00:00:41.000We all hate having to deal with the healthcare system because you're never going to be in a hospital on your best day.
00:00:47.000You're never going to be dealing with doctors and insurance companies on your best day.
00:00:50.000It's the worst part of your life, always, because health problems are the worst part of anybody's life.
00:00:53.000And let's be clear our healthcare system has real problems.
00:00:57.000A huge percentage of our spend is on administration and bureaucracy and regulatory compliance, like one third of the total cost.
00:01:04.000Medical malpractice eats up enormous sums of money.
00:01:08.000But we should be clear about something.
00:01:10.000America's healthcare system is by far the most innovative healthcare system on planet Earth.
00:01:16.000We hold up the healthcare system for the rest of the world.
00:01:18.000For literally the rest, just as our economy is the basis for the rest of the global economy, our healthcare system is also the basis for the rest of the global healthcare system.
00:01:34.000The reason people live longer is because we come up with better solutions to very old problems.
00:01:38.000Who is coming up with those solutions?
00:01:40.000Well, this brings us to Moderna's huge breakthrough announcement yesterday.
00:01:44.000Now, Moderna's kind of a fascinating story as a company, right?
00:01:46.000They're around for years and years and years and years.
00:01:48.000And they did the mRNA vaccine, which, of course, was extremely controversial.
00:01:53.000Some people claim that it cut death rates for people who are obese and old, but was not great for people who are younger and obviously not appropriate for kids.
00:02:00.000I tend to think that's what the data shows.
00:02:02.000Other people are just very anti Moderna and anti mRNA vaccines generally.
00:02:09.000And it turns out that, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, an experimental mRNA vaccine has succeeded in preventing cancer from coming back or spreading in a study of high risk melanoma patients.
00:02:22.000Moderna and its partner Merck said Wednesday, paving the way for a potentially life extending treatment for the thousands of people diagnosed with the deadly skin cancer each year.
00:02:31.000Moderna shares more than doubled Wednesday.
00:02:35.000And the positive results rippled through the drug industry as investors saw potential for more future blockbusters.
00:02:40.000This is the second major oncology breakthrough in recent months after a different drug succeeded in extending the lives of people with pancreatic cancer, a notoriously lethal disease.
00:02:48.000So, every day, pretty much every day, we are coming up with extraordinary medical innovations here in the United States.
00:02:57.000The big pharma companies that people like to rip on, the ones that are keeping your parents and your grandparents alive and creating new treatments so that you will live longer, we rip on those each and every day because people don't understand how exactly the medical innovation industry works.
00:03:29.000Fox yesterday was reporting on a Parkinson's patient whose tremor is vanishing with a new ultrasound treatment.
00:03:34.000Like we're coming up with new treatments.
00:03:36.000When I say we, I mean these companies, right?
00:03:38.000People with actual medical knowledge doing experimentation and innovation.
00:03:43.000One million Americans are living with Parkinson's disease, but a newly expanded treatment is changing the game.
00:03:50.000Doctors are now using ultrasound tech to target some of the most debilitating symptoms.
00:03:56.000There is one man who lived with a severe tremor for years, and after undergoing this treatment, the shaking was gone within minutes, and no surgery was even required.
00:04:07.000That patient, Air Force veteran Bud Level, and his doctor, Dr. Bavia Shah, join us now.
00:04:15.000The way this works is that there are multiple ultrasound transducers all around the skull, and they each send their own ultrasound beam that crosses the skull onto a specific point in the brain, and that's where you get the maximum energy deposition.
00:04:29.000While we're doing this procedure, we can use the low energy ultrasound waves and then go examine the patient and make sure that their symptoms are getting better and that they're not having any side effects.
00:04:51.000AI is going to have a massive impact on how you and your parents and your grandparents live.
00:04:56.000According to the Wall Street Journal, patients and families are turning to AI to help pinpoint conditions.
00:05:00.000By the way, I've done this myself, it's unbelievable.
00:05:02.000Its differential diagnosis is very often better than what doctors can do, not because doctors are ignorant, but because doctors are limited by what they can instantaneously recall.
00:05:12.000AI is especially adept at flagging potential rare and hard to diagnose diseases because doctors often are trying to diagnose based on the probability, right?
00:05:19.000You come in with a set of symptoms, 95% probability.
00:05:23.000They focus on the 95% probability, but it may be in the other 5%, right?
00:05:29.000In a study published last year in a Journal of American Medicine, Journal.
00:05:34.000Researchers took 90 complex rare disease cases that had already been solved and tested AI chatbots' abilities to suggest the right diagnosis.
00:05:42.000The two chatbots doubled the probability of getting it right.
00:05:47.000Again, AI is extraordinary at this because it has infinite memory, essentially.
00:06:06.000The U.S. conducts According to the FDA, 35% of all global clinical trials, we command over 50% of early phase trials involving high risk therapeutics.
00:06:40.000Well, because we invest extraordinary amounts of capital, extraordinary amounts of capital in RD.
00:06:46.000Every year, the United States, our markets, we invest $180 to $200 billion into RD in the medical field, including corporate pharma, federal grants, venture capital, MA, and corporate ventures.
00:06:59.000And it costs that amount of money to develop new drugs.
00:07:43.000And this is a point that Jeff Bezos made not long ago that the thing that really distinguishes the United States from other countries is not just our tax structure, because other countries have tax structures.
00:07:54.000The thing that distinguishes the United States is our gigantic pools of liquidity.
00:07:58.000What's really going on with all this dynamism in this country compared to what we see around elsewhere in the world?
00:08:05.000And there are a bunch of reasons for that, but the biggest one, eight of ten points there, is that.
00:08:35.000But the people who are giving you that seed capital know that their expected value is still positive in many cases, or they're at least gambling that that's true.
00:08:45.000That risk capital system that we have in this country is turning out to be very hard for other countries to duplicate.
00:08:52.000Again, this is a really important point.
00:08:55.000The reason we innovate here is because we have a capitalist system.
00:08:59.000Other systems that don't reward in the same way and that don't have gigantic pools of liquidity don't do this kind of research.
00:09:10.000This is the real reason you are paying too much for drugs, is because foreign governments are basically unionizing against American drug manufacturers.
00:10:33.000At the end of a very long day, you get into bed and you think, this was a good decision.
00:10:36.000Sleep cooler this summer with Bowl and Branch.
00:10:38.000Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bullandbranch.comslash Ben with code BEN.
00:10:43.000That's BOLLANDBRANCH.comslash Ben, code BEN to unlock 15% off.
00:10:50.000So, in order for us to actually diagnose what's wrong with our medical system, we should be at least Accurate about what's wrong with our medical system and what's right.
00:10:57.000So, here are a lot of myths about the American medical system.
00:11:00.000I'm going to myth bust a few of these myths so that we actually know what we're looking at and what we ought to fix.
00:11:04.000Because otherwise, what you end up with is the idiocy of Medicare for all, where you can't see the doctor you want, where you can't get the medical care that you want, where somebody else decides that for you.
00:11:14.000So, myth number one, and you hear this all the time our life expectancy is lower because of our health care system here in the United States.
00:11:33.000Okay, so when you compare to life expectancy, you have to compare apples to apples, not apples to cucumbers.
00:11:39.000You can't take an American population that is racially diverse, fat, has higher rates of drug abuse, suicide, and murder, and measures death itself differently, and then compare it to a population like, say, Switzerland, that is racially homogenous, diets completely differently, doesn't drug or suicide or murder, and measures infant mortality differently.
00:12:00.000Okay, so take a look, for example, at the average racial life expectancy breakdown in the United States, right?
00:12:07.000Because we actually have some data about who lives long in the United States.
00:12:11.000And what you find is that there's pretty significant striation in life expectancy in the United States.
00:12:15.000So if you're an Asian American in the United States, then you are likely to live the average life expectancy for Asians in the United States, for Asian Americans, about 85 years.
00:12:27.000Well, here is the thing if you compare the Asian American life expectancy to, say, the Japanese life expectancy, it turns out it's the same.
00:12:37.000So if you're going to compare American life expectancy to Japanese life expectancy, that's stupid.
00:12:42.000You should actually compare Japanese life expectancy to, say, Japanese living in American life expectancy, right?
00:12:48.000You're keeping all the factors equivalent except for the healthcare system and lifestyle.
00:12:53.000And what it turns out is it's kind of the same.
00:12:56.000How about Hispanics in the United States?
00:12:58.000Life expectancy in the United States for Hispanics at last time of measurement was about 81.
00:13:03.000Well, the life expectancy for Mexicans is 75.
00:13:07.000For Mexican Americans, it's like 78 to 80.
00:13:09.000So you actually live slightly longer if you're a Mexican American than if you are a Mexican, for example.
00:13:15.000If you're white in the United States, your life expectancy average about 78, black 74, Native American 70.
00:13:21.000Now, again, the problem is the confound, because I can name you half a dozen countries that are majority black that have lower life expectancies than black Americans.
00:13:30.000So if you are going to actually compare population groups, you have to pick population groups that are similar in genetic makeup, for example, because that has an impact on health.
00:13:39.000And there are certain health conditions that are just diagnosed differently based on race, such as sickle cell anemia, most famously.
00:13:47.000So, again, keep all of the confounds out and you will get a better statistical examination.
00:13:52.000Then you have to look at the reasons for death in the United States.
00:13:54.000Because if you're going to blame the healthcare system, what you don't want to do is blame the healthcare system for people shooting each other when they're 20, which brings down the life expectancy.
00:14:03.000So, one of the things that you see here is Peterson KFF, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Global Burden of Disease Data.
00:14:13.000And what it shows is deaths per 100,000 population aged 15 to 49, the United States versus comparable countries.
00:14:19.000So, what you see is Ours was higher than comparable countries, but it was trending in a similar direction, like down, deaths per 100,000 population.
00:14:28.000And then we kind of stagnated around 1985, and we didn't really keep going down.
00:14:36.000Well, it turns out we have a lot of deaths that are attributable to, for example, drugs.
00:14:43.000We have a lot of deaths that are attributable to heart disease, a huge number of heart disease deaths, which is diet based, a huge number of murders in the United States, and a huge number of car accidents in the United States.
00:14:54.000And when you remove all of those confounds, it turns out our death rates decline pretty markedly.
00:14:58.000We also measure deaths differently than the Europeans do when it comes to infant mortality.
00:15:03.000So, for example, in the United States, when a baby is born, no matter how preemie, we consider that baby a life.
00:15:09.000And then if that baby dies in, say, the first week of preemiedom, that is now a death.
00:15:13.000Now, it has a major impact on your life expectancy stats, even with small numbers.
00:15:17.000Because if you have a person who dies at age zero and a person who dies at age 100, the average life expectancy is now 50.
00:15:25.000The UK, and you just don't measure the premium as a life, then your average life expectancy is 100, right?
00:15:35.000There are studies by the National Bureau of Economic Research that indicate that differences in data reporting alone make up roughly 30% of the statistical mortality gap between the US and certain European nations.
00:15:45.000So, the point that I'm making here is there are a lot of reasons for the statistical life expectancy gap between us and other countries, but you have to compare apples to apples, and also you have to do the measurements the same way.
00:15:55.000Okay, myth number two we spend too much on healthcare fundamentally because our system is broken.
00:16:02.000And now, again, there are serious problems in our system, mainly.
00:16:05.000The problem of administration and bureaucracy.
00:16:07.000If we had no administration and no bureaucracy, we reduced our costs by probably one third.
00:16:11.000If we reduce medical malpractice problems, we reduce our costs.
00:16:30.000Basically, what you see in this chart is a straight line correlation between health expenditure per capita and GDP per capita.
00:16:38.000In other words, How much you spend as a country on health is highly correlated to how much you make.
00:16:46.000Now, there are certain outliers that spend less than that line would suggest Singapore, Brunei, Saudi Arabia.
00:16:55.000There are a few that are sort of under the line, but this is a pretty, pretty obvious correlation.
00:17:02.000So here's the thing we're a very rich country, and we spend a lot of money on our healthcare, and we predominantly spend a lot of money on our upper end healthcare.
00:17:10.000That's really where we spend our money.
00:17:12.000We're an older country, so we spend a lot of money on our old people.
00:17:15.000If you look at the actual stats in the United States, our health expenditures are $22,356 per person on people over the age of 65 in 2020.
00:17:26.000That is five times per person what we spend on kids and 2.5 what we spend on working age people, right?
00:17:32.000Because as you get toward the end of your life, you have more health problems.
00:17:35.000And we expend extraordinary amounts of money in the United States to keep people alive for small amounts of time.
00:17:42.000And we all have a grandmother who had to spend an enormous amount of time in a hospital before she passed away.
00:17:48.000And when that happens, you're spending a lot of money to marginally increase lifespan.
00:17:53.000That's just the way that it works in Western countries.
00:17:57.00017% of the population in the United States in 2020 was 65 plus, but it accounted for 37% of all spending in the healthcare industry in 2020.
00:18:08.000And a huge percentage of that spending is happening via Medicare and Medicaid.
00:18:13.000The largest share of healthcare spending is the federal government.
00:18:16.000So, the idea that we need more federal government interventionism in a healthcare system and this will lower costs again, 31% of all healthcare spending in 2024 was sponsored by the federal government.
00:18:27.000Okay, but where are we really spending a lot of money?
00:18:30.000Some of the areas where we disproportionately spend money on, for example, cancer care, which is why we have a lot of innovation in that space because there's a huge market in the United States for, for example, cancer treatments, which is why the United States has some of the best cancer survival rates of anywhere on planet Earth.
00:18:45.000According to the OECD, we consistently rank among global leaders in five year cancer survival rates for major adult cancers.
00:18:53.000And that is, by the way, despite high screening rates, meaning we screen really carefully when it comes to cancer in the United States.
00:18:58.000So we identify a lot of cancer and then we treat it really, really well.
00:19:02.000If you're in the UK, there's a reason rich people in the UK or Canada come to the United States if they've got cancer.
00:19:07.000They're not going to wait in line and die because their nationalized healthcare system is not doing a good job of it.
00:19:13.000So, for example, prostate cancer survivability is 98% in the United States, it's about 85% in the EU.
00:19:19.000Melanoma survivability is 94% in the United States.
00:19:22.000These are five year survival rates, 86% in the EU.
00:19:25.000Breast cancer survivability, 91% in the United States, 85% in the EU.
00:19:32.000Virtually all major cancers, we are statistically significantly higher in terms of survivability than other countries.
00:19:38.000This is what, again, this is white pilling because I think it's important to know what is wrong and what we're doing wrong, what we can fix.
00:19:43.000I mean, Tulsi Gabbard was talking about this literally today.
00:19:46.000Her husband was diagnosed with severe cancer, and she made an announcement today that his treatment is going well.
00:19:52.000We talked with our doctors and said, okay, what are our options?
00:19:55.000One is a very invasive surgery to remove the bottom part.
00:20:00.000Part of Abraham's sacrum and his tailbone, and the other option was radiation.
00:20:05.000So, we scheduled the surgery as quickly as we could.
00:20:09.000A few weeks after the surgery was done, the pathologists and the doctors said that they are confident that they were able to cut out all of the cancerous bone and tissue.
00:20:19.000So, here we are now, almost three months after, and he started a very rigorous physical therapy program.
00:20:27.000He gets frustrated a lot because he wants to be able to make progress.
00:20:31.000Faster and sometimes he's pushed a little bit too far, but overall, Abraham is progressing very well.
00:20:37.000Again, when you rip on the system, recognize at least what the system does and what it is and what it's good for.
00:20:43.000And one of the reasons we spend a lot of money here is because other countries, because they're nationalized, they will reject people for treatments based on cost benchmarks, right?
00:20:50.000It costs too much, so we can't pay for it.
00:20:53.000In the United States, insurers are legally mandated to cover broad categories of drugs.
00:20:59.000Okay, which brings us to the fourth big myth.
00:21:02.000That healthcare in the United States is wildly unequal.
00:21:03.000Now, that's not a myth because it's totally untrue.
00:21:06.000Obviously, if you're rich, you're going to get better healthcare than if you're poor.
00:21:08.000This is true literally everywhere on earth except areas where everyone gets crappy healthcare.
00:21:13.000We can be equal in our poverty or unequal in our prosperity.
00:21:19.000The things that are luxurious, all innovation, all of it starts off as a luxury for rich people and then it becomes a necessity.
00:21:26.000This is true for everything in your life except for like basic, basic, basic nutrition.
00:21:30.000And if you go back far enough, it's probably true of basic nutrition as well.
00:21:35.000If the cell phone you carry in your pocket was a luxury, I use this example a lot because it's obvious.
00:21:40.000If you go back and you watch like old movies from the 1950s, the guy who was like the richest dude you ever saw was a dude who had a phone in his car.
00:21:47.000That dude was like the wealthiest person ever.
00:21:50.000If you had a phone on a beach, you were Gordon Gecko in Wall Street walking around with a shoebox to your head.
00:21:54.000And that's because he was the richest guy in America.
00:21:57.000And now you have a phone that is significantly more powerful than any device that put man on the moon in your pocket.
00:22:04.000Everyone, including people who are poor in the United States.
00:22:06.000Innovation starts off as a luxury and then it becomes a necessity.
00:22:11.000So, Bill Ackman, the investor extraordinaire, who, contrary to some opinions, actually is a very smart person, very much smarter than many of the people who critique him politically.
00:22:21.000In any case, Bill Ackman, his daughter Lucy, when she was 26, had a brain hemorrhage.
00:22:28.000And like a very serious brain hemorrhage.
00:23:20.000So, Ackman put up a post explaining what happened.
00:23:23.000He said by about 2 30 a.m., with the results from a CAT scan, Lucy's doctors had determined she had a massive brain hemorrhage and would need an emergency hemicraniectomy, which is basically drilling a hole in your head to release the pressure on her brain and remove the blood from the hemorrhage.
00:23:36.000The surgery to save Lucy's life began around 3 15 a.m. and finished around 5 30 a.m.
00:23:40.000I learned later that the standard of care is not to do the surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed if more than five hours have passed since the hemorrhage.
00:23:47.000Even when the surgery is done, I was told the likely outcome for the patient is a few months in a nursing home and death from pneumonia.
00:23:53.000And he said, Let's see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.
00:24:01.000She was in a coma for several weeks and then awoke, not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see, or speak.
00:24:06.000Over the last six months, she has recovered her cognition.
00:24:08.000She understands everything, including her circumstance, is able to walk 100 or more steps at a time with assistance, is making progress with sounds, vowels, and consonants and the beginnings of speech, but she remains unable to see.
00:24:18.000Lucy's vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface.
00:24:23.000Work that is underway at Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science. Synchron nudge and other companies in the space.
00:24:28.000Okay, now all of the Marxists in the audience go, How could, see, if it were my daughter, she would have died.
00:24:34.000Right, but the whole point of this story is the treatment that Ackman and his family are putting his daughter through and are developing these treatments are going to become standard of care over time because this is what happens in free markets.
00:24:49.000When rich people do a thing and it turns out that thing is innovative and creative and good, it bleeds down to the rest of the population.
00:24:57.000And Ackman is trying to accelerate that with charitable works.
00:24:59.000Again, he's supposed to be the bad guy.
00:25:02.000Schmucks sitting in cabins selling you Indian man nicotine are the good guys.
00:25:05.000Bill Ackman, who is launching a $400 million brain research institute, is the bad guy.
00:25:15.000In any case, Ackman announced yesterday that Pershing Square Foundation has acquired almost 700,000 square feet of real estate on the Upper West Side.
00:25:23.000They're founding the Ackman Oxman Institute to conduct brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, and longevity.
00:25:30.000He put out a post saying the AOI will be a nonprofit, but will have highly commercial instincts.
00:25:36.000It will work to develop innovations to create companies that will see it assist and spin out to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible.
00:25:44.000He's again, the best way to incentivize bringing down cost and increasing innovative capacity is the profit margin.
00:25:52.000Because we are now in the midst, throughout American life, of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
00:25:59.000We are now in the midst of saying we have problems with how the health insurance system works, up to and including maybe we should shoot healthcare executives.
00:26:07.000And also, the solution to that is Medicare for all, single payer government run healthcare.
00:26:11.000Okay, understand you are destroying the golden goose.
00:26:13.000The reason, by the way, that Americans pay disproportionate prices for their drugs is because of the Medicare for all systems in other countries.
00:26:20.000When we talk about the president, I've said, as you know, I'm not a fan of tariffs as a general economic policy, but as a form of leverage, I'm in favor.
00:26:28.000One area where we should be leveraging the living hell out of other countries, other countries collectively bargain using their nationalized healthcare system with our drug providers.
00:26:36.000They go to Merck, for example, and they say, We are only willing, as the single payer national health system in Britain, to pay X dollars for this drug.
00:26:45.000And X dollars is a lot lower than the market price.
00:26:48.000So either you take it or you leave it.
00:26:51.000Merck turns around and says, Okay, fine, we'll take your price, but we're going to upcharge everybody in the United States to compensate for the fact that we are delivering to you at a bare profit or at a loss.
00:27:03.000What we should do is we should mandate that all of those drugs can only be exported to countries like Great Britain if Great Britain is willing to pay the American market price, because that brings down the price for everybody.
00:27:17.000More customers means more competition, which means that you're going to get higher production.
00:27:25.000Price discrimination means that basically we pay a different price than Britain pays.
00:27:41.000That's a real thing we ought to be doing.
00:27:45.000But here in the United States, again, the call for Medicare for All is a call to destroy this entire system, including the innovation that makes it possible.
00:27:53.000Remember, when you hear people who are yelling at Wall Street and saying, Those pools of capital, why are we taxing those pools of capital differently than we would tax earnings?
00:28:01.000The answer is we are trying to incentivize the creation of pools of capital because that's what creates the innovation.
00:28:07.000That's what creates the better products, goods, and services.
00:28:11.000Beyond that, obviously, when you invest in the stock market, that's money that you already paid income tax on.
00:28:15.000So why are we taxing you twice based on the gain from the stock market?
00:28:20.000In any case, you can see the idiocy of all of this thanks to the DSA.
00:28:23.000So, Florida Senate, Democratic Senate, Democratic Socialist of America candidate Angie Nixon, who is a nut job.
00:28:30.000Again, the DSA apparently just recruits from the psych ward.
00:28:33.000She says, We're already paying for Medicare for all right now, which, I mean, is kind of true in one sense, in the sense that we pay for emergency care for a lot of people who don't have insurance and we pay for Medicaid.
00:28:46.000But it is not true in the sense that we have not destroyed all innovation and made all care rationed.
00:28:53.000You want Medicare for all and free universal child care and pre K. How are you suggesting taxpayers pay for that?
00:29:26.000Actually, Medicare for all, we're already Spending the amount we would be paying for Medicare for all right now, even while folks are still paying for co pays and deductibles and co insurance.
00:29:38.000Okay, it is true that we're paying for a lot of things right now, but you know what's going to cost a lot more money?
00:30:50.000Okay, so when they say lower pharmaceutical prices, they mean that they're going to blackmail pharmaceutical companies into selling the drugs for lower prices, which again cuts down on the RD.
00:30:57.000So how about fewer new drugs, if you like that?
00:31:29.000It presumes quote unquote all things being equal.
00:31:32.000Well, why would they possibly be equal?
00:31:34.000The only reason that Medicare payment rates right now are accepted by anyone is because they are subsidized by people with private insurance.
00:31:41.000You're paying a higher level of private insurance because the government is paying a lower level of Medicare.
00:31:47.000Okay, doctors are lucky to break even on Medicare and they actively lose money on Medicaid.
00:31:54.000So, the same way that the Europeans live fat off the prices that we pay here in America for our drugs, Medicaid patients are being subsidized by people on private insurance.
00:32:06.000Again, if you are going to do international pharma pricing across the board, you're just destroying all of the companies that develop the new innovations.
00:32:34.000Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.