The March Towards Socialized Medicine. Craig the Healthcare Guru Talks to Armstrong & Getty

Armstrong & Getty's official healthcare guru, Craig Gottwals, provides an update on recent changes to the Affordable Care Act--and what the changes mean to you. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
The Armstrong and Getty Show. So one of Biden's dogs
pooped on the floor. You got Major Biden people. Yeah,
just when you thought you had the we're monitoring the
correct end of the dog. He unleash is from his
hind end. And then we saw the joke earlier that
now some of Major's anti cat tweets from ten years

(00:24):
ago have been found. He's gonna get canceled. Canceled. Fabulous.
Please welcome back to The Armstrong and Getty Show. The
always informative Craig the healthcare Guru, a k a. Craig
Gottwall's attorney at law, benefit consultant and UH for a
long time, Craig the Obamacare lawyer who helped us understand
what was and actually wasn't in Obamacare and how who

(00:48):
was actually going to profit from it, which was completely
accurate and definitely not jiving with the mainstream media. Craig,
how are you, sir? I am well, how are you, gentlemen? Excellent?
Thank despondent. Despondent. You know, Jack, My my twenty year
old daughter has despondent too, because I followed your lead

(01:08):
this morning and I convinced her that President Biden had
outlawed TikTok. She just about died. Yeah. I tweeted at
my nine year old that did you hear President Biden
outlawed minecraft. He hasn't checked his iPod yet. I can't
wait to see the reaction. That is absolutely hilarious. So Craig,
I had to set the record straight before she went
to work, or it would have been it would have

(01:30):
been a long day, I think, Oh yeah, yeah, no kidding.
So hey, you reached out to us earlier this week
with your always interesting real world analysis of healthcare policy
from the administration, and you hit us with some amazing figures.
You start where you think is appropriate. Well, the fun
fun part of this, and we've got we've got a

(01:51):
situation here with a with a with a barking dog
going crazy in the background. So we're going to close
that off. Okay, we can't even hear it. Fun part
of the the COVID Recovery bill, the one point nine
trillion that we just passed. Um, there was a pretty
massive expansion to Obamacare that is, as always under reported,
and so you know, I don't know if we call

(02:12):
this the Obamacare report anymore, or maybe just a government
healthcare the march towards socialized medicine. But there used to
be a provision in Obamacare that said, look, if if
your employers not offering healthcare to you that you can afford,
we will go ahead and give you taxpayer dollars to
afford that healthcare. However, once you get to the point
where you're making four times the federal poverty level, which

(02:33):
is a hundred and six thousand dollars for a family
of four, then you don't get any more taxpayer dollars
because you know you're making over as you ought to
be able to figure out a way to get your
own healthcare. Well, the the new bill just out just
removed all of those restraints. So now anybody, even if
you're making half a million dollars a year, can get

(02:54):
taxpayer dollars to go ahead and buy your Obamacare plan. Insane.
The only yeah, the only restraint is that you are
never going to be required to pay more than eight
and a half percent of your total income. But so
you have to use some real world examples. So I
went in, I grabbed I just grabbed kind of a
random state and city. So in Prescott, Arizona, I pulled

(03:15):
up the exchange plans and for a family of five
with a sixty year old head of household. Again I
used older families to make the point here. So a
family of five with a sixty year old head of
household would have to if bear Obamacare plan in Prescott,
Arizona costs them fifty one dollars per year, and if
that family makes three hundred and fifty thousand port per year,

(03:37):
taxpayers would give them twenty thousand per year to buy
that plan. Hmm. Yeah, Now if if the families make
in half a million, they get dollars from taxpayers to
buy their Obamacare. So what what do you think the
strategy is here? Just get as many people roped into

(04:00):
a subsidi of some sort as possible, knowing it will
never go backward. You've hit the nail on the head, jack.
As as as more people are funneled into taxpayer funded plans,
less people care about what things really cost, and so
it just becomes this situation where yeah, I pay high taxes,
but they give it back to me to buy my healthcare.
So it is what it is. Yeah, you get so

(04:22):
remember you know this? I think the fact I have
to share with you guys every time I'm on your show,
sorry to repeat it, but all the way back in
U c l A. The Health Policy Institute U s
l A did a study that showed of all health
care in America was paid for with taxpayer dollars in

(04:43):
s in blue states. So that means we're only we're
only funding one third, less than one third of healthcare
with private dollars anymore. And then we just passed this
stimulus bill which is gonna take that percentage up even higher.
Right now, half millionaires are going to get taxpayer dollar.
You do need to say that every time you're on,
because I'm as simple to and forget. Yeah, they arguing

(05:05):
over you know, how much government healthcare there should be. Well,
if we're at sixty or seventy of it is already
government health care. I don't know what we're arguing about anymore.
I think those of us who are paying for our
own insurance and healthcare are clinging to the ability to
do that, the right to do that, and not to
be foisted onto some government plan that's going to be

(05:26):
you know, like a government anything. And and those people
Joe in that are increasingly funding all of our health
care or subsidizing all of our health care because another
statistic that people can never ever forget is Medicare, Medicaid
and all the government programs they don't run efficiently. They're
they're incredibly inefficient. In fact, roughly of all dollars running

(05:49):
through Medicare Medicaid are fraud, waste, and abuse. But but
what what what that means is they can't. So health
care is going up at four to six percent per year,
no matter or who you talk to, but Medicare is
only going up at one point seven percent per year.
So what happens, Well, you've got hospitals that are in
a situation where if they want to take Medicare Medicaid,
and almost all of them do, they can't afford it.

(06:12):
That Medicare Medicaid is not even reimbursing what their actual
costs are. So what that means is those of us
that are intent of private plans, we pay two hundred
and forty pc of the cost of a hospital visit
that those on Medicare pay, and that percentage is just
getting worse and worse. So let me stop you. Why
why does the hospitals go ahead and treat the Medicare
and medicate patients then because Medicare Medicaid is the largest

(06:36):
purchaser of healthcare nationwide, and you either opt in or
you opt out. So if if few that do opt out,
they have to say goodbye to the largest buyer of
health care in the country. You're saying, yeah, well so,
so this disparity just gets worse every year. Every year,
I look at this stat and it goes to two
percent this year. It's two meaning those of us in

(06:58):
an ever shrinking third of the economy that are paying
for health care are paying exorbitantly more to fund the
fact that the government system is highly inefficient and underpace providers.
It's it's it's a look, we've we've talked about this before.
I stand by my prediction we will have fully socialized
medicine in America by It's it's this is all going

(07:21):
according to plans. Yeah, yeah, within seven years. You know
what you just pointed out a little bit ago, Um,
I thought, why haven't I heard that from the Republicans?
I mean, why didn't I get that kind of pushback
from the Republican Party. And you can blame the media
for not having any interest in getting the news out,
But I follow a lot of news from the right,

(07:43):
so it could get to me and I still don't
hear it. They just they're not good at fighting back
against this stuff. Right. Craig got Walls is an attorney
at Long Benefit Consultant. He's on the line, Craig, go ahead. Well,
I was gonna say, Jack, they're not They're not good
at it. And um. The other thing you've got to
remember here is that you know, there's plenty of blame
to go around here. The insurance industry is every bit

(08:04):
as much to blame as the government. In this case,
I have to say we were down to four major
national insurers. It's an oligopoly. It's not a free market.
And the way this was, the way this was done
in the recent uh COVID bailout, is to launder that
money through the insurance industry because you're not you're not
putting these newly eligible half millionaires but there are millionaires.

(08:26):
They're just making half a million year. You're not putting
them on Medicare and Medicaid. You're saying, oh, we'll give
you taxpayer dollars to buy these bloated premiums from the
four major insurance companies nationwide. So and remember the insurance
lobby is the first or second biggest lobby in the
United States. So there's a lot of Republicans that are
keeping their mouth shut. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. So let's

(08:50):
get to the bottom line. And we'll talk many times
going into the future, and we'll revisit this topic. But
when we slide further and further to of all medical
payments are going to be through the government, what's that
going to do to medical care in the United States. Well,
all of the all of the trends that you you

(09:10):
hear people complaining about now, longer wait times, your choices,
more bureaucracy, all that stuff is just going to amplify
because right now you still have roughly a third of
health care that is privately funded. Once we get to
the point, and we're really close to that tipping point, folks,
once we get to the point where it's you you know,
privately or publicly funded, you're just going to have more

(09:31):
of that public worker mentality, more of that situation where
wait times go on. You know, you've got waiting lists
for procedures, you get these crazy things like Jack was
talking about, where getting your shot for the COVID vaccine
is is kind of just a crapshoot of a morass
of mess. You know. Yeah, that's what I worry about.
You know, I got my shot because I knew somebody
who gave me a tip, not because I followed any

(09:51):
of the rules. And I'm worried that that's going to
be the way you get your penicillin for your kid,
or or your hip operation or anything else. Well, and
it's a very so yet way to live too. And
I want to point out your story. It's not that
you called in a favor because you're a big famous
radio guy. You just knew a guy who knew a
guy who knew of a pharmacy that often had left overdoses.
So it's like, you know, as send to me to

(10:12):
a Trotsky's fish market because they usually have a little
bass at the end of the day. Because the government,
the lines are out the door for the government food. Joe, Joe,
let me share with you one more thing. I know
we're running out of time, but a couple of years
ago we talked about how the Trump administration passed new
regulations forcing hospitals to disclose the real prices for procedures,
not the not the phony prices, but the prices that

(10:34):
insurance companies actually pay, which was a huge victory for consumers, right,
huge victory for consumers, huge victory, and anyway, that went
into law January one of this year, the Wall Street
Journal just did an investigation and reported that two thirds
of the top hospitals in the country have not yet
complied with that law, and most of them are purposefully

(10:57):
embedding code on their websites to make the price is
unsearchable by search engines like Google. So plenty of blame
to go around here. You've got hospitals hiding the fact
that they charge focus prices, You've got the government working
with them to help them do that. It's it's it's
mobbed up so bad at this point, guys that I
feel bad for my industry when you have then a

(11:19):
few insurance companies making gobs and gobs of money exactly.
This is this is this is the opposite of capitalism.
This is chrony capitalism. This is government with its tentacles
into capitalism and making some rich, picking winners and losers.
When people bitch about the free market, what they're usually

(11:40):
griping about is this, and it's galling. But I don't know,
I couldn't said it better. Joe. That's exactly right when
whenever anybody talks about free market healthcare, reminds them we
don't have that, and we haven't had it for forty
plus years in America. Final observation, our guest is more
responsible keeping us on time than we are. Craig, thanks
a million, and it's it's always great to talk. We

(12:01):
appreciate the perspective. There's this, this is and I'm not
bragging because you get all the credit. This is the
only show in America you can get actual factual discussion
of healthcare policy and how it works. So for better
or worse. Thanks Craig, Well, thank you appreciate it, and
we'll get into the long conversation. I always ask about

(12:22):
the the untethering work from insurance that were headed toward
when it's government healthcare. You know, uh, some people think
that's fantastic. Um, I hope they're right. But I took
a lot of jobs in my life because I wanted
to always have healthcare. It kept me in a certain
path on life because I need to have healthcare. If

(12:44):
I couldn't, if I could have had free healthcare, and
you know, been in a band, or been an artist
or whatever only and not had a real job somewhere,
like when I worked at UPS or a hardware store,
or various jobs that I've taken to make sure I
had insurance I wouldn't have and a lot of people
won't in the future. Well, and combine that with untethering
work from welfare and untethering work from a lot of

(13:05):
other bad consequences. That's one of the reasons why the
West Coast and other places are absolutely clogged with bombs
and junkies, because we've untethered the consequences of not working
from not working far strong and