March 31, 2025 • 35 mins
Join Co-Host Graves Baker as he talks about the pharmacy bill, income tax, the dual loyalty bill, and DoE.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
And it's the Consolant Colonel Podcast with Harrison Dollars, where
one man studies against me the wife and Tide of
the Walls, this officer in the battles preserve Ortation. It
is the Conservative Permit.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Nothing else here.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Our hopes and our journeys continue, and here's Harrison Loves.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Conservative Colonel Podcast.
I'll be your host today. My name is Graves Baker
and I am glad to be back with everybody again.
Do want to thank Harrison again for letting me do this.
And before we get started, I want to remind everybody
that the Conservative Kernel Podcast has its own website, so
(01:26):
you can go to that you can get some merch
to support and also find out more about Harrison and I.
We're also on pretty much every platform that you can
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anything you can think of, it's there, so wo'd love
to get some five star ratings on those and also
(01:48):
of course share the episode after you listen to it
or while you're listening to it. But I do want
to thank everybody for tuning back in and we have
some issues going on, of course, there's always news in
this country, but today about Mississippi and also federal You know,
(02:08):
Mississippi has had issues with healthcare for a while. I
mean not only access to it because it's so spread out.
I mean these rural really rural areas almost have nothing,
you know, and it takes so long to get to
somewhere where if you need emergency care that you could
(02:31):
get to it. That's one issue. But today I want
to talk about some stuff going on in the pharmaceutical
side in Mississippi. We've had a lot of issues with
local pharmacies, you know, family owned, independent, you know, not
CBS in those types of places. And we have a
(02:53):
bill that passed the Senate I believe did not pass
the House as well, kind of two separate bills, or
maybe they're the same. This is all new information to me.
I have been talking to people I know in pharmacy.
I do want to give a shout out to Hunt
Howell from my hometown of Batesville, Mississippi. He works for
(03:14):
a local pharmacy and I've gotten a lot of this
stuff I'm going to point out from him, and it's
really a lot. So I'm going to have to do
a deeper dive into this probably after the episode, but
also more information is going to be coming out because
this bill, which I believe officially is Senate Bill twenty
(03:36):
six seventy seven, is going to conference now. So when
that happens, a lot of times, they're just going to
try to take out a couple of little things that
they don't like. And it seems in this instance that
those couple of things that they want to take out
are going to protect our local pharmacies here in the state,
(03:56):
including like the ones that my friend works at. So
a little bit more background information about this has a
lot to do with PBMs, or pharmacy benefit managers. Basically
since the nineteen eighties, they've been a middleman between insurance companies,
you pharmacies, you know, and like a lot of insurance,
(04:21):
you know, people that deal with insurance. You know, you're
already paying end to that a decent amount every month
just to get your regular care, and then you know,
you have to meet all these deductibles, you know, the
insurance thing. It's it's really annoying. But the PBMs themselves
have also grown corrupt, increasing your drug prices and things.
(04:41):
And one way they do that is through spread pricing.
So let's say that a drug actually costs fifty dollars
to buy, and a pharmacy you know, would normally pay that. However,
a PBM they're going to say, well, this actually cost
one hundred dollars instead of fifty, so your price is
(05:03):
going to go it from that, and it hurts the
independent local pharmacies because they are paying more than the
drug is actually I mean, that is not good business.
That is I mean, any person that has worked in
or runs a business knows that that is not good business.
So we're dealing with that. But yet seventy five percent
(05:26):
of the time, these PBMs will pay the pharmacy less
they paid for the drug. Obviously, they also get paid
late a lot, a lot from what I'm hearing. There
was also an audit done on the PBMs here in
Mississippi that they are paid between eight and twenty two
times more than an independent pharmacy for the exact same drug.
(05:51):
So not only are they paying more than the drug
actually costs just to get it, but they are also
not being paid at all. Getting These guys are getting
eight to sometimes twenty two percent a profit of what
these guys are the small guys are getting so it
really is terrible on that end. Another thing, PBMs have
(06:15):
also gotten to the point where it's basically a monopoly.
Now it's not just one business, but there's three that
own eighty percent of the market for this stuff. At
CBS care, Mark, Express Scripts and optimar X control eighty
percent of the market. And of course, based off the
numbers I've said, they're prioritizing profits over patient access because
(06:39):
they're not covering the scripts that independent pharmacies they are
making you. Basically, they're forcing you to say, hey, you
have to go get your script filled here. You can't
get your script filled at you know, this local pharmacy
that you've been going to for thirty years. Now you
have to go to CVS. Well, I don't have a
(06:59):
cv US an hour then you know it's an hour
away from me. Ah, it's too bad. That's that's who
we do business with. You got to go there to
get your medicine. So it just makes everything, not only monetarily,
but everything your your access is going to get harder.
These local places are going to close if we don't
(07:21):
get this bill passed. And I'll tell you why it
is because the Senate Bill SB twenty six to seventy
seven is to address the issues with the PBM, and
now it's in conference, of course, but that leaves these
local pharmacies very vulnerable to being stripped of those protections
(07:42):
that were originally in the bill, and you're going to
see a lot more closed. By the way, there's been
an average of twenty pharmacies closing weekly a week, not
a month, not a year, a week for the last
four years in Mississippi. So, like I said at first,
has problems with healthcare substantially already and that's shows in
(08:07):
those numbers. But it's only gonna get worse because what
they're going to try to do I hope not, but
we'll see, and I'll come back to this in a
later episode, is that they will probably try to take
out all of this good stuff for these local pharmacies
because oh, well, where's all the money going. It's going
to these big companies. Yes, that's corruption. That is how
(08:27):
this works in our in our country for a while. Now,
sadly new administration is working on some stuff, but we
need action in Mississippi on this. Now. This bill would
ban spread pricing where they say, oh it costs one
hundred dollars, but it's actually fifty. Yeah, it would ban that.
(08:49):
It would also ban forcing you to go to a
specific pharmacy, so you don't have to go to that
CBS it's an hour or more away anymore. And it
will require that these local pharmacies get paid on time
by these PBMs. So I don't see a single thing
in any of this that is actually bad for the
(09:10):
people of Mississippi. Well, i'll tell you what. You know,
what they're saying. They're saying, well, we don't want to
pass this, we gotta do something about it because it'll
increase your premiums twenty to thirty dollars a month. Well,
truth is, your rates on both medicine and premiums are
already going up because of the PBMs. You take them
(09:33):
out of it, your rate's gonna go down. But also,
let's say it did go up twenty to thirty dollars
a month, that you spend that every single day on
food in one day, even if you're a single person
like me, So that is not that big of a
(09:55):
do you know, Okay, it takes away one meal for
me per month. Well, first off, I don't even believe
that increase is going to happen. I think it would
be a reverse. But even if that's the case, you're
still helping out the community. You're not. You know, it's
not just a pharmacy closing. It's more than that. You know,
(10:17):
it's your access to care, to get your medicine is
going to be farther away and farther away and farther away,
and those people are going to be losing their jobs,
so you're hurting the job market as well. We need
this bill to pass, is what I'm getting at. You know,
there's no reason that with the problems we already have
(10:40):
here in the state, that we should not be passing this.
And you know, I've heard about this issue for the
past couple of weeks and I've seen people posting about it,
advocating for this, you know, saying, hey, let's reach out
to these people. I am going to pledge to you
right now. I'm going to reach out to these people
in the House and maybe even in the Senate if
(11:02):
I need to, but regardless, I will be reaching out
to these people. So I encourage all of you to
do the same thing, and hopefully, you know, we can
get this done. Now, another topic that we have in
(11:25):
Mississippi is the Mississippi income tax. I know, it sounds good,
and of course it does. Nobody wants to pay income tax,
you know, but there's kind of a catch to this one.
It's gonna take twelve years to phase out. And yes,
the governor has already signed this, but it will take
(11:47):
twelve years to phase it out. So over twelve years
you're gonna be slowly paying less income tax. But then
you're also gonna have increased taxes. And you know, other places,
like the gas tax has already gone up a little
bit apparently pass the gas tax and grocery tax, which
(12:08):
we already have the highest grocery tax in the country.
That is probably going to go up as well. I
don't know if they have started working on that yet
or not. Getting rid of the income tax like nine
other states have sounds like a good thing if you
(12:28):
do it the right way. Uh, you know, you could say, well,
you're getting rid of taxes, you have to tax somewhere
else to get that money. Right. Investments, look at what
Trump is doing with the federal economy right now. Trump
has already secured three trade in investments. That's not going
to have an immediate impact. But guess what if the
next president doesn't screw it up, that's going to help
(12:51):
us tremendously each person, all of those things that by
the way, these people have to create jobs as well
with that money. You know, it's not just going to
thin air like the last administration was having money due
So in Mississippi, which we have I will say had
an increase the last four years in investments to our state,
(13:13):
we are now within the top twenty and economic outlook
in the country. So we've done a better job at that.
But you know why say get rid of the income
tax just to have no benefit really from it. You
know what if we end up paying more because of
the increases in other places, both with the Senate bill
(13:35):
for the pharmacy stuff and this we're just going to
have to see over time, you know what happens. We
need to look at the percent increase versus decrease. We
need to see what they take out of the Senate
bill for pharmacy. There's a lot of things that right
now are just in the works and we have to
see exactly how they pan out. But I can tell
(13:55):
you that if you are going to have free trade
and investments. Mississippi could just get five hundred billion more.
You know, maybe a trillium would be a tough bet.
But if we just get some more and continue to
do that and build our state up because we have
plenty of land, there's plenty of land to build these
(14:17):
big plans, you know, whatever it is. There's plenty of
room in this state to build hospitals, to build more pharmacies,
to get more investments in regular business, manufacturing oil. What
about oil. We have a golf we could be drilling more,
(14:39):
get more contracts for that in the state, bring in
more revenue. You know, there's things that we can do
that we just are not doing right now. Instead we
put this income tax thing. We want to say, well, yeah,
we're getting rid of your income tax. You're going to
work hard and keep your money more of it. Well,
we know y'all are raising these other taxes. So again,
(15:01):
over twelve years of phasing this out, we will see
how it actually goes. But as of right now, I
don't really have a ton of confidence, you know, Harris
and I, Harrison and I agree on that that you know,
there there is going to be something else coming up
(15:21):
that could make it where we actually are spending more
money on taxes. But you know what that would mean.
The way that that doesn't happen is if they are
actually responsible with our money and with their thinking when
they as these years go on and we do tax stuff.
(15:41):
But who's gonna sit here and say I trust the
government to be frugal with my money. They're not, you know,
they're not. It doesn't matter if eighty percent of the
people in the House say I'm gonna do this, it
ain't gonna happen. You know, something else is always going
to happen. And for another example, even when people in
(16:06):
the state of Mississippi want something, they'll still shut it down.
We voted for legal marijuana here in the state or
medical sorry we have medical now. But at the time
that we voted for medical marijuana, we had passed it
through a vote. It got passed completely. Supreme Court of
(16:29):
the miss of Mississippi said, now, now it doesn't matter.
Y'all voted for it and it was passed through everything,
and it's all good. No, y'all ain't doing it well.
Of course, later on as that thing went to repeals
and other judgments, it got overturned. Yeah, our Supreme Court
got overturned, which they should have because we voted for it.
(16:50):
Whether you agree with you know, legal medical marijuana or not,
we did vote for it as citizens had one more
than three fifty percent of the vote. So the Supreme
Court should not be able to say you can't do that. Uh,
there's probably some If there's some liberals listen, then you're
(17:11):
probably thinking about another thing with the night, the National
Supreme Court, which I will not get into on this episode,
but I could depunk where you're going with that too. However,
please reach out to these people in the Mississippi Senate
and the House, you know, doesn't matter their position. Heck,
even called the governor, you know, leave him, it doesn't matter.
(17:32):
Send emails. Let's get this thing for the pharmacies past.
And let's also keep an eye on what they're doing
with our taxes after they've passed this income tax bill.
So with that, I've got some more topics coming up,
but I will take a quick commercial break real fast,
so everybody, again, thank you for tuning in and we'll
(17:54):
be right back alrighty, welcome back to the Conservative Colonel podcast.
(18:25):
Thanks for staying with me, and I will remind you
once again that you can catch us on pretty much
any platform that you want to catch a podcast on,
any podcasts, but go to ours and give us a
five star rating. Also, you can go to our website.
I believe it is the Conservativecernel dot com. But you
can go there. Just look up the Conservative Colonel podcast online.
(18:46):
It'll probably pop up and you can buy merch Please
do that. We got some cool stuff and even more coming.
But onto our next topics. We've got a new thing
that's going into I believe in the federal government in
the House or maybe Senate. But it's a new bill
(19:08):
that'll be called the Dual Loyalty Disclosure Act. And basically
what that's going to be is, if you have somebody
who's a dual citizen aka il han Omar, you know,
a citizen of Somalia who is running for office, they
have to disclose every country that they have citizenship in,
(19:30):
even if it's more than just you know here and
somewhere else like her. Really, I don't even trust that
she might be might have another one too, But I
think this is a good thing. It's a good start,
I'll say, because it might need to go deeper. I
haven't read the whole thing. So, you know, I don't
(19:50):
know if it's going to bring up any other you know,
let's say that you're affiliated with hamas not just a country,
you know. I think we should also do that where
we have to prove that they're not also loyal to
some terrorist group somewhere. And there's probably more things you
(20:11):
could throw in there too besides just that, but I
think it'd be a good idea to just really have
a deep dive on that. If you're not only an
American citizen who was born here, which by the way,
you can't even run for president if you were not
born in the United States, I think it should kind
of be the same with every other office. Maybe that's
(20:32):
just me. I doubt it though. The issue is when
you have people coming over here like ilhan Omar, who
by the way, there's something going on with her brother
as far as citizenship in the first place, I'm not
going to get into all of that, but you have
instances of that. Look at the United Kingdom slash England
(20:55):
right now. They have multiple Muslim mayors and you're gonna say, okay, well,
what's the issue that they have people that believe in
a different religion well, let me tell you something. You
want to talk about culture. Culture of the West is
(21:16):
being destroyed. Okay, Western culture is Christianity, it is. I
don't have a problem with someone who believes in their
Muslim faith. Okay. What I do have a problem with
is when you're letting people flood your country and they
(21:36):
start taking power, which is what happened there. You know,
like these people who were not from your country are
now running your cities, and okay, sure they have citizenship now,
but it goes it's a much bigger issue than that,
when when you're seeing what's happening in the UK right
(21:59):
now now, throwing people in jail for a tweet saying
that you know, oh well I'm tired of the illegal
immigration people coming into the UK. You go to jail,
You criticize a politician, you go to jail. It's absolutely ridiculous.
And you cannot tell me that this has nothing to
(22:21):
do with the fact that all this foreign powers coming in.
What isn't there They're one of their prime ministers or
somebody that was in the Parliament that was extremely high up,
maybe the Speaker of the House or whatever you call them,
was also a Muslim. Okay, This has nothing to do
with race. If you think that you can't be white
(22:42):
and be a Muslim, then you need to wake your
brain up. This has nothing to do with race. I'm
not talking about a certain color of people. I'm talking
about an ideology versus an ideology of a country. You
were tearing apart the country at it seems, and when
people complain about it, they're going to jail. And you
(23:02):
just see the policies that are happening. Besides that, you
know the UK right now, it's you know, it could
happen here where all you see in the UK now,
just like in America, these people that have no jobs
(23:22):
that came from another country, just protesting twenty four to seven,
and it is just so annoying. You know, protesting is fine.
You can protest all you want to. And when you're
burning tesla's and you're supporting terrorist groups and you are
locking Jewish people and you know, beating them on university campuses,
(23:48):
locking them into rooms, barricading it. You know, yelling death
too is real and Jews and stuff, and you're painting
swasti on tesla's and you're all for everybody coming across
the border, which by the way. If you don't have
a border, you don't have a country, You just have
land that whatever happens happens. Okay, they if we had
(24:15):
lost the election, it would have gotten a lot worse.
We would have had people like the UK coming in
and taken over. You see what Illah and Omar did
in Minnesota. She has completely turned that into you know,
there's like these pockets of Somalians they like run cities
like Okay, well you know white people have run. No,
(24:38):
this is not the same thing. This is not the
same thing as a foreign country coming in people from
a foreign country and just taking over your cities. Trenda
a Wagua, Aurora, California, Colorado. This, all of this stuff,
along with what they're doing to Tesla's this is all.
(24:58):
It goes hand in hand with just letting whoever do
whatever get whatever position of power they want by coming
across illegally and acting like they are only loyal to
your country, when in reality not even close. So just
keep all that in mind, and I hope that this
bill does go a little bit deeper than just showing okay,
(25:21):
I'm also a citizen of this country. We need to
be very careful about who we let in, who we
get into, let get into power. It's not about shutting
down people just because we don't like them. It's about
making sure that we maintain not only but the founding
fathers wanted this country to be, but what it has
(25:45):
been and could be because things have gone downhill. Now
we are starting to get out of that, but we
let this border invasion happen again and let foreign people
that came across illegally get positions of power like in
the UK. I'm telling you this country, it will go
downhill so fast, and you will wonder what happened and
(26:09):
how it went wrong so quick. Well, we've been trying
to tell you all the whole time.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Now.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Our last topic today has to do with the Department
of Education. As you've seen, Trump signed an executive order
to dismantle it or they, you know, really close to
dismantling it. What he's doing is grants, you know, tuition, food,
(26:36):
all that stuff, by the way, are already mostly covered
by a different department. The Department of Agriculture takes care
of the food in schools. It's going to stay there.
The Department of Commerce deals with transportation to public schools.
It's going to stay there. There's another side of this,
(26:59):
the grants. That is another department that I can't remember
right now. But you're not gonna lose your fast fill,
You're not gonna lose your pel grant. None of that's
going away. What is going away is the three trillion
dollars that we've spent over the last forty five years
on the Department of Education that did not increase our
scores in most categories, have actually gone down below what
(27:22):
it was back then. Makes sense. You see how many
well you know what I'm getting that what you see
every day in this country. And also fascism. I think
we need to be teaching that literally again because the
people who claim that we are fascists or Elon is
a fascist, and Trump is a fascist, and j D
(27:45):
is a fascist, and you're a fascist, SEP, you're a Republican,
they don't even know what it means. They overuse it,
and they're the ones that do the fascist stuff, burning
down cities, government buildings. Over two thousand police officers were
killed in two thousand twenties. In the George Floyd writes,
from my point is their point. They're spray painting and
(28:10):
keying Tesla's who. By the way, Elon doesn't drive every
one of those that these are innocent people. They are
spray painting swastikas. How ironic is that they're not the
Nazis but we are, and yet they are spraying that
insigney on everything. They are the ones that are coming
(28:31):
their face, going around creating violence all the time. And
I don't want to hear about January sixth. There was
one casualty that day and it was not an officer.
Two billion dollars worth of damage. And I'm getting off
on the subject. I'm sorry, but that's just proof of
the Department of Education. These people are getting indoctrinated that
(28:52):
the money we have spent on it, and the money
their parents have spent on getting their education has done nothing,
and it has done so getting rid of this is
a great thing. The Department of Education did not pay
a single teacher directly. It did not employ anybody at
(29:14):
your university or your public school. They did not do
any of that. They got three trillion dollars over forty
five years to quote, you know, what's the word I'm
trying to think of. They just were supposed to give policy.
You know, this is what we need to focus on.
(29:35):
That's really all they were supposed to do. Three trillion dollars,
and look where it got us. We went from number
one in the world in education now we're like sitting
about thirty, maybe worse than that. Now, all that money
did nothing when the states were in charge of it, which,
by the way, that money now goes to the states instead,
(29:55):
because we still have that setup, like instead of it
going to the Department of Education, we split it in
the states. You're welcome. This is how it's supposed to be.
The government should not be choosing who, you know, what
we're teaching our kids. And the bill in the Senate,
it's sponsored by Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Bernie Moreno,
(30:19):
and I haven't looked into it yet, but here's the
basic gist of it is that Trump signed the executive order,
just like Jimmy Carter did to establish it in nineteen
seventy nine. However, Congress then after Jimmy Carter signed his
executive order, then went and passed an actual bill and
(30:40):
made it law through Congress. So now even though that
Trump has signed this, that the the dismantling has begun.
The cutting of funds to it, you know, the making
sure that you know, cutting certain things in it, but
making sure that everything else that is not already in
a different department, it's put into a department to keep
(31:01):
going and then the rest of the money goes to
the states. However, to do that, you need Congress to
fully abolish it so you can start it. But what's
going to happen if Congress doesn't actually pass this to
abolish it and to do what's already being done through
executive process. You're gonna look four years from now, if
(31:22):
we don't win that election and the Democrats are just
going to completely wipe it off. They're going to bring
it back. You know, they're going to bring back the
Department of Education. And hopefully we do get this done
so we don't have to wait that long to see results.
Because if we get this passed and the Senate first,
then the House back to the President. If we get
(31:46):
that passed, I believe if we do it quick enough,
we will see significant improvement just over the next two
and a half three years, when you know, more not
just test scores but everything else. You know, how many
people are showing up the school you know, I mean,
get the indoctrination out of it, for sure. We don't
(32:07):
need kids being taught to hey, you can change your
gender at four years old. Saw a video today this dad,
and I'm not making this up. It's on TikTok so
you can find it. He was talking to his son.
His son said he's a girl. He was like, well,
you're not a girl, you're a boy. Who told you that?
(32:28):
Oh well, mommy told me that. Okay, I know that's
not a teacher. How was his to do, the Department
of Education. But this happens in schools too. Okay, I'm
just using one example right here. The court system now
because the mother divorced him, and the mother is saying
that he has to get gender transition surgery. This kid
(32:51):
is very, very very young. I'm talking, you know, six seven,
first grade, second grade, max, kindergarten even maybe, so his
mom is telling him that he's a girl. Well, it
went to court for child support. Now the dad is
(33:13):
supposed to pay child support to get the transition surgery.
He's being forced into that or else he goes to
jail for not paying child support. We should not have
to pay child support for that. And a lot of
times teachers are also teaching that. You've seen the videos
of the teachers that have all that stuff in the
room and talk about how they talk about it to
(33:33):
the kids. So overall, getting rid of this is not
a waste of money. It's gonna be good for our students.
Your state. If you're mad about it and you live
in California, why because your state now gets even more
power to teach them that. If you want to, you know, whatever,
you do that in your state, we don't do it.
(33:54):
In mind, that is how it's supposed to work in
this country, especially when it comes to educating your kids.
So that is just about all I have for today,
ladies and gentlemen. I hope you do take what I
said about the pharmacy stuff. You take everything seriously. But
if you're in Mississippi right now, just really really pay
(34:18):
attention to the pharmacy stuff because it will affect all
of us. Whether you work in pharmacy or not, it
will affect all of us. And income tax just be ready,
be looking for the other stuff that may increase, that
will increase and what else they do. Keep your eye
on that, keep yourself informed, and you know, like I
(34:40):
always say, don't stop fighting. We gotta win the midterms
in twenty six. We gotta win the presidential election in
twenty eight. But it's a constant process. Don't just wait
until the end of the election to start getting worried.
Start now, you'll be less worried then. So thanks for
tuning in. Please share this out, give us a five
(35:01):
star rating on your podcast catcher app of choice, check
out our website, get some merch and let everybody know
about what I said today. Everything is backed up by facts.
If I said I didn't know something for sure, I
told you so. Thanks for tuning in, Thanks for listening
to the Conservative Kernel podcast, and we will catch you
(35:22):
all next week. God bless America, God bless Mississippi.
And it's the Consolant Colonel Podcast with Harrison Dollars, where
one man studies against me the wife and Tide of
the Walls, this officer in the battles preserve Ortation. It
is the Conservative Permit.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Nothing else here.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Our hopes and our journeys continue, and here's Harrison Loves.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Conservative Colonel Podcast.
I'll be your host today. My name is Graves Baker
and I am glad to be back with everybody again.
Do want to thank Harrison again for letting me do this.
And before we get started, I want to remind everybody
that the Conservative Kernel Podcast has its own website, so
(01:26):
you can go to that you can get some merch
to support and also find out more about Harrison and I.
We're also on pretty much every platform that you can
get your podcast on, whether it's Apple Podcasts, Spotify, I mean,
anything you can think of, it's there, so wo'd love
to get some five star ratings on those and also
(01:48):
of course share the episode after you listen to it
or while you're listening to it. But I do want
to thank everybody for tuning back in and we have
some issues going on, of course, there's always news in
this country, but today about Mississippi and also federal You know,
(02:08):
Mississippi has had issues with healthcare for a while. I
mean not only access to it because it's so spread out.
I mean these rural really rural areas almost have nothing,
you know, and it takes so long to get to
somewhere where if you need emergency care that you could
(02:31):
get to it. That's one issue. But today I want
to talk about some stuff going on in the pharmaceutical
side in Mississippi. We've had a lot of issues with
local pharmacies, you know, family owned, independent, you know, not
CBS in those types of places. And we have a
(02:53):
bill that passed the Senate I believe did not pass
the House as well, kind of two separate bills, or
maybe they're the same. This is all new information to me.
I have been talking to people I know in pharmacy.
I do want to give a shout out to Hunt
Howell from my hometown of Batesville, Mississippi. He works for
(03:14):
a local pharmacy and I've gotten a lot of this
stuff I'm going to point out from him, and it's
really a lot. So I'm going to have to do
a deeper dive into this probably after the episode, but
also more information is going to be coming out because
this bill, which I believe officially is Senate Bill twenty
(03:36):
six seventy seven, is going to conference now. So when
that happens, a lot of times, they're just going to
try to take out a couple of little things that
they don't like. And it seems in this instance that
those couple of things that they want to take out
are going to protect our local pharmacies here in the state,
(03:56):
including like the ones that my friend works at. So
a little bit more background information about this has a
lot to do with PBMs, or pharmacy benefit managers. Basically
since the nineteen eighties, they've been a middleman between insurance companies,
you pharmacies, you know, and like a lot of insurance,
(04:21):
you know, people that deal with insurance. You know, you're
already paying end to that a decent amount every month
just to get your regular care, and then you know,
you have to meet all these deductibles, you know, the
insurance thing. It's it's really annoying. But the PBMs themselves
have also grown corrupt, increasing your drug prices and things.
(04:41):
And one way they do that is through spread pricing.
So let's say that a drug actually costs fifty dollars
to buy, and a pharmacy you know, would normally pay that. However,
a PBM they're going to say, well, this actually cost
one hundred dollars instead of fifty, so your price is
(05:03):
going to go it from that, and it hurts the
independent local pharmacies because they are paying more than the
drug is actually I mean, that is not good business.
That is I mean, any person that has worked in
or runs a business knows that that is not good business.
So we're dealing with that. But yet seventy five percent
(05:26):
of the time, these PBMs will pay the pharmacy less
they paid for the drug. Obviously, they also get paid
late a lot, a lot from what I'm hearing. There
was also an audit done on the PBMs here in
Mississippi that they are paid between eight and twenty two
times more than an independent pharmacy for the exact same drug.
(05:51):
So not only are they paying more than the drug
actually costs just to get it, but they are also
not being paid at all. Getting These guys are getting
eight to sometimes twenty two percent a profit of what
these guys are the small guys are getting so it
really is terrible on that end. Another thing, PBMs have
(06:15):
also gotten to the point where it's basically a monopoly.
Now it's not just one business, but there's three that
own eighty percent of the market for this stuff. At
CBS care, Mark, Express Scripts and optimar X control eighty
percent of the market. And of course, based off the
numbers I've said, they're prioritizing profits over patient access because
(06:39):
they're not covering the scripts that independent pharmacies they are
making you. Basically, they're forcing you to say, hey, you
have to go get your script filled here. You can't
get your script filled at you know, this local pharmacy
that you've been going to for thirty years. Now you
have to go to CVS. Well, I don't have a
(06:59):
cv US an hour then you know it's an hour
away from me. Ah, it's too bad. That's that's who
we do business with. You got to go there to
get your medicine. So it just makes everything, not only monetarily,
but everything your your access is going to get harder.
These local places are going to close if we don't
(07:21):
get this bill passed. And I'll tell you why it
is because the Senate Bill SB twenty six to seventy
seven is to address the issues with the PBM, and
now it's in conference, of course, but that leaves these
local pharmacies very vulnerable to being stripped of those protections
(07:42):
that were originally in the bill, and you're going to
see a lot more closed. By the way, there's been
an average of twenty pharmacies closing weekly a week, not
a month, not a year, a week for the last
four years in Mississippi. So, like I said at first,
has problems with healthcare substantially already and that's shows in
(08:07):
those numbers. But it's only gonna get worse because what
they're going to try to do I hope not, but
we'll see, and I'll come back to this in a
later episode, is that they will probably try to take
out all of this good stuff for these local pharmacies
because oh, well, where's all the money going. It's going
to these big companies. Yes, that's corruption. That is how
(08:27):
this works in our in our country for a while. Now,
sadly new administration is working on some stuff, but we
need action in Mississippi on this. Now. This bill would
ban spread pricing where they say, oh it costs one
hundred dollars, but it's actually fifty. Yeah, it would ban that.
(08:49):
It would also ban forcing you to go to a
specific pharmacy, so you don't have to go to that
CBS it's an hour or more away anymore. And it
will require that these local pharmacies get paid on time
by these PBMs. So I don't see a single thing
in any of this that is actually bad for the
(09:10):
people of Mississippi. Well, i'll tell you what. You know,
what they're saying. They're saying, well, we don't want to
pass this, we gotta do something about it because it'll
increase your premiums twenty to thirty dollars a month. Well,
truth is, your rates on both medicine and premiums are
already going up because of the PBMs. You take them
(09:33):
out of it, your rate's gonna go down. But also,
let's say it did go up twenty to thirty dollars
a month, that you spend that every single day on
food in one day, even if you're a single person
like me, So that is not that big of a
(09:55):
do you know, Okay, it takes away one meal for
me per month. Well, first off, I don't even believe
that increase is going to happen. I think it would
be a reverse. But even if that's the case, you're
still helping out the community. You're not. You know, it's
not just a pharmacy closing. It's more than that. You know,
(10:17):
it's your access to care, to get your medicine is
going to be farther away and farther away and farther away,
and those people are going to be losing their jobs,
so you're hurting the job market as well. We need
this bill to pass, is what I'm getting at. You know,
there's no reason that with the problems we already have
(10:40):
here in the state, that we should not be passing this.
And you know, I've heard about this issue for the
past couple of weeks and I've seen people posting about it,
advocating for this, you know, saying, hey, let's reach out
to these people. I am going to pledge to you
right now. I'm going to reach out to these people
in the House and maybe even in the Senate if
(11:02):
I need to, but regardless, I will be reaching out
to these people. So I encourage all of you to
do the same thing, and hopefully, you know, we can
get this done. Now, another topic that we have in
(11:25):
Mississippi is the Mississippi income tax. I know, it sounds good,
and of course it does. Nobody wants to pay income tax,
you know, but there's kind of a catch to this one.
It's gonna take twelve years to phase out. And yes,
the governor has already signed this, but it will take
(11:47):
twelve years to phase it out. So over twelve years
you're gonna be slowly paying less income tax. But then
you're also gonna have increased taxes. And you know, other places,
like the gas tax has already gone up a little
bit apparently pass the gas tax and grocery tax, which
(12:08):
we already have the highest grocery tax in the country.
That is probably going to go up as well. I
don't know if they have started working on that yet
or not. Getting rid of the income tax like nine
other states have sounds like a good thing if you
(12:28):
do it the right way. Uh, you know, you could say, well,
you're getting rid of taxes, you have to tax somewhere
else to get that money. Right. Investments, look at what
Trump is doing with the federal economy right now. Trump
has already secured three trade in investments. That's not going
to have an immediate impact. But guess what if the
next president doesn't screw it up, that's going to help
(12:51):
us tremendously each person, all of those things that by
the way, these people have to create jobs as well
with that money. You know, it's not just going to
thin air like the last administration was having money due
So in Mississippi, which we have I will say had
an increase the last four years in investments to our state,
(13:13):
we are now within the top twenty and economic outlook
in the country. So we've done a better job at that.
But you know why say get rid of the income
tax just to have no benefit really from it. You
know what if we end up paying more because of
the increases in other places, both with the Senate bill
(13:35):
for the pharmacy stuff and this we're just going to
have to see over time, you know what happens. We
need to look at the percent increase versus decrease. We
need to see what they take out of the Senate
bill for pharmacy. There's a lot of things that right
now are just in the works and we have to
see exactly how they pan out. But I can tell
(13:55):
you that if you are going to have free trade
and investments. Mississippi could just get five hundred billion more.
You know, maybe a trillium would be a tough bet.
But if we just get some more and continue to
do that and build our state up because we have
plenty of land, there's plenty of land to build these
(14:17):
big plans, you know, whatever it is. There's plenty of
room in this state to build hospitals, to build more pharmacies,
to get more investments in regular business, manufacturing oil. What
about oil. We have a golf we could be drilling more,
(14:39):
get more contracts for that in the state, bring in
more revenue. You know, there's things that we can do
that we just are not doing right now. Instead we
put this income tax thing. We want to say, well, yeah,
we're getting rid of your income tax. You're going to
work hard and keep your money more of it. Well,
we know y'all are raising these other taxes. So again,
(15:01):
over twelve years of phasing this out, we will see
how it actually goes. But as of right now, I
don't really have a ton of confidence, you know, Harris
and I, Harrison and I agree on that that you know,
there there is going to be something else coming up
(15:21):
that could make it where we actually are spending more
money on taxes. But you know what that would mean.
The way that that doesn't happen is if they are
actually responsible with our money and with their thinking when
they as these years go on and we do tax stuff.
(15:41):
But who's gonna sit here and say I trust the
government to be frugal with my money. They're not, you know,
they're not. It doesn't matter if eighty percent of the
people in the House say I'm gonna do this, it
ain't gonna happen. You know, something else is always going
to happen. And for another example, even when people in
(16:06):
the state of Mississippi want something, they'll still shut it down.
We voted for legal marijuana here in the state or
medical sorry we have medical now. But at the time
that we voted for medical marijuana, we had passed it
through a vote. It got passed completely. Supreme Court of
(16:29):
the miss of Mississippi said, now, now it doesn't matter.
Y'all voted for it and it was passed through everything,
and it's all good. No, y'all ain't doing it well.
Of course, later on as that thing went to repeals
and other judgments, it got overturned. Yeah, our Supreme Court
got overturned, which they should have because we voted for it.
(16:50):
Whether you agree with you know, legal medical marijuana or not,
we did vote for it as citizens had one more
than three fifty percent of the vote. So the Supreme
Court should not be able to say you can't do that. Uh,
there's probably some If there's some liberals listen, then you're
(17:11):
probably thinking about another thing with the night, the National
Supreme Court, which I will not get into on this episode,
but I could depunk where you're going with that too. However,
please reach out to these people in the Mississippi Senate
and the House, you know, doesn't matter their position. Heck,
even called the governor, you know, leave him, it doesn't matter.
(17:32):
Send emails. Let's get this thing for the pharmacies past.
And let's also keep an eye on what they're doing
with our taxes after they've passed this income tax bill.
So with that, I've got some more topics coming up,
but I will take a quick commercial break real fast,
so everybody, again, thank you for tuning in and we'll
(17:54):
be right back alrighty, welcome back to the Conservative Colonel podcast.
(18:25):
Thanks for staying with me, and I will remind you
once again that you can catch us on pretty much
any platform that you want to catch a podcast on,
any podcasts, but go to ours and give us a
five star rating. Also, you can go to our website.
I believe it is the Conservativecernel dot com. But you
can go there. Just look up the Conservative Colonel podcast online.
(18:46):
It'll probably pop up and you can buy merch Please
do that. We got some cool stuff and even more coming.
But onto our next topics. We've got a new thing
that's going into I believe in the federal government in
the House or maybe Senate. But it's a new bill
(19:08):
that'll be called the Dual Loyalty Disclosure Act. And basically
what that's going to be is, if you have somebody
who's a dual citizen aka il han Omar, you know,
a citizen of Somalia who is running for office, they
have to disclose every country that they have citizenship in,
(19:30):
even if it's more than just you know here and
somewhere else like her. Really, I don't even trust that
she might be might have another one too, But I
think this is a good thing. It's a good start,
I'll say, because it might need to go deeper. I
haven't read the whole thing. So, you know, I don't
(19:50):
know if it's going to bring up any other you know,
let's say that you're affiliated with hamas not just a country,
you know. I think we should also do that where
we have to prove that they're not also loyal to
some terrorist group somewhere. And there's probably more things you
(20:11):
could throw in there too besides just that, but I
think it'd be a good idea to just really have
a deep dive on that. If you're not only an
American citizen who was born here, which by the way,
you can't even run for president if you were not
born in the United States, I think it should kind
of be the same with every other office. Maybe that's
(20:32):
just me. I doubt it though. The issue is when
you have people coming over here like ilhan Omar, who
by the way, there's something going on with her brother
as far as citizenship in the first place, I'm not
going to get into all of that, but you have
instances of that. Look at the United Kingdom slash England
(20:55):
right now. They have multiple Muslim mayors and you're gonna say, okay, well,
what's the issue that they have people that believe in
a different religion well, let me tell you something. You
want to talk about culture. Culture of the West is
(21:16):
being destroyed. Okay, Western culture is Christianity, it is. I
don't have a problem with someone who believes in their
Muslim faith. Okay. What I do have a problem with
is when you're letting people flood your country and they
(21:36):
start taking power, which is what happened there. You know,
like these people who were not from your country are
now running your cities, and okay, sure they have citizenship now,
but it goes it's a much bigger issue than that,
when when you're seeing what's happening in the UK right
(21:59):
now now, throwing people in jail for a tweet saying
that you know, oh well I'm tired of the illegal
immigration people coming into the UK. You go to jail,
You criticize a politician, you go to jail. It's absolutely ridiculous.
And you cannot tell me that this has nothing to
(22:21):
do with the fact that all this foreign powers coming in.
What isn't there They're one of their prime ministers or
somebody that was in the Parliament that was extremely high up,
maybe the Speaker of the House or whatever you call them,
was also a Muslim. Okay, This has nothing to do
with race. If you think that you can't be white
(22:42):
and be a Muslim, then you need to wake your
brain up. This has nothing to do with race. I'm
not talking about a certain color of people. I'm talking
about an ideology versus an ideology of a country. You
were tearing apart the country at it seems, and when
people complain about it, they're going to jail. And you
(23:02):
just see the policies that are happening. Besides that, you
know the UK right now, it's you know, it could
happen here where all you see in the UK now,
just like in America, these people that have no jobs
(23:22):
that came from another country, just protesting twenty four to seven,
and it is just so annoying. You know, protesting is fine.
You can protest all you want to. And when you're
burning tesla's and you're supporting terrorist groups and you are
locking Jewish people and you know, beating them on university campuses,
(23:48):
locking them into rooms, barricading it. You know, yelling death
too is real and Jews and stuff, and you're painting
swasti on tesla's and you're all for everybody coming across
the border, which by the way. If you don't have
a border, you don't have a country, You just have
land that whatever happens happens. Okay, they if we had
(24:15):
lost the election, it would have gotten a lot worse.
We would have had people like the UK coming in
and taken over. You see what Illah and Omar did
in Minnesota. She has completely turned that into you know,
there's like these pockets of Somalians they like run cities
like Okay, well you know white people have run. No,
(24:38):
this is not the same thing. This is not the
same thing as a foreign country coming in people from
a foreign country and just taking over your cities. Trenda
a Wagua, Aurora, California, Colorado. This, all of this stuff,
along with what they're doing to Tesla's this is all.
(24:58):
It goes hand in hand with just letting whoever do
whatever get whatever position of power they want by coming
across illegally and acting like they are only loyal to
your country, when in reality not even close. So just
keep all that in mind, and I hope that this
bill does go a little bit deeper than just showing okay,
(25:21):
I'm also a citizen of this country. We need to
be very careful about who we let in, who we
get into, let get into power. It's not about shutting
down people just because we don't like them. It's about
making sure that we maintain not only but the founding
fathers wanted this country to be, but what it has
(25:45):
been and could be because things have gone downhill. Now
we are starting to get out of that, but we
let this border invasion happen again and let foreign people
that came across illegally get positions of power like in
the UK. I'm telling you this country, it will go
downhill so fast, and you will wonder what happened and
(26:09):
how it went wrong so quick. Well, we've been trying
to tell you all the whole time.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Now.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Our last topic today has to do with the Department
of Education. As you've seen, Trump signed an executive order
to dismantle it or they, you know, really close to
dismantling it. What he's doing is grants, you know, tuition, food,
(26:36):
all that stuff, by the way, are already mostly covered
by a different department. The Department of Agriculture takes care
of the food in schools. It's going to stay there.
The Department of Commerce deals with transportation to public schools.
It's going to stay there. There's another side of this,
(26:59):
the grants. That is another department that I can't remember
right now. But you're not gonna lose your fast fill,
You're not gonna lose your pel grant. None of that's
going away. What is going away is the three trillion
dollars that we've spent over the last forty five years
on the Department of Education that did not increase our
scores in most categories, have actually gone down below what
(27:22):
it was back then. Makes sense. You see how many
well you know what I'm getting that what you see
every day in this country. And also fascism. I think
we need to be teaching that literally again because the
people who claim that we are fascists or Elon is
a fascist, and Trump is a fascist, and j D
(27:45):
is a fascist, and you're a fascist, SEP, you're a Republican,
they don't even know what it means. They overuse it,
and they're the ones that do the fascist stuff, burning
down cities, government buildings. Over two thousand police officers were
killed in two thousand twenties. In the George Floyd writes,
from my point is their point. They're spray painting and
(28:10):
keying Tesla's who. By the way, Elon doesn't drive every
one of those that these are innocent people. They are
spray painting swastikas. How ironic is that they're not the
Nazis but we are, and yet they are spraying that
insigney on everything. They are the ones that are coming
(28:31):
their face, going around creating violence all the time. And
I don't want to hear about January sixth. There was
one casualty that day and it was not an officer.
Two billion dollars worth of damage. And I'm getting off
on the subject. I'm sorry, but that's just proof of
the Department of Education. These people are getting indoctrinated that
(28:52):
the money we have spent on it, and the money
their parents have spent on getting their education has done nothing,
and it has done so getting rid of this is
a great thing. The Department of Education did not pay
a single teacher directly. It did not employ anybody at
(29:14):
your university or your public school. They did not do
any of that. They got three trillion dollars over forty
five years to quote, you know, what's the word I'm
trying to think of. They just were supposed to give policy.
You know, this is what we need to focus on.
(29:35):
That's really all they were supposed to do. Three trillion dollars,
and look where it got us. We went from number
one in the world in education now we're like sitting
about thirty, maybe worse than that. Now, all that money
did nothing when the states were in charge of it, which,
by the way, that money now goes to the states instead,
(29:55):
because we still have that setup, like instead of it
going to the Department of Education, we split it in
the states. You're welcome. This is how it's supposed to be.
The government should not be choosing who, you know, what
we're teaching our kids. And the bill in the Senate,
it's sponsored by Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Bernie Moreno,
(30:19):
and I haven't looked into it yet, but here's the
basic gist of it is that Trump signed the executive order,
just like Jimmy Carter did to establish it in nineteen
seventy nine. However, Congress then after Jimmy Carter signed his
executive order, then went and passed an actual bill and
(30:40):
made it law through Congress. So now even though that
Trump has signed this, that the the dismantling has begun.
The cutting of funds to it, you know, the making
sure that you know, cutting certain things in it, but
making sure that everything else that is not already in
a different department, it's put into a department to keep
(31:01):
going and then the rest of the money goes to
the states. However, to do that, you need Congress to
fully abolish it so you can start it. But what's
going to happen if Congress doesn't actually pass this to
abolish it and to do what's already being done through
executive process. You're gonna look four years from now, if
(31:22):
we don't win that election and the Democrats are just
going to completely wipe it off. They're going to bring
it back. You know, they're going to bring back the
Department of Education. And hopefully we do get this done
so we don't have to wait that long to see results.
Because if we get this passed and the Senate first,
then the House back to the President. If we get
(31:46):
that passed, I believe if we do it quick enough,
we will see significant improvement just over the next two
and a half three years, when you know, more not
just test scores but everything else. You know, how many
people are showing up the school you know, I mean,
get the indoctrination out of it, for sure. We don't
(32:07):
need kids being taught to hey, you can change your
gender at four years old. Saw a video today this dad,
and I'm not making this up. It's on TikTok so
you can find it. He was talking to his son.
His son said he's a girl. He was like, well,
you're not a girl, you're a boy. Who told you that?
(32:28):
Oh well, mommy told me that. Okay, I know that's
not a teacher. How was his to do, the Department
of Education. But this happens in schools too. Okay, I'm
just using one example right here. The court system now
because the mother divorced him, and the mother is saying
that he has to get gender transition surgery. This kid
(32:51):
is very, very very young. I'm talking, you know, six seven,
first grade, second grade, max, kindergarten even maybe, so his
mom is telling him that he's a girl. Well, it
went to court for child support. Now the dad is
(33:13):
supposed to pay child support to get the transition surgery.
He's being forced into that or else he goes to
jail for not paying child support. We should not have
to pay child support for that. And a lot of
times teachers are also teaching that. You've seen the videos
of the teachers that have all that stuff in the
room and talk about how they talk about it to
(33:33):
the kids. So overall, getting rid of this is not
a waste of money. It's gonna be good for our students.
Your state. If you're mad about it and you live
in California, why because your state now gets even more
power to teach them that. If you want to, you know, whatever,
you do that in your state, we don't do it.
(33:54):
In mind, that is how it's supposed to work in
this country, especially when it comes to educating your kids.
So that is just about all I have for today,
ladies and gentlemen. I hope you do take what I
said about the pharmacy stuff. You take everything seriously. But
if you're in Mississippi right now, just really really pay
(34:18):
attention to the pharmacy stuff because it will affect all
of us. Whether you work in pharmacy or not, it
will affect all of us. And income tax just be ready,
be looking for the other stuff that may increase, that
will increase and what else they do. Keep your eye
on that, keep yourself informed, and you know, like I
(34:40):
always say, don't stop fighting. We gotta win the midterms
in twenty six. We gotta win the presidential election in
twenty eight. But it's a constant process. Don't just wait
until the end of the election to start getting worried.
Start now, you'll be less worried then. So thanks for
tuning in. Please share this out, give us a five
(35:01):
star rating on your podcast catcher app of choice, check
out our website, get some merch and let everybody know
about what I said today. Everything is backed up by facts.
If I said I didn't know something for sure, I
told you so. Thanks for tuning in, Thanks for listening
to the Conservative Kernel podcast, and we will catch you
(35:22):
all next week. God bless America, God bless Mississippi.
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