July 1, 2025 • 11 mins
Even though Senator Rand Paul just played golf with President Donald Trump, the president could not persuade Sen. Paul to vote in favor of the BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL. It passed anyway.
Sen. Paul was one of three Republican senators who voted against the BBB, and happily explained his decision on WHAS Radio.
We also discussed the benefits of tariffs (Rand Paul opposes them) and winnowing out certain undeserving Medicaid recipients, and whether Gov. Andy Beshear's claims of 35 rural hospitals is fact or hysteria.
Sen. Paul was one of three Republican senators who voted against the BBB, and happily explained his decision on WHAS Radio.
We also discussed the benefits of tariffs (Rand Paul opposes them) and winnowing out certain undeserving Medicaid recipients, and whether Gov. Andy Beshear's claims of 35 rural hospitals is fact or hysteria.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So anyway, thanks to them for putting me on and
helping me celebrate forty years in this particular job. Let's
bring in you, as Senator Ran Paul Hey Ran, Welcome
back forty years.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
How could you possibly have been working anywhere for forty years?
I know you're not nearly that old, are you.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
It's astounding and I'm still going to go another forty
I'm thinking.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
All right, well, good luck Louisville. Forty more years of
Terry Minors. If you can take.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
It, appreciate it. Senator I saw your tweet a little
while ago. Obviously you're one of the three Republican senators
who voted against the Big Beautiful Bill as it's labeled,
and you wrote that you met with the Vice President
reiterated your offer to vote for the bill if it
included a ninety percent reduction in the debt ceiling. Tell
me more about that.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
You know the tax cuts I'm for. I voted for
the tax cuts in twenty seventeen, making them permanent. The
idea of expensing and making expensing immediate is really good
to the economy. So this is like if you're in
construction and you buy a two hundred thousand dollars bulldozer.
You don't have to expense it over five years to
pay it off. You can do it in one year.
(01:10):
That way, if you're doing well in business, you expense
it one year and you buy another bulldoze or the
next year. It is very much a good encouragement for
the economy. So I'm for all that. But then what
they did to this bill is they made it a
lot harder for conservatives like me to support. They added
in over five hundred billion dollars in new spending, and
that new spending is just not a good idea when
(01:30):
we're already running a two trillion dollar deficit. So that
and they decided to add or raise the debt ceiling
the borrowing limit by five trillion, which really kind of
indicates what's going to happen over the next two years.
They plan on borrowing five trillion dollars. More So, for
those reasons, I couldn't vote for the bill. But up
until the last minute, I was trying to figure out
(01:51):
a way that I could. I met you know, I've
been up now for like thirty hours. Trade never got
to better, even got a change in clothed in the
last two days. But I did meet with the Vice
President in the capitol. He came in to break the
time and they were debating which way to go. There
was one senator they need, they wanted votes from, and
(02:11):
she wanted just more money for her state, more pork,
more you know, earmarks, And what I wanted was just
less debt for the country and for every individual. And
it was a trade off back and forth. They considered
my offer of voting for it so we could get
the bill over the hump, but in the end they
chose just to feed more subsidies into the bill, which
(02:33):
actually made it a little bit worse from my perspective.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Was the other Senator Murkowski you're referencing.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, and she ended up getting, you know, hundreds of
millions of dollars for welfare for Alaskans. But you know,
that's not really the answer to the situation. The answer
is trying to create more jobs and have less people,
you know, less people in the wagon and you know,
more people outside working hard to you know, to keep
(03:01):
the engine of the economy going.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Right. That's what many people are talking about is the
notion of medicaid. Some people say they're saving medicaid. You
keep people out of it, who don't who shouldn't be
entitled to it because of various reasons. How do you
feel about the Medicaid part of this bill.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
There are some people who, by no choice of their own,
just can't afford their medical care. People have kidney failure,
people with diabetes sometimes who weren't able to work during
their career, or you know, were born with a bad disease.
And those people's society can take care of through Medicaid.
But what we don't need is a nineteen year old,
strapping young man or woman who's physically capable to be
(03:46):
on Medicaid one. They don't do as well health The
people on Medicaid have worse health outcomes and those on
private insurance. And so the debate gets I think disjointed,
and people say, oh, you don't want people to have
health care. No, I'd rather them have private health care
and private jobs. And I think works important part of
everybody being mentally healthy and staying away from so many
(04:09):
of the bad things in life that are out there drugs, alcohol,
et cetera. I think works an important thing to keep
people away from that. So I think what we should
do is the able bodied people need to go to work.
And what happened with Obamacare is the federal government promised
to pay for all the new able bodied people with
(04:30):
higher incomes one hundred percent of the bill. So the
states expanded Medicaid and said, oh, yeah, we'll put all
these new people on Medicaid because we don't have to
pay anything the federal government is going to pay. And
the federal government, you know, of course, doesn't have any money.
They've got a printing press though, you know, the Federal
Reserve just prints it up. But in the end, it's
led to this massive debt. And it's not for lack
(04:54):
of compassion that we want to do something about it.
But when we run this massive debt, the inflation that
comes from printing up the new money actually hurts the
poor people that people pretend that they're trying to help.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah, it's at COVID levels, right, the medicaid, and so
we haven't been able to back that down. It's like
we invited a bunch of people in during COVID and
now it's time for them to get on their own.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, the spending levels went from four trillion at the
beginning of COVID to seven trillion and to put in perspective.
We bring in about five trillion in taxes and we
spend seven trillion in spending. So it just this mismatch
can't go on forever. And it is kind of a
bait and switch too, because the free stuff they offer
(05:40):
to our poorer citizens, it isn't really free. Everybody pays
for it to inflation, and so a lot of times
people say, well, gosh, the government offered me all this
good stuff. It seemed to be free, But how come
I'm just as poor as I was five years ago.
It's because of the inflation eats away at the substance
of benefits or at the substance of low wage jobs.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Indeed, we're speaking with Senator Ran paul Is Governor Andy
Bashier blowing smoke when he says they'll have to shut
down thirty five rural hospitals in Kentucky with these Medicaid changes.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
No, I think there's been a struggle for rural hospitals,
you know, and I'm from a smaller community. I've traveled
out and worked in some of these smaller hospitals. The
evolution of what's happening in hospital care, for better or worse,
is the bigger hospital has been gobbling up the smaller hospitals.
So it's one way to make the system work. So
(06:35):
if you know Louisville has a profitable hospital and they
go out an hour away to a small town and
they buy the smaller hospital, what happens is the more
serious diseases heart attack, strokes, will get referred in, and
even the small hospital doesn't necessarily make a profit, it
ends up being profitable for the big hospital because of
the referrals, in the existence of the you know, referral
(06:58):
chain that develops over time, and that's probably the future
of how the rural hospitals will make money over time.
But there are advantages to having rural hospitals. I remember
when my father in law have had a heart attack,
he told.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Me, and we're losing a signal their senator.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
I'm back now, yeah, there you go. My father in law,
he used to always joke, he said, you know, if
I have a heart attack, just going past the local
hospital and take me down to Nashville. But when he
did have a heart attack, he wouldn't he would have died,
he wouldn't have made it, and he ended up living
another fifteen twenty years. But because of that local hospital
saved his life. So I think we want these local
(07:39):
hospitals to exist, but it can't be through subsidies. It
has to be through self sufficiency, and we need to
remove obstacles. The hospitals and the doctors need to be
paid more. So what we have to figure out is
how we have a reasonable amount of people on Medicaid.
If everybody's on Medicaid, the hospital loses money. If twenty
percent of the people are on medica, the hospital can
(08:01):
make money. And that's true of really all of the
hospitals we really need to be Our goal needs to
be to have Medicaid for those who cannot provide it
for themselves and have bad diseases and can't afford it,
and for almost everybody else, we need to get them
on as much private insurance as possible. That's how the
hospitals will survive.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
You played golf with President Trump in the last few days.
How much pressure was there for you to move to
his side of the ledger on the big beautiful bill?
Speaker 2 (08:29):
You know, not that much. We get along pretty well
on the golf course. He's a great golfer. I enjoy
playing with him. He's competitive. We usually play a match
play reminds me of you know, our matches between you
and Yarmouth and I and Junior Bridges a while ago.
We need to try that again, except for unfortunately Junior
has left us. But he was a great force for
(08:51):
Louisville and a great philanthropist, and I definitely will miss
Junior Bridgeman.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Do you concede putts to Trump just because you feel
like you have who.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
You know? Me? I wouldn't do that. I would make
your putt at out now. The way match play works,
as you know, people do concede putts and some people say, oh,
that's not right. Well, in match play, that's part of
the game. It's any putt your opponents will concede. But
I don't do it just because he's the president. You
know things that within reason. If he gave you a
(09:22):
four foot putt on the last hole, which is generous,
you probably reciprocate. But that's the way it would be
in any game, if if you and I were playing
out there in match play, it ends up being if
it's a friendly game, you know you you give, you
give putts and uh, it's a it's a quicker game.
It's less of a game of you know, uh, standing
there and wobbling over a foot putt like they do,
(09:44):
and you know the PGA, but it is it's it's
still it's an honest way of playing.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Last thing for you, Senator, are you seeing any change
in your feelings about tariffs. We seem to see an
economic bump out of some of these tariffs that are
in play now.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I think we haven't seen the full effect yet, and
I'll be more than willing to compliment President Trump if
they weren't. My fear is is that you're going to
see the price rises on things that are tariff later
in the year. And still I get a lot of
people in business coming up to me. People will build
houses saying the woods more expensive, the steel's more expensive.
I get farmers telling me that their exports are down.
(10:23):
In this bill, they actually put more ag subsidies. So
one of the expenditures in the bill, one of the
increases in federal spending, was to give farmers money who
were being hurt by the tariffs. But one reason why
the tariffs may be worse in the fall is that
if you have clothing for jackets or sports jackets made overseas,
(10:44):
they're still being sold. They have a contract for several
months to be sold at a certain price. When that
contract expires, there'll be a new contract based on the
new price. And so if the prices go up through tariffs,
ultimately that price has to be passed on to the consumer.
I think right now we're collecting the tariffs, but we
haven't seen the full impact of the price is going up. Still,
(11:06):
even though Walmart's starting to have more stuff made in America,
still sixty percent of the things you buy Walmart are
made overseas, and so there's going to be a high
king prices. The other thing about the tariffs is so
far they're bringing in some revenue, but not an extraordinary amount.
I think it's like seventy eighty billion last year at
(11:27):
this time, and I think it's maybe one hundred and
fifty billion. So it's sixty or seventy billion more, but
in the scheme of things, not enough to balance the budget.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Understood. Really appreciate the time, Senator. We will get out
and do another charity golf match. Sometimes let's do it.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Thanks Jerry.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Great talking to you, Senator Ran Paul, and we're back
in a minute on News Radio eight forty whas
So anyway, thanks to them for putting me on and
helping me celebrate forty years in this particular job. Let's
bring in you, as Senator Ran Paul Hey Ran, Welcome
back forty years.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
How could you possibly have been working anywhere for forty years?
I know you're not nearly that old, are you.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
It's astounding and I'm still going to go another forty
I'm thinking.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
All right, well, good luck Louisville. Forty more years of
Terry Minors. If you can take.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
It, appreciate it. Senator I saw your tweet a little
while ago. Obviously you're one of the three Republican senators
who voted against the Big Beautiful Bill as it's labeled,
and you wrote that you met with the Vice President
reiterated your offer to vote for the bill if it
included a ninety percent reduction in the debt ceiling. Tell
me more about that.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
You know the tax cuts I'm for. I voted for
the tax cuts in twenty seventeen, making them permanent. The
idea of expensing and making expensing immediate is really good
to the economy. So this is like if you're in
construction and you buy a two hundred thousand dollars bulldozer.
You don't have to expense it over five years to
pay it off. You can do it in one year.
(01:10):
That way, if you're doing well in business, you expense
it one year and you buy another bulldoze or the
next year. It is very much a good encouragement for
the economy. So I'm for all that. But then what
they did to this bill is they made it a
lot harder for conservatives like me to support. They added
in over five hundred billion dollars in new spending, and
that new spending is just not a good idea when
(01:30):
we're already running a two trillion dollar deficit. So that
and they decided to add or raise the debt ceiling
the borrowing limit by five trillion, which really kind of
indicates what's going to happen over the next two years.
They plan on borrowing five trillion dollars. More So, for
those reasons, I couldn't vote for the bill. But up
until the last minute, I was trying to figure out
(01:51):
a way that I could. I met you know, I've
been up now for like thirty hours. Trade never got
to better, even got a change in clothed in the
last two days. But I did meet with the Vice
President in the capitol. He came in to break the
time and they were debating which way to go. There
was one senator they need, they wanted votes from, and
(02:11):
she wanted just more money for her state, more pork,
more you know, earmarks, And what I wanted was just
less debt for the country and for every individual. And
it was a trade off back and forth. They considered
my offer of voting for it so we could get
the bill over the hump, but in the end they
chose just to feed more subsidies into the bill, which
(02:33):
actually made it a little bit worse from my perspective.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Was the other Senator Murkowski you're referencing.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, and she ended up getting, you know, hundreds of
millions of dollars for welfare for Alaskans. But you know,
that's not really the answer to the situation. The answer
is trying to create more jobs and have less people,
you know, less people in the wagon and you know,
more people outside working hard to you know, to keep
(03:01):
the engine of the economy going.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Right. That's what many people are talking about is the
notion of medicaid. Some people say they're saving medicaid. You
keep people out of it, who don't who shouldn't be
entitled to it because of various reasons. How do you
feel about the Medicaid part of this bill.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
There are some people who, by no choice of their own,
just can't afford their medical care. People have kidney failure,
people with diabetes sometimes who weren't able to work during
their career, or you know, were born with a bad disease.
And those people's society can take care of through Medicaid.
But what we don't need is a nineteen year old,
strapping young man or woman who's physically capable to be
(03:46):
on Medicaid one. They don't do as well health The
people on Medicaid have worse health outcomes and those on
private insurance. And so the debate gets I think disjointed,
and people say, oh, you don't want people to have
health care. No, I'd rather them have private health care
and private jobs. And I think works important part of
everybody being mentally healthy and staying away from so many
(04:09):
of the bad things in life that are out there drugs, alcohol,
et cetera. I think works an important thing to keep
people away from that. So I think what we should
do is the able bodied people need to go to work.
And what happened with Obamacare is the federal government promised
to pay for all the new able bodied people with
(04:30):
higher incomes one hundred percent of the bill. So the
states expanded Medicaid and said, oh, yeah, we'll put all
these new people on Medicaid because we don't have to
pay anything the federal government is going to pay. And
the federal government, you know, of course, doesn't have any money.
They've got a printing press though, you know, the Federal
Reserve just prints it up. But in the end, it's
led to this massive debt. And it's not for lack
(04:54):
of compassion that we want to do something about it.
But when we run this massive debt, the inflation that
comes from printing up the new money actually hurts the
poor people that people pretend that they're trying to help.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah, it's at COVID levels, right, the medicaid, and so
we haven't been able to back that down. It's like
we invited a bunch of people in during COVID and
now it's time for them to get on their own.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, the spending levels went from four trillion at the
beginning of COVID to seven trillion and to put in perspective.
We bring in about five trillion in taxes and we
spend seven trillion in spending. So it just this mismatch
can't go on forever. And it is kind of a
bait and switch too, because the free stuff they offer
(05:40):
to our poorer citizens, it isn't really free. Everybody pays
for it to inflation, and so a lot of times
people say, well, gosh, the government offered me all this
good stuff. It seemed to be free, But how come
I'm just as poor as I was five years ago.
It's because of the inflation eats away at the substance
of benefits or at the substance of low wage jobs.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Indeed, we're speaking with Senator Ran paul Is Governor Andy
Bashier blowing smoke when he says they'll have to shut
down thirty five rural hospitals in Kentucky with these Medicaid changes.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
No, I think there's been a struggle for rural hospitals,
you know, and I'm from a smaller community. I've traveled
out and worked in some of these smaller hospitals. The
evolution of what's happening in hospital care, for better or worse,
is the bigger hospital has been gobbling up the smaller hospitals.
So it's one way to make the system work. So
(06:35):
if you know Louisville has a profitable hospital and they
go out an hour away to a small town and
they buy the smaller hospital, what happens is the more
serious diseases heart attack, strokes, will get referred in, and
even the small hospital doesn't necessarily make a profit, it
ends up being profitable for the big hospital because of
the referrals, in the existence of the you know, referral
(06:58):
chain that develops over time, and that's probably the future
of how the rural hospitals will make money over time.
But there are advantages to having rural hospitals. I remember
when my father in law have had a heart attack,
he told.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Me, and we're losing a signal their senator.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
I'm back now, yeah, there you go. My father in law,
he used to always joke, he said, you know, if
I have a heart attack, just going past the local
hospital and take me down to Nashville. But when he
did have a heart attack, he wouldn't he would have died,
he wouldn't have made it, and he ended up living
another fifteen twenty years. But because of that local hospital
saved his life. So I think we want these local
(07:39):
hospitals to exist, but it can't be through subsidies. It
has to be through self sufficiency, and we need to
remove obstacles. The hospitals and the doctors need to be
paid more. So what we have to figure out is
how we have a reasonable amount of people on Medicaid.
If everybody's on Medicaid, the hospital loses money. If twenty
percent of the people are on medica, the hospital can
(08:01):
make money. And that's true of really all of the
hospitals we really need to be Our goal needs to
be to have Medicaid for those who cannot provide it
for themselves and have bad diseases and can't afford it,
and for almost everybody else, we need to get them
on as much private insurance as possible. That's how the
hospitals will survive.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
You played golf with President Trump in the last few days.
How much pressure was there for you to move to
his side of the ledger on the big beautiful bill?
Speaker 2 (08:29):
You know, not that much. We get along pretty well
on the golf course. He's a great golfer. I enjoy
playing with him. He's competitive. We usually play a match
play reminds me of you know, our matches between you
and Yarmouth and I and Junior Bridges a while ago.
We need to try that again, except for unfortunately Junior
has left us. But he was a great force for
(08:51):
Louisville and a great philanthropist, and I definitely will miss
Junior Bridgeman.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Do you concede putts to Trump just because you feel
like you have who.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
You know? Me? I wouldn't do that. I would make
your putt at out now. The way match play works,
as you know, people do concede putts and some people say, oh,
that's not right. Well, in match play, that's part of
the game. It's any putt your opponents will concede. But
I don't do it just because he's the president. You
know things that within reason. If he gave you a
(09:22):
four foot putt on the last hole, which is generous,
you probably reciprocate. But that's the way it would be
in any game, if if you and I were playing
out there in match play, it ends up being if
it's a friendly game, you know you you give, you
give putts and uh, it's a it's a quicker game.
It's less of a game of you know, uh, standing
there and wobbling over a foot putt like they do,
(09:44):
and you know the PGA, but it is it's it's
still it's an honest way of playing.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Last thing for you, Senator, are you seeing any change
in your feelings about tariffs. We seem to see an
economic bump out of some of these tariffs that are
in play now.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I think we haven't seen the full effect yet, and
I'll be more than willing to compliment President Trump if
they weren't. My fear is is that you're going to
see the price rises on things that are tariff later
in the year. And still I get a lot of
people in business coming up to me. People will build
houses saying the woods more expensive, the steel's more expensive.
I get farmers telling me that their exports are down.
(10:23):
In this bill, they actually put more ag subsidies. So
one of the expenditures in the bill, one of the
increases in federal spending, was to give farmers money who
were being hurt by the tariffs. But one reason why
the tariffs may be worse in the fall is that
if you have clothing for jackets or sports jackets made overseas,
(10:44):
they're still being sold. They have a contract for several
months to be sold at a certain price. When that
contract expires, there'll be a new contract based on the
new price. And so if the prices go up through tariffs,
ultimately that price has to be passed on to the consumer.
I think right now we're collecting the tariffs, but we
haven't seen the full impact of the price is going up. Still,
(11:06):
even though Walmart's starting to have more stuff made in America,
still sixty percent of the things you buy Walmart are
made overseas, and so there's going to be a high
king prices. The other thing about the tariffs is so
far they're bringing in some revenue, but not an extraordinary amount.
I think it's like seventy eighty billion last year at
(11:27):
this time, and I think it's maybe one hundred and
fifty billion. So it's sixty or seventy billion more, but
in the scheme of things, not enough to balance the budget.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Understood. Really appreciate the time, Senator. We will get out
and do another charity golf match. Sometimes let's do it.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Thanks Jerry.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Great talking to you, Senator Ran Paul, and we're back
in a minute on News Radio eight forty whas
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