefits around twenty eight billion
dollars in twenty twenty, about thirty seven billion in twenty
twenty one, across all federal, state, and local exemptions. Now
that's real money for gone revenue that effectively subsidizes hospitals

(23:37):
balance sheets and the bills you see. Well, that depends
on where you get your service. The exact same imaging,
a tolonoscopy or an infusion of some sort costs more
in a hospital outpatient department than in a doctor's office
or an ambulatory surgery center. There are studies all over

(24:00):
the place, across thousands of services that show how these
prices are substantially higher and rising faster, often two times
or more, compared to the community settings. And why is that?
Because it's a subsidy. Why do you think tuition has
gotten so high? Because the federal government is the provider

(24:22):
of the dollars that people go borrow to pay tuition.
So when you know that it's an unlimited amount of
bucket of money out there, well, of course you're going
to increase your price, in this case, tuition, because you
know there's more dollars to chase out there. The same
is true with the subsidies. When you know there are
subsidies out there, you're going to start increasing your prices

(24:43):
because you want to get more subsidies. It is a
basic lack of economic understanding by most Americans that if
they truly understood how these things work, and if they
truly understood that these dollars are going to every year's
budget deficit, and then that budget deficit gets piled onto

(25:03):
the national debt, it stands at what some thirty seven
thirty eight trillion dollars. Now we're in a financial hell hole,
and these yahoo's in Congress just keep going on and
on and on like the intern juger Bunny. They refuse
to admit the truth. They refuse to admit what's really

(25:24):
going on. For example, I told you that Democrat Senator
Shahem New Hampshire.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
She voted in the shutdown. She was on Fox News.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
This morning and then so and in doing so on
Fox News evaded everything about what I just told you.

Speaker 6 (25:43):
Heir for the longest government shutdown in history. After eight Democrats,
including our next guest, voted with Republicans to break the filibuster.
In a key first step, Democratic Senator the Jean Shaheen
wrote us down to talk about it. Senator, thanks so
much for joining us good morning.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
Can you give us a.

Speaker 6 (26:00):
And an idea in our viewers, an idea what happened
behind the scenes to have you Senator King Kin Angus King,
Catherine more Cortez, Master Jackie Rosen, and John Fetterman, as
well as Maggie Hasan and Dick Durban all come together
to get to the sixty threshold.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Can you bring us behind the scenes for that.

Speaker 7 (26:20):
Well, there had been discussions going on really since the
shutdown about how could we work together to end this,
how could we make sure that we can address healthcare
costs for the millions of Americans who are seeing their
healthcare costs rise as the result of the bill that
was passed in the summer that the President wanted, and
so I think this agreement gives us an opportunity to

(26:42):
continue to do that work. We're going to have a vote,
and I believe there are a number of Republicans who
are going to join us in trying to address healthcare
costs for Americans. But we're also turning the government back
on We're making Yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:57):
So far, I'm only about health With the sound bite,
she evades things other than trying to claim that they
want to address health care costs based on everything I've
told you so far. Oh, they're going to address it,
all right, and health care costs will go up.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
Michael.

Speaker 6 (27:16):
You can insult me all you want, but I have
to tell you I have never failed to perform in
the bathroom.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
That is where I shine.

Speaker 5 (27:27):
It's the slip of the tongue that always gets in well.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
And knowing him, I'm sure he does shine in the bathroom,
because if you talk to his commanders, he's not shining whatsoever.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
So there's that.

Speaker 3 (27:41):
Back to Democrat Senator Shaheen on Fox and Friends this morning.

Speaker 7 (27:45):
Making sure that the people of America can get the
food benefits that they need, that air traffic controllers can
get paid, the federal workers are able.

Speaker 5 (27:53):
To come back.

Speaker 7 (27:54):
The ones who are let go that they get paid,
the contractors get paid. That aviation moves for forward.

Speaker 5 (28:00):
So we are going to be.

Speaker 7 (28:02):
Able to continue to fight about healthcare because we're going
to have a vote in December.

Speaker 6 (28:09):
So Senator Chuck Schumier, leader on the Setate, said I
cannot support a continuing resolution that fails to address healthcare.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
I am voting No.

Speaker 6 (28:17):
Did you do this outside leadership? And was there a
big push for you not to join the others and
break the sixty threshold.

Speaker 7 (28:26):
No, we kept leadership informed throughout. And I think it's
important to remember who's responsible for why we got into
this shutdown. We are here because we are concerned about
the healthcare costs rising significantly on millions of Americans.

Speaker 3 (28:43):
And oh, she did not blame Republicans. Now, why is
that important? She also says that they did it in full.
They fully informed the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer about
everything they were doing, and I called totally on that. Oh,
they may have occasionally said, by the way, Chuckie, here's

(29:04):
what we're doing, but that's not how Washington, DC works.
What they were really doing was this. They were caucusing
on their own. They were probably talking in private to
either you know, either the Speaker of the House or
the Majority Whip, somebody in the House about what they
could or could not do, And they were certainly having
some conversations with the Senate Majority of Leader John fun

(29:27):
or somebody on his staff, because in order to break
the logjam, they have to know for certain that whether
it's going to be five of them or eight of them,
whatever the number turns out to be, that they're all
going to stand pat They also wouldn't do this for
two other reasons.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
One is, if.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
You recall, they're all from battleground states, they're all up
for reelection in twenty twenty six, And the longer this
goes on, the more. For example, air traffic control, air
traffic would absolutely become a disaster. Now you may think
that just ten percent of flights being cut is no
big deal, but when a plane doesn't get from point

(30:11):
A to point B, then you can't get a crew
from point A to point B, and those passengers that
no longer can get there they have to find another
way to get there. So now all of the back
end stuff that goes on when you book a ticket
with an airline that's just doubled their expenses. That's just
double the workload that they have because they never know, Okay,

(30:32):
how do we now, how do we now manipulate this
flight schedule so we can maximize crew time and not
have crews where they can't get to where they're going
to go. That would just, like an exponentially get worse
and worse and worse. It wouldn't just be cutting ten
percent of flights, it would be much more than that.

(30:53):
So they knew that it's the closer we got to
the Thanksgiving season, they had to do something because the
blowback was going to fall on them, on the Democrats.
So they sat down and they said, look, can we
just reach a deal where we can at least talk
about the Affordable Care Act and those subsidies? And I'm

(31:13):
sure that Soon said, sure, that's what we've been offering
all along. But if you'll come over here and if
you'll vote with us, then we will do that. They've
effectively now accomplished two things. Makes it there are a
couple of big ass assumptions we have to make here.
One is all they've done. Remember, I want to, I
want to, I want you to remember, all they have

(31:34):
done is they've agreed to invoke cloture, so that means
they've stopped debate. There will still have to be a
motion to bring the Continuing Resolution to the floor. It
may or may not have some changes in it. If
it does, it has to go back to the House
or go to a conference committee. If it does that,

(31:55):
the whole thing starts all over again. So don't get
too excited.

Speaker 6 (32:00):
H