In this episode of CEO, we discuss the UnitedHealthcare CEO being gunned down by a crazed gunman, and how we can fix our broken health care system. Plus, a call-in from Josh about taxes, and the latest on the latest in the Syria crisis.
00:03:13.000Other question is, what's been your worst experience with health insurance?
00:03:17.000Because today we're going to be talking about Obviously, the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. What's worrisome about this is that a lot of people are celebrating it.
00:03:28.000Now, I get why people are mad, and I get why people feel as though they have no power or recourse versus the elites.
00:03:35.000I don't think we want to be in a world where we just start offing CEOs, but if someone was looking for the guilty party, they probably would have been searching for, I'm not condoning this, hunting down the people who voted for the Affordable Care Act.
00:03:46.000We're going to get through the timeline here as to why health insurance has become as awful as it is.
00:03:50.000Some common ground, the left and the right, can agree that our health care system is broken.
00:03:55.000We disagree on the solution, where they believe we should become more socialized, where we have a socialized health care system in all but name anyway, and I believe we should actually put more power in the hands of the doctors and patients, you know, health care providers as opposed to administrators.
00:04:08.000Also, Assad is gone now, so Syria is seeing a little bit of a shake-up.
00:04:14.000I know it's hard to care because you think, hey, they've never gotten it right, you know, throughout all of human history, but we'll get through some fact and fiction out there right now.
00:04:25.000There's a lot of fake news circulating, a lot of takes that are simply inaccurate, and hopefully I'll help you out with that.
00:04:30.000So at some point today, probably when we're talking about jihadists, terrorists, and, you know, the religion of non-peace, you'll see this on YouTube.
00:06:01.000Speaking of cheeks, Rosie O'Donnell went, she did a TikTok post because, you know, they hate the X, so they decided to go to a platform that's the largest holder in the company is Communist China.
00:06:15.000So, Rosie O'Donnell went to TikTok to, I say, she says possibly herpes, spoiler alert, she has herpes, but It is.
00:07:34.000Everything he represents and the people, you mean like freedom of speech, the right to keep and bear arms, low taxes, you know, economic protectionism, and we're getting screwed on international business.
00:08:31.000I don't know if you know this, but Rosie O'Donnell, she's no stranger to teasing and making fun of people.
00:08:36.000Remember when she mocked the Chinese on The View, which I thought was funny when she said, Ching chong, ching chong, ching chong, ching chong.
00:10:17.000All right, we're going to get on to Assad because we have a lot to get to with Assad, but it's about the last week before the Christmas shipping, so cridershop.com if you want to get it in time, right?
00:10:28.000One more week I think we have to be able to make sure you get it before Christmas.
00:11:38.000We're going to try and separate that and make all the references available to you so you can kind of understand the timeline.
00:11:42.000But after over a decade of civil war...
00:11:46.000In really a short amount of time, with more counterfeit Adidas tracksuits than I've seen in my life, the Assad regime has fallen in Syria in really a matter of days.
00:11:56.000A momentous day in the Middle East, the family dynasty that controlled Syria for more than half a century is no longer in power, with President Bashar al-Assad having fled the country as rebel forces closed in on the capital, Damascus.
00:12:10.000Those bullets have to come down, boys. . boys. .
00:14:30.000I think he thought it was like an elf in a Christmas story.
00:14:32.000Oh, Aleppo, he made the doll that warmed Santa's heart.
00:14:35.000Now, according to the Russian media, yesterday Bashar Elisad arrived in Moscow, so that's what they're saying.
00:14:42.000The rebels were basically able to take over everything so quickly because some people are making the point that Russia, Iran are busy right now.
00:16:35.000So the group, to give you an idea, who are at the center of a lot of this, they were founded as basically an Al-Qaeda affiliate, Al-Qaeda adjacent for those in real estate.
00:16:44.000And the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has also played a role in helping to form this group.
00:17:17.000We brought in a bunch of military-aged single Muslim males.
00:17:20.000less than 1% were Christians from the Middle East, specifically places like Syria, who were fleeing persecution, being burned alive in cages.
00:17:27.000HTS is one of the groups largely responsible for that. - Yeah, and by the way, so there were a lot of Christians celebrating this.
00:17:32.000You heard them ringing church bells and celebrating.
00:17:34.000Now, they're the group probably that needs the most prayers right now.
00:17:37.000They were persecuted under the Assad regime, but not nearly as bad as people think they will be persecuted under a regime that has zero kind of You know, issue with burning Christians in chaos.
00:17:49.000They're not going to have any problem at doing that and probably not going to have the world looking on for much of it.
00:17:53.000So you really need to be praying for Christians and I hope they're either getting out or making sure they're taking the proper precautions.
00:18:16.000There is some good news because the leader of HTS said that actually you needn't worry because as of an hour ago, they're like super moderate now.
00:18:25.000The group has had affiliations with al-Qaeda, with ISIS, and now you are projecting this image of a moderate A leader and a moderate group.
00:22:39.000Which, again, I don't want to leave you with a hopeless message.
00:22:41.000But the good news is, if you're in the United States of America, it probably won't affect you that much.
00:22:45.000And I know you're going to say, that's so selfish.
00:22:47.000Look at all the suffering going on in the world.
00:22:48.000And to those I say, if you are a Democrat, shut up.
00:22:52.000Because you're complaining about patriarchy and you're complaining about women's rights here in the United States where women aren't allowed to go to college or even come forward with accusations of rape.
00:23:01.000So, yeah, yeah, we're enjoying sitting up here in our ivory tower because we live in the Western world.
00:23:40.000By the way, anybody who says, and I know I've gotten some notes over here, and this is a fair point, like Iran doesn't really play well with some of these guys.
00:23:50.000You find a way or you kill them or you replace them or you put somebody else in power or you pay them enough or you do whatever you have to do and they will find a way to work the thing that they have been doing this entire time, which is funding Hezbollah.
00:24:52.000And by the way, I don't want to hear people take this and extrapolate it out.
00:24:55.000They're saying, oh, they're going to export terrorism.
00:24:57.000We can't let it become a hotbed for terrorism because that would be grounds to go into, I don't know, half the world and make sure that we have a presence there.
00:25:04.000If we do something in places like this, it has to be specific threats in-out and that's it.
00:25:28.000So instead, we should spend billions of dollars on sending our troops into foreign countries.
00:25:31.000We don't want to have a wall and don't want to have a ban from countries that, well, yeah, they happen to be Muslim because they've never gotten it, right?
00:25:39.000Let's just leave the borders wide open.
00:25:41.000Let's the 20 million undocumented aliens come into this country in the last three years and hope for the best.
00:25:46.000And then while we're also paying for Ukraine to wage war with Russia, well, sorry, Russia and Ukraine in war.
00:25:52.000I don't want to say Ukraine's the one waging war, but you get the point.
00:25:54.000Paying hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:25:55.000Let's spend hundreds of billions of dollars more to go into Syria and and to repeat iraq or let's just make sure we're safe and let's start enforcing the laws that we have here instead you have former vice president biden respect the office saying that the united states needs to and will be active in rebuilding the i don't want to be i don't want to be uh i don't want to be coarse the that is syria as we all turn to the question of what comes next The
00:26:25.000United States will work with our partners and the stakeholders in Syria to help them seize an opportunity to manage the risks.
00:26:34.000We will engage with all Syrian groups, including within the process led by the United Nations, to establish a transition away from the Assad regime toward an independent and independent, I might say it again, sovereign Syria.
00:26:50.000The United States will do whatever we can to support them, including through humanitarian relief to help restore Syria after more than a decade of war and generational brutality by the Assad family.
00:27:24.000If you had a Christian group who were just as extreme and willing to eradicate Islamic terrorism in that region, that would be the only group that you could support.
00:27:55.000Which is why I disagree with Lindsey Graham, but, you know, you probably saw that coming.
00:28:00.000He even went as far as saying that we probably need some ground operations there to handle ISIS. He said, I appreciate the air shrine and ISIS terrorists in Syria, but it will not be enough.
00:28:10.000We have to ensure that the roughly 50,000 ISIS prisoners in northeastern Syria, being primarily held by Kurdish forces, are not released.
00:28:49.000Luckily, President Trump, some people call him former president, incoming president, I call him President Trump, in advance, they both basically signaled that the United States should completely stay out of it.
00:30:43.000You're fleeing a country that is a shithole, has always been a shithole and always will be a shithole, really that entire region of the world.
00:30:48.000And so in claiming you are entitled to asylum to not even the nearest neighboring nation, but any nation you want to go, you go there and you want to instate the kind of government that you just fled?
00:30:59.000And the only people dumb enough to play this game are those in the Western world dealing with their crippling white guilt?
00:31:08.000How about, no, how about go back, fix your own country?
00:31:11.000And we certainly are not going to, hey, you know, and even more, if you come here, first off, full stop, just go back to your own country, but we're not going to adapt to you, you adapt to us.
00:31:20.000That means you don't get to yell Allahu Akbar, voice any kind of support for Sharia law.
00:31:25.000Not because it's a First Amendment issue, but we're talking about something that cannot be juxtaposed with the Constitution, with freedom of speech.
00:32:08.000On the other hand, you have go in, ground operations, airstrikes, drone strikes, try and help with the peaceful transition of power, and because of the fallout, bring in tens or hundreds of thousands of people from the third world who have a vested interest in destroying us.
00:32:34.000And Israel's response, Israel doesn't get it right all the time, but their response was like, yeah, we're going to just blow a lot of stuff up that you don't need.
00:32:39.000We're going to blow a lot of stuff up.
00:32:40.000We don't know who's coming into power, and you guys might not play well, so all those munitions depot, those things are gone.
00:33:04.000Yeah, and it's just like my dad used to say when he was a kid, he'd go to a fast food restaurant and if they brought out like a really sloppy, he'd go, look, make mine look like the picture.
00:33:15.000Just go back to your country and go, okay, Syria, make this country look like that country and point to any, like, American or Western skyline.
00:34:34.000So this is something I really wanted to get into.
00:34:36.000Coming from, or was raised in a country, silly country, Canada, where we had socialized medicine.
00:34:43.000And the first video that I ever did, where I actually did any type of investigative journalism undercover or on location, was a video on the Canadian healthcare system.
00:34:53.000Because back in 2009, Michael Moore and all these other liberals were saying that's how we needed to reformat our system to mimic that.
00:35:13.000My question to you, before I move on and get through some of these historical facts here, And some numbers that may surprise you is why do you think that this system is broken?
00:35:25.000And how do you think it needs to be fixed?
00:35:27.000Do you think it's because it's capitalism run amok?
00:35:30.000Or do you think it's the most heavily regulated industry in the United States and largely subsidized?
00:35:35.000So, I get it when people talk about a lot of people have been happy, unfortunately, over the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. The search is continuing for this murderer.
00:35:45.000Although we did just get a hint with, we found out who was in charge of his security.
00:36:02.000We actually have an insider right now at UnitedHealthcare, which brings us to Mug Club Undercover.
00:36:07.000So just to set this up, a source inside UnitedHealthcare sent us this all-hands-on-deck call discussing the CEO, Brian Thompson, a source inside UnitedHealthcare sent us this all-hands-on-deck call discussing the This is a great question.
00:36:26.000This comes from an insider there, and we do ask before I show this to you, again, if you see something or if you have any information that could be helpful, send it to lwctips at protonmail.com.
00:36:49.000I just want to take a moment to pay tribute to Brian.
00:36:54.000We've lost a friend, a colleague, a boss, a mentor, a great family man, a dad, somebody who has been incredibly important to many, many people across our organization, and somebody who was pivotal in the development of UnitedHealth Group, and always, always and somebody who was pivotal in the development of UnitedHealth Group, and always, always somebody who could bring a
00:37:17.000We've also been working hard to make sure that people who feel concerned about security individually, but more importantly, perhaps, for our sites, continues to be reviewed and strengthened to make sure that we have put in place all of the appropriate mechanisms to keep our organization and our people safe.
00:37:38.000Yeah, I mean, unless you're a client of theirs.
00:37:43.000And yeah, this is a problem with a lot of health insurance companies.
00:38:33.000When you look at the fact that about 15% of all claims are denied by insurance companies, and that pisses people off, and then you understand that UnitedHealthcare actually denies on average 32%, right?
00:40:13.000A lot of people, because it started with the single-payer option, thought, oh, this is going to be socialized healthcare.
00:40:17.000Ultimately, it ended up being a giant greasing of the palms of the insurance company.
00:40:21.000So anyone who was not insured had to get insurance or pay a tax.
00:40:27.000Now, Donald Trump eliminated the mandate on a federal level, but a lot of states, they still have penalties for non-compliance like New Jersey, California, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, D.C. And by the way, the damage was already done at that point.
00:40:36.000So you had to pay an exorbitant tax or you were forced to get insurance.
00:40:39.000Because a lot of people were not getting insurance before that.
00:40:42.000A lot of people were young people who opted to not pay for insurance because they assessed the risk.
00:41:12.000And insurance has to accept everyone, including those who may have self-induced diabetes because they've lived on a diet of Funyuns and Code Red.
00:41:24.000So you don't have just a bunch of new, young, healthy people joining in, lowering the overall risk pool.
00:41:29.000You have a guarantee that these people joining now will increase the cost.
00:41:42.000That seems like the same playbook that everybody should be able to do this.
00:41:45.000We already had, by the way, most people don't know this.
00:41:47.000You already had pre-existing condition pools.
00:41:50.000If you had a pre-existing condition, that sucks, right?
00:41:52.000You had to go into what they call the risk pool in your state, which is more expensive because it's filled with people that have higher risk.
00:41:58.000You try to mitigate it to some degree by putting healthier people in there, but you don't screw the healthier people to take care of the people with pre-existing conditions.
00:42:06.000And people are like, oh my gosh, you have to have some kind of healthcare.
00:42:43.000So what you saw with this, again, everyone has to buy insurance, and insurance you have to accept everyone with every condition no matter what, no matter how much it offsets the cost.
00:42:50.000What happened is they decided to offset the cost by obviously increasing premiums and deductibles, but also by denying far more claims.
00:43:01.000You actually saw three in four providers were actually surveyed, said that denials have gone up dramatically.
00:43:05.000They've even created denial algorithms.
00:43:07.000In other words, they're going to cut costs somewhere.
00:43:09.000And then we also see, fast fact here, key fact number three.
00:43:14.000When you marry, everyone has to buy insurance.
00:43:18.000You have to cover every single person.
00:43:20.000They go, oh my gosh, that's going to be crazy.
00:43:22.000Is there any limit to how much we can raise expenses?
00:43:34.000And I believe this is really only the first couple of years.
00:43:36.000I was about to say, I can give you my example.
00:43:38.000Yeah, they've gone up hundreds of percentages since then.
00:43:41.000In the course of a year, I think I went from paying $90 to about $400 for a health savings account plan that had a $3,000 deductible that then went to a $6,000 deductible.
00:44:27.000Customer satisfaction is an all-time low.
00:44:30.000And their CEOs are getting hundreds of millions or tens of millions of dollars, especially if you're looking at an industry that's struggling to be profitable.
00:44:37.000If you see that, guaranteed government subsidies.
00:44:44.000So the key fact here is unlimited government bailouts.
00:44:47.000We'll go through that, but let me explain to you.
00:44:49.000This is a problem with the current capitalist system.
00:44:53.000And I'm a free enterpriser through and through.
00:44:55.000But, for example, if you look at UnitedHealthcare, okay, they have all this red tape and all these government policies they have to navigate.
00:45:00.000And they ultimately are looking for either government money or to increase, to squeeze out more profit for their shareholders.
00:45:06.000There's a big difference between healthcare that we used to have where the actual healthcare providers, doctors, nurses, practitioners, were largely in charge of determining the care versus today, it's administrators and it's red tape.
00:45:18.000And these people, when your company that provides goods or services Is not beholden to the satisfaction of those receiving the goods or services, the consumer.
00:45:30.000But really, this person providing goods and services has a fiduciary duty exclusively to shareholders to squeeze out as much profit as possible.
00:45:38.000That is now a warping of the free enterprise system.
00:45:59.000It puts people in a precarious position, but doctors and nurses typically do a great job of balancing that as long as the corporate people aren't pushing too hard.
00:46:21.000Do you understand how many people we could cut out of this industry if we didn't have to have people specializing and coding stuff properly to get paid by Medicare or Medicaid or any health insurance company?
00:46:30.000You just go back to a cash system and people taking care of themselves and having catastrophic insurance just to make sure you don't go bankrupt if something bad happens?
00:46:47.000Now, it didn't go directly to health insurance companies, but it did benefit them by, for example, allowing them to just postpone expensive medical procedures indefinitely, right?
00:47:56.000Your tax dollars, $2 trillion, while your business was shut down.
00:48:00.000Or while, maybe at the same time, you had to pay your mortgage while someone else was granted rent forgiveness, and so you lost your property.
00:48:05.000You were paying and funding for insurance companies to get kickbacks, for pharmaceutical companies to get kickbacks.
00:48:13.000When your store was closed down, your tax dollars ensured that those who could lobby to make sure Walmart and Costco could stay open...
00:48:24.000Where Amazon saw increases in revenue, depending if you use the annual number, the total number, hundreds of billions of dollars annually while you lost yours.
00:48:32.000Your money, if you were worried about, you're doing it for the greater good, hey, we're a nation who takes care of someone when they're down.
00:48:38.000Well, I hope you find solace in the fact that during COVID, when you were shut down and your savings account was irreparably damaged, you were paying for very wealthy billionaires across this country and their lobbyists.
00:48:49.000Which brings us to key fact number five.
00:49:27.0007 of the top 10 lobbyists on the Inflation Reduction Act were pharmaceutical or health insurance companies.
00:49:34.000Hey, what do you need to keep lobbying for?
00:49:37.000What point is hundreds of billions over time not enough?
00:49:42.000This is when people, when people no longer have faith in their system, and I'm not a Bernie bro, not a socialist, but you want to know how you end up with some kind of a guillotine situation, is when people who are suffering, who are getting their claims denied, who are seeing their premiums go up, who are seeing their deductibles go up, they're seeing this, they're seeing the worst service they've ever seen in their life, and a company that is more profitable than ever.
00:50:18.000That's when people feel like they're completely powerless and you end up with terrorism in the streets.
00:50:26.000And so it's not lost on me, but we need to be really clear about where the problem stems here in the United States.
00:50:32.000And you cannot have this awful, this giant, this leviathan, this hungry beast that is the health insurance industry without constant, never-ending Supplies of federal dollars, taxpayer dollars.
00:50:47.000This goes to a key fact here, number six.
00:50:50.000The administrative costs that are just growing out of control.
00:50:53.000This is something that we're seeing in the healthcare industry.
00:50:56.000Just since the 1970s, the administration costs have gone up 1,115%.
00:51:39.000And Americans are spending a huge amount on healthcare in this country.
00:51:42.000And it's hard to compare those costs because in other countries where it's socialized, you're paying an astronomical amount on income taxes, sales taxes, right?
00:51:53.000And by the way, it's a system that requires employers to provide insurance, and so you're also limited in the kind of insurance that you can provide for your employees.
00:52:02.000If we allowed employees, if we allowed people to pick their own healthcare, if we allowed insurance across state lines, if we allowed people to have a relationship with their doctor, with their care providers, if we put the power back in the hands of the consumer and the doctors and the care providers, and limited the power of insurance companies as much as possible, we've talked about HSA accounts, we've talked about catastrophic insurance, there are obviously health exchanges out there, health sharing programs.
00:52:27.000These are all tools moving toward a solution.
00:52:32.000You are right if you are angry to understand that those in D.C. have no interest in reforming this because of the lobbyists, because of the money coming in.
00:52:38.000And yes, it's a revolving door of favors from these lobbyists to government and then government back to these industries.
00:52:46.000But before you just blame a CEO and shoot a man who has a family, look at the people who enable this systemic corruption.
00:52:53.000It's the same people who say, we need to send hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine and we need to put boots on the ground in Syria.
00:52:59.000It's the same beast that we are feeding.
00:53:06.000And I don't know that he was the supervillain either.
00:53:08.000From all accounts, I think somebody told me he worked his way up in that company from a very, very low position and made a lot of successful decisions.
00:53:35.000If you want to really change this system, then fight to change the system.
00:53:38.000Don't be an idiot and go and shoot somebody for no reason.
00:53:41.000But you want to know, hey, what can you do as far as changing the system?
00:53:43.000If you're in a small business, maybe all of you and the employees can get together and say, hey, we don't want you to provide health insurance.
00:53:48.000Just give us a credit so we can go and purchase our own health care.
00:53:52.000We've had that here where we had it at one point, but you had some people going like, well, I want the business to provide health, which we do here.
00:53:57.000But I tell you what, it's more expensive.
00:53:59.000And people could get better healthcare if they decided to go out and purchase their own healthcare.
00:54:02.000But that's not how the system works, and you have many people who feel as though they're being wronged if you don't do that.
00:54:06.000So we provide healthcare, which is, of course, tied up with red tape, and options are limited because that's a system that we have.
00:54:12.000But people need to fundamentally change them up, and we do.
00:54:21.000Just like saving for your own retirement.
00:54:23.000Sure, yeah, okay, you can rely on Social Security, you can rely on a 401k, but you could also go out and invest yourself in an index fund And have a far greater yield.
00:54:32.000People like the idea of personal freedom, but not personal accountability or responsibility.
00:54:37.000And we have a system that is predicated on that.
00:54:39.000I can tell you on the opposite side, the guy who signs the fronts of checks, not the backs of them, it's something you have to do.
00:54:52.000And so that puts a lot of power in the hands of these companies, where in 70% of American counties, you have one or at most two options for health insurance.
00:55:52.000Yeah, there needs to be a change, but if people think the change is going to be a socialized system, take this and give it steroids.
00:55:59.000Well, look, just look at COVID. I think that has been the biggest eye-opener for the medical profession for most Americans that I can think of.
00:56:06.000I think people looked at it and go, wait a minute, these are the people that we were trusting?
00:56:09.000These are the people that said, these are the heroes?
00:56:11.000They didn't know what they were doing?
00:56:12.000They were doing stuff inappropriately?
00:56:14.000They were recommending things that really didn't even work, that they knew didn't work for 100 years?
00:56:34.000Maybe now that the blinders have been lifted, we can actually make some changes with RFK going in there and being a Tasmanian devil to some degree.
00:56:40.000Not that he's going to make all the great changes that we need to, but he is at least going to be crazy enough to try.
00:56:45.000People have seen my doctor on the show, Dr. Troy.
00:56:47.000We need to have him back on with another What's Up Doc segment.
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