The Charlie Kirk Show - Breaking the Medicare Cartel

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.

00:00:04.000 Ask chapter.com, a conversation with Kobe Blumenfeld Gantz all about Medicare.

00:00:09.000 I learned a lot about Medicare, the issues, the problems, enrollment, and more.

00:00:13.000 You can email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.

00:00:17.000 That is the Charlie Kirk Show podcast page.

00:00:19.000 and get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com that is tpusa.com.

00:00:24.000 Buckle up everybody here.

00:00:25.000 We go.

00:00:26.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:28.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:30.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:33.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:36.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:38.000 He's an incredible guy, his spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:40.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:00:47.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:00:56.000 That's why we are here.

00:00:59.000 Okay, everybody, welcome to this amazing conversation we have with you all about ask chapter dot com dot Did I get that right, Kobe?

00:01:07.000 Great.

00:01:07.000 And we are joining us now as Kobe Blumenfeld Gantz.

00:01:11.000 Did I say that correctly?

00:01:12.000 Yes.

00:01:12.000 Okay, welcome to the program.

00:01:14.000 is.

00:01:14.000 I hear such amazing things about you from Vivek and other people, and so glad you're here.

00:01:20.000 Introduce yourself to our audience.

00:01:21.000 Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:22.000 It's a pleasure to be here.

00:01:23.000 I started Chapter a few years ago.

00:01:25.000 Before that, I had worked in software, working with the government, and have spent a lot of time looking at how large data sets can be used to help people, how the government can be more efficient, and there's a lot to explore there, in using information and providing better services to people, how we can create systems that help people with much better incentives to create better services for Americans.

00:01:52.000 So you decided to start ask chapter dot com, first tell everybody what it is and then the why.

00:01:59.000 So, or you could, whichever way you want to do it.

00:02:00.000 Yeah.

00:02:01.000 Tell us, tell the story, because it's about, it's a personal experience that drove you to this.

00:02:05.000 Yeah.

00:02:05.000 So, I was very fortunate to grow up with my grandfather living with my parents and me when I was in high school.

00:02:12.000 He was very healthy, mentally sharp and with it, but just as a function of his generation, he didn't really have access to the technology of the day and didn't really know how to interact with others in a meaningful way.

00:02:26.000 And it wasn't because he was a Luddite.

00:02:28.000 In fact, it was the opposite.

00:02:29.000 He would take radios apart.

00:02:31.000 He was very, very technical for technology of his day.

00:02:35.000 And he was fairly isolated in our home.

00:02:38.000 And I always thought that was just kind of crazy, that we didn't have a good way to engage our elders and our seniors in productive life after this thing we call retirement.

00:02:47.000 Of course, I didn't do anything with that at the time.

00:02:48.000 I went to college, I went to grad school, worked in software for a long time.

00:02:52.000 And then as my parents were getting older and going through a similar process, I observed them navigating Medicare and retirement at large and just saw how the system is really rigged against our elders when they're dealing with Medicare.

00:03:11.000 and it was just such a challenging experience for them.

00:03:13.000 They were working with a local Medicare advisor who was maybe well-intentioned but didn't have the data or the tools to be effective. 0.78

00:03:21.000 And they frankly got screwed.

00:03:23.000 They were far overpaying for a plan that they didn't need. 0.92

00:03:27.000 And I just looked at the industry and thought it was kind of crazy.

00:03:29.000 So excuse my ignorance.

00:03:31.000 So there's Medicare advisors.

00:03:35.000 So is it like open enrollment?

00:03:36.000 I mean, I've never dealt with Medicare.

00:03:38.000 How does this process work and who set it up?

00:03:40.000 Yeah, so the history of Medicare is pretty interesting.

00:03:43.000 Goes back to LBJ with Social Security Act and Medicare.

00:03:48.000 And we largely have a system that's been Frankenstein together over the past many, many decades.

00:03:56.000 And there are many types of Medicare.

00:03:57.000 It's not just this one, it's not one Medicare plan.

00:04:01.000 Part A, B, C, D, all these letters, alphabet soup of Medicare.

00:04:04.000 And most people assume that it's just automatic, that you turn 65 or you retire and you get Medicare.

00:04:09.000 And that's fortunate or unfortunately, just not how it works.

00:04:12.000 And so there's a whole industry of people out there who are there to support seniors in navigating this process.

00:04:20.000 But as we're seeing with some of the DOJ investigations now into a lot of the Pretty much every American who's working with a Medicare advisor today is not getting the best guidance for their needs.

00:04:36.000 That's 70 million people.

00:04:38.000 But who are these Medicare advisors?

00:04:39.000 Are they private actors?

00:04:41.000 Okay, so they're companies.

00:04:42.000 Yeah, think of it as like a real estate agent.

00:04:44.000 So you have that.

00:04:45.000 That's a good comparison.

00:04:46.000 Okay.

00:04:46.000 It's a real estate agent analog, many of whom are kind of doing this as a side hustle.

00:04:51.000 And so, you know, not all are malicious at all, but most to all don't have the data or the really expertise to be effective.

00:05:00.000 So, let's say a couple, what age, are you eligible, MagnaRC 65? 0.80

00:05:04.000 65.

00:05:05.000 Okay, so they both turn 65, they call a Medicare advisor, there's all these hotlines, right?

00:05:11.000 Yeah.

00:05:11.000 That they advertise on TV.

00:05:13.000 I just kind of, I drone out when they do that, right?

00:05:15.000 But they say, okay, call your Medicare Advisor hotline, whatever.

00:05:19.000 You call it, you're like enlisting a real estate agent.

00:05:22.000 What is the conventional or the most common experience that anyone has?

00:05:28.000 So the way it works is most Medicare advisors are paid a lot more in terms of commission for one type of plan, it's called the Medicare Advantage plan.

00:05:36.000 That's one of the two types of Medicare plans you can go down.

00:05:40.000 And because they're paid more by these Medicare Advantage plans, they're going to push a subset of Medicare plans on the user.

00:05:46.000 In the same way you might have an insurance agent push plans of any type, whether it's auto insurance, life insurance, whatever it is.

00:05:52.000 But when you're dealing with someone's health and something that's so foundational, and also let's remember, it's not a welfare program.

00:05:58.000 Medicare is a program that we've all been paying into.

00:05:59.000 We pay into as part of Medicare payroll tax our entire lives.

00:06:03.000 and so it's something people have paid into and deserve and have really earned through their whole careers.

00:06:08.000 They're being, It's not what's better for the customer.

00:06:20.000 And really, who is the customer here?

00:06:22.000 So then, so do people have to co-pay on Medicare then?

00:06:25.000 I mean, who's paying for Medicare Advantage versus a lower plan?

00:06:29.000 The senior themselves?

00:06:30.000 I thought Medicare is largely covered by the government taxpayer.

00:06:34.000 Yeah, we it's the short version is there are a lot of costs to the consumer on Medicare without going into too too nitty gritty detail.

00:06:43.000 But the the majority of Americans do sign up for some kind of supplemental coverage, which they do have to pay something for.

00:06:50.000 Sometimes that's in the form of premium, sometimes that's in the form of co-pay, sometimes it's in the form of paying for prescriptions, whatever it is.

00:06:57.000 And so there are a lot of costs sometimes hidden in the system that can be really hard for people to navigate.

00:07:02.000 So then where do you guys come in and you help with the three key Medicare decisions?

00:07:06.000 When to enroll, how to get the most value from Medicare, and then also how to keep Medicare working for you.

00:07:11.000 So you're a disruptor.

00:07:12.000 That's like the favorite word, like, ooh, you're a disruptor.

00:07:17.000 How are you disrupting it?

00:07:18.000 And how have you been received by the conventional Medicare lobby?

00:07:22.000 Yeah.

00:07:23.000 So I am not liked by the Medicare industry.

00:07:26.000 And that's why you're doing great work.

00:07:28.000 I appreciate that.

00:07:29.000 The Medicare cartel is doing a lot of... 0.59

00:07:32.000 It's wild.

00:07:33.000 I'm talking about Medicare itself, the cartel surrounding it.

00:07:36.000 Yeah.

00:07:36.000 So Medicare as a program is actually beloved.

00:07:39.000 Most people who are on Medicare have a.

00:07:41.000 really good health insurance coverage.

00:07:43.000 It's all the things around it.

00:07:45.000 It's really the on-ramp, the accessibility to Medicare that are so challenging and are rife with misincentives.

00:07:51.000 So things that we do to help, first and foremost, you know, it's probably not a surprise to say that health insurance companies are not the most technologically savvy or technologically forward organizations.

00:08:02.000 And so what we do is build a lot of really good technology and improve the data quality.

00:08:06.000 So as an example, if you want to know what your prescriptions are going to cost on a Medicare plan, you know, it's a reasonable thing to ask.

00:08:13.000 There is not a single organization or company in the country other than Chapter for better or for worse, that can tell you that with precision.

00:08:20.000 And the reason is because we have to integrate tens of billions of records of prescription data to know that answer.

00:08:28.000 It's actually a very hard technical problem.

00:08:30.000 So one is we do a lot of technology to in the background so that the senior doesn't have to do all that research.

00:08:36.000 Two is we align incentives.

00:08:38.000 And this is one of, if not the most important.

00:08:40.000 As I was saying, most Medicare brokers just push plans that pay them the most.

00:08:44.000 In fact, the DOJ just unveiled this huge investigation.

00:08:47.000 Yeah.

00:08:48.000 So is that illegal to do?

00:08:50.000 We're about to find out based on how the DOJ investigation I mean, there's no question that it's unethical.

00:08:55.000 Whether it's illegal is a question, and that's what they're litigating now.

00:09:00.000 But at a high level, you have a few big Medicare insurance brokerages who are being paid basically volume-based performance programs saying, hey, if you sell...

00:09:18.000 So does everyone use a Medicare advisor or it's just most people?

00:09:22.000 I mean, it's like closing out a house.

00:09:23.000 You don't need a real estate agent.

00:09:24.000 Would you say 60%, 70%?

00:09:27.000 Roughly half to 60% of people use some kind of Medicare advisor.

00:09:32.000 And the reason is you can't get a different price going direct.

00:09:35.000 So it's actually, there's no incentive not to use a Medicare advisor.

00:09:38.000 And it is very..

00:09:39.000 complicated but the advisor makes the money from the government then the advisor makes the money from the insurance carrier so the flow of funds is the government pays a health insurance company united at night anthem whatever got it i see they pay you know they are the ones who are paying the medicare broker got it We're honored to be partnering with the Allen Jackson Ministries, and today I want to point you to their podcast.

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00:10:42.000 Allen Jackson Ministries is working hard to bring biblical truth back into our culture.

00:10:47.000 You can find out more about Pastor Allen and the ministry at Allen Jackson.com forward slash Charlie.

00:10:55.000 And so then you guys come in and you are trying to revolutionize the entire broker relationship where then people would then use you as a replacement for Medicare advisory.

00:11:08.000 Is that correct?

00:11:08.000 Yeah, so at our core, we are a Medicare advisory and a retirement advisory, which we can talk about in a few minutes.

00:11:14.000 But we look at every single Medicare option.

00:11:18.000 We take in the needs of each person.

00:11:20.000 and we educate them on what their needs and concerns are and then we figure out what's right for them if there's a medicare plan that suits their needs even if it's one that we don't earn any money on we will still enroll someone in that medicare plan and because it's the right thing to do, we think it creates a long-term relationship with the customer.

00:11:37.000 And it actually makes the end user the customer.

00:11:40.000 A really simple way to think about in any market, where are the incentives, is who is the customer?

00:11:45.000 If we were to go back to employer health insurance, the reason that it's tied to your employer is really a product of World War two.

00:11:54.000 The government was trying to stem inflation and so froze wages.

00:11:57.000 And the only way for employers to compete was to provide other benefits like health insurance, tax-free health insurance.

00:12:04.000 And so we're still eating the cost of that decision half a century later, almost a century later at this point.

00:12:10.000 But the employer in that case is the customer, right?

00:12:15.000 The health insurance company sells to the employer, not to the employee, not to all of us as consumers of the health insurance.

00:12:20.000 It's similar in Medicare.

00:12:22.000 The Medicare broker thinks of the health insurance company as the customer, not the end user.

00:12:28.000 I think that's a fundamental challenge with the industry and one of the things we've really flipped on its head.

00:12:33.000 And so the.

00:12:35.000 To kind of complete the whole point then, how big are you guys?

00:12:38.000 How many employees?

00:12:39.000 And you have success stories that are flowing?

00:12:43.000 We've been really fortunate.

00:12:44.000 We are helping hundreds of thousands of Americans navigate Medicare.

00:12:49.000 At this point, we've been around for a few years and growing.

00:12:52.000 We're definitely the fastest growing Medicare organization in the country, one of the fastest growing companies in the country of any archetype.

00:12:58.000 And so, yeah, we're helping a lot of people and our goal is to help every American.

00:13:03.000 Yeah.

00:13:03.000 And so the, you are an entrepreneur and you started this.

00:13:09.000 Where did you work previously?

00:13:10.000 I worked at a company called Palantir.

00:13:12.000 Yeah, I've heard of it.

00:13:13.000 The New York Times says they're wanting to spy on everybody.

00:13:17.000 That is what the New York Times says.

00:13:20.000 Yeah.

00:13:21.000 It's, I mean, I loved it.

00:13:23.000 There was a Wall Street Journal article about some of the work we did just a couple of days ago.

00:13:29.000 And I'm a huge fan of the work we did.

00:13:31.000 I'm very proud of what we did.

00:13:33.000 I was fortunate to be able to support the Marines in the Middle East and support a large number of areas of the government.

00:13:41.000 Yeah, it's when the New York Times attacks you, then there's probably another, there's something of the opposite of the truth there, and so there's been some great people that have come out of that.

00:13:51.000 So let's now talk a little more broadly about government waste.

00:13:55.000 What is your philosophy on the inefficiencies of government and how we can try to modernize it?

00:14:01.000 It's a really tough problem.

00:14:02.000 I spent almost a decade working with the government while at Palantir and now at Chapter.

00:14:09.000 in different ways.

00:14:10.000 I think one of the least sexy but most fundamental improvements that the government needs to make and they're trying to make now is around, this is going to sound so silly, but HR policies.

00:14:22.000 How do you hire the best people, incentivize the best people?

00:14:25.000 Because what are organizations?

00:14:26.000 They're groups of people trying to make good decisions.

00:14:28.000 And you need to have a way for people to, for the government to hire the best people, to retain the best people, and to let go of people who aren't an appropriate fit.

00:14:37.000 And I think that's one of the hardest things for the government to do, not only because it's the government, but it's, and it's not unique to the government.

00:14:43.000 Any large organization has this challenge.

00:14:45.000 Any, and you know, these are.

00:14:47.000 hundreds of thousands of people in these government agencies.

00:14:50.000 It's a lot of people to manage.

00:14:51.000 It's hard.

00:14:52.000 Yeah.

00:14:53.000 And so the more on the HR, he who controls the HR will control the personnel and with personnel is policy.

00:15:00.000 Where did we go wrong as a country just more broadly at the collapse of robust HR?

00:15:07.000 How did we run human resources hiring, onboarding 40 years, 50 years ago, not just technologically, That's just been a general trend across pretty much every administration.

00:15:31.000 And that often includes bringing on more people.

00:15:36.000 And then there are a lot of rules.

00:15:38.000 There are a lot of different interest groups who promote different areas of investment for different groups of people.

00:15:46.000 And that creates sort of different little fiefdoms in the government and in different agencies.

00:15:50.000 And because the sort of political class, the political appointees change roughly every four years or every eight years with the administration change, but you have the civil servant class which doesn't change it creates this really interesting and often challenged relationship between people who are there for a very long time and people who are not and it's really hard i don't have a i don't have an easy solution for it yeah and so what what are some of the other massive inefficiencies you think in the government that technology

00:16:21.000 absolutely um i think we the way that our government procures technology um is really stuck in the stone age and i'll give a couple of examples um so one is sort of a defense example and one is a medicare example um in the defense world um you have these cost plus contracts and so for people who aren''t familiar, cost plus is basically a way of contracting where a private company will say, hey, it's going to cost me a dollar to produce this widget.

00:16:47.000 I'm going to charge the government three times my cost in this case.

00:16:52.000 So I'm going to charge the government three dollars.

00:16:54.000 It's going to cost me a dollar.

00:16:55.000 I'm going to make two dollars a profit.

00:16:56.000 And that's going to be a consistent way of doing it.

00:16:58.000 The problem with that is it disincentivizes innovation.

00:17:01.000 It disincentivizes investment into new ways of doing things because the company is always going to make the same profit margin.

00:17:09.000 right and the government has there are a lot of rules and a lot of executive orders that have come out particularly in this current administration to move away from that model, but the civil servant class is still stuck there.

00:17:22.000 And we're seeing that in Medicare as well.

00:17:26.000 At HHS, there are a whole host of technology challenges and procurement challenges, some of which aren't that hard to solve that they're most technical problem, but they're very hard to solve because you have these people with different incentives and different sort of fiefdoms, as I was saying.

00:17:43.000 Yeah, and there's just recalcitrants.

00:17:45.000 to any sort of technological innovation or adaptation.

00:17:49.000 And I guess that's part of why you started your business.

00:17:52.000 And it just goes to show that the private sector is doing everything the government once wished it could do from SpaceX to, you know, Palantir you mentioned, right?

00:18:01.000 Both SpaceX and Palantir had to sue the government to get this.

00:18:04.000 So Let's talk about that.

00:18:05.000 So Palantir sued the US Army and won for the same Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act called FASA Statute, where basically the government was not allowing Palantir to compete on a very large defense contract because the government wanted to build it themselves.

00:18:23.000 And so what do they do?

00:18:24.000 Also expand it because people attack Palantir all the time.

00:18:28.000 Okay, I don't work at Palantir.

00:18:29.000 I'm not a school person for country.

00:18:30.000 No, no, I know, but I just, I care about truth.

00:18:32.000 I don't like laws.

00:18:33.000 Sure, sure.

00:18:34.000 I'm just sharing that so that they don't get mad at me.

00:18:40.000 Palantir is very good at building software that allows people to analyze data.

00:18:44.000 It integrates data and it analyzes data.

00:18:47.000 It's very simple.

00:18:48.000 So it's, you know, if you're upset with Palantir, I think you also have to be upset with Microsoft for Microsoft Office, I think you also have to be upset with Amazon for AWS products, I think you have to be upset with pretty much any company that builds data analysis products, which is hard to be upset with because they actually do provide a lot of value to the world.

00:19:05.000 Yes, so they sued.

00:19:06.000 I interrupted you.

00:19:06.000 No, yeah, so Palantir sued the army for not allowing Palantir to compete on a particular government contract that Palantir thought it was best suited for.

00:19:17.000 And the government's claim was that it should be built by the government.

00:19:21.000 And this is, I think, a much broader issue, which again we're seeing in pretty much every federal agency where the government is still trying to build software themselves, which doesn't make sense.

00:19:30.000 I mean, the government can barely deliver the mail, no offense to them.

00:19:33.000 I mean, 100%.

00:19:34.000 So wait, so you're trying to say the government is building software.

00:19:36.000 I mean, how does that even?

00:19:38.000 It's like an incomprehensible concept.

00:19:40.000 There's two sides of it.

00:19:40.000 One is the government employs a small number of actual engineers, very small.

00:19:44.000 We're talking about like a handful of people at each agency who try to build.

00:19:48.000 But the much more pernicious and much wider version of this is you have the government consultants and contractors.

00:19:55.000 These are, you know, the Booz-Allens, the Accentures. 1.00

00:19:57.000 And they're literally like attaches of all of them.

00:20:00.000 Exactly.

00:20:01.000 They have government IDs.

00:20:02.000 They're viewed almost internally at times as government employees.

00:20:06.000 And they are the ones.

00:20:07.000 They're STs sometimes, yeah.

00:20:09.000 Exactly.

00:20:09.000 They're the ones sucking the money out of the system.

00:20:11.000 And I think if you want to go after anyone, you go after the big consultants.

00:20:14.000 Well, and that's, yeah, let's zero in on that.

00:20:16.000 That never gets talked about, right?

00:20:18.000 So we're always like, okay, the Department of Labor has, you know, I don't know, 60,000 people.

00:20:22.000 I don't know if that's that much.

00:20:23.000 Whatever, Department of Education.

00:20:24.000 But there's sometimes double or triple that of government contractors.

00:20:28.000 That's where we should start the cutting.

00:20:30.000 Absolutely.

00:20:31.000 I mean, I don't want to get too political, but why have Republicans refused to start that?

00:20:35.000 A lot of them finance their campaigns too, right?

00:20:38.000 Like you have these major law firms like McKinsey, where they're consulting, and they just get checks every month from the government.

00:20:45.000 And they have badges.

00:20:46.000 They have like literal, it's not visitor badges.

00:20:48.000 They're able to badge in and badge out.

00:20:50.000 Yeah.

00:20:50.000 And it's not just a special government employee.

00:20:53.000 They have like a permanent government.

00:20:56.000 They have desks of people that are just for contractors in the government.

00:20:59.000 Yeah.

00:21:00.000 Has this made us more efficient?

00:21:01.000 No.

00:21:01.000 It's made us dramatically less efficient.

00:21:04.000 That's the argument.

00:21:04.000 They're like, well, we need these McKinsey types because otherwise the government would be super inefficient.

00:21:32.000 look to the free market and the government should say, hey, is there a better product that exists?

00:21:37.000 Let's buy it and integrate it.

00:21:38.000 rather than and that can take a month rather than let's give, you know, Accenture or Booz Allen or someone five years to build a worse version of.

00:21:50.000 How many contractors are there in the federal government?

00:21:52.000 We don't even know.

00:21:52.000 I don't know the number, but it's got to be over a million.

00:21:55.000 I would be surprised if it weren't.

00:21:57.000 Yeah.

00:22:00.000 It's hard to believe it was even possible, but the Democrat-run states are now more pro-abortion than ever and will only get worse unless you join me standing for life. 0.64

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00:22:53.000 That's 833-850-2229 or click on the preborn banner at charliekirk.com.

00:23:01.000 It gets you have this permanent civil service bureaucracy.

00:23:04.000 You have this permanent government contractor class and a DOD and CIA and the Pentagon, there's a ton of contractors that, especially in the Intel world, like, remarkable.

00:23:14.000 And so then the civil service, we kind of know they're just slow and bureaucratic, but the contractors, that's a whole lot.

00:23:22.000 They should be held to an even higher standard.

00:23:24.000 And are they?

00:23:26.000 No, absolutely.

00:23:26.000 In fact, they're held to a lower standard.

00:23:28.000 They mess up and they almost fail upward.

00:23:32.000 You have these contracts that go so far over budget and take so much longer to build than they're supposed to.

00:23:38.000 And then the government just says, oh, well, you know, we're already pot committed.

00:23:41.000 We've already spent five years building this thing.

00:23:43.000 Let's just spend another two and let's just give them more money. 1.00

00:23:46.000 And this is a product in many ways of that cost plus contract instead of an outcomes-based contracting.

00:23:52.000 And we're seeing that at the health and human services today as well.

00:23:55.000 It's not unique to DOD or to Intel.

00:23:57.000 It's really across every part of the government.

00:24:00.000 And I think the number one place that Americans actually see the government more than any other place is with their Medicare.

00:24:09.000 You have seventy million Americans dealing with Medicare every single year.

00:24:12.000 Seventy million.

00:24:14.000 How often do they shift from plan to plan?

00:24:17.000 People it really depends on the details, but most people are eligible to make a plan switch roughly once a year, some people more than that.

00:24:25.000 But it depends on the persons.

00:24:27.000 Yeah, and so, and the CMS, which is run by Dr. Oz, that's a beast.

00:24:35.000 Medicaid.

00:24:36.000 And what would other ways with your company or outside, how else do we save money with Medicare?

00:24:43.000 Where are some of the other wastes in this behemoth?

00:24:46.000 I think there's a few areas.

00:24:48.000 One is it's just a massively inefficient system today.

00:24:51.000 If you think about inefficiency creating waste, you have people who are signing up for the wrong Medicare plan and different studies show different things, but roughly 70 to 90 percent of Americans are on the wrong Medicare plan for their needs.

00:25:07.000 So if you think about the entire system, you have this massive inefficiency of what plans people are on, how they utilize those plans, and how the plans serve those end users.

00:25:18.000 So that's one big area.

00:25:20.000 The second big area is utilization.

00:25:22.000 Like you have these Medicare plans that have all these benefits.

00:25:26.000 but they're all locked in in the plans and they make them so hard to use and so seniors are offered these great hearing dental vision over-the-counter benefits but they can't actually use them so one thing we've done at chapter is we've built a free app that allows people to look up their Medicare plan, look up their over-the-counter benefits and just redeem them with a click of a button.

00:25:46.000 And then magically a few days later, their free benefits show up at their door instead of having to spend weeks calling different carriers, calling different middleware providers to understand what's going on.

00:25:56.000 And this is just one very small example, of course, of the inefficiency and the waste.

00:26:01.000 But you magnify that across everything.

00:26:03.000 And there's just no price transparency across the entire system.

00:26:09.000 No price transparency.

00:26:10.000 No, if you go into a doctor's office and ask how much is this procedure going to cost, they don't even know.

00:26:15.000 They don't even know exactly.

00:26:16.000 It's not like they're holding it.

00:26:17.000 They're just, I don't know.

00:26:18.000 Yeah, no.

00:26:19.000 It's all the third party paying is like the downfall of American healthcare.

00:26:24.000 It's one of the two.

00:26:25.000 I think that's one.

00:26:26.000 I think the second biggest issue in healthcare is there's no longitudinal incentive for insurance carriers to provide good health.

00:26:35.000 So what does that mean?

00:26:37.000 Every year, your employer can switch your healthcare or your Medicare plan can change.

00:26:43.000 And so if you're a health insurance company and you want to create long term, you know, good preventative healthcare, you don't know that you're going to have that customer in 10 or 20 or 30 years, not to be charitable to the health insurance companies, but where's the incentive for them to make me healthier today rather than in 50 years?

00:27:05.000 The longitudinal incentive just isn't there.

00:27:08.000 And so the, it just, well, here's a, here's a provocative question for you.

00:27:11.000 Why has no one done what you're doing yet?

00:27:13.000 When I started the company, pretty much everyone in the industry I agree.

00:27:21.000 I agree.

00:27:21.000 Pretty much everyone in the industry told me I was crazy, that what I wanted to do was illegal, and that I would fail within the first three months.

00:27:29.000 And so I think some of it is path dependence.

00:27:31.000 I think a lot of people who operate in the health insurance space and the Medicare space just frankly don't think about things in a new way that often.

00:27:39.000 And part of it is technical.

00:27:40.000 It's a very hard data and technology problem that we've had to solve.

00:27:43.000 And I brought some of the best engineers I've worked with at Palantir and at other places to build for this.

00:27:49.000 And the best technology individuals, the best companies don't really build for seniors.

00:27:53.000 They build for problems they see.

00:27:55.000 That's a good point.

00:27:57.000 How do I get Chinese food to my dorm?

00:28:01.000 To my apartment quicker.

00:28:03.000 And I think it goes to this systematic issue that we have actually in our society that we don't have the right engagement, the intergenerational engagement.

00:28:10.000 engagement with our I agree with our seniors.

00:28:13.000 No, and it's just like I mean, I know we have a ton seniors that are watching this program and they're getting hosted by this stuff.

00:28:19.000 So you guys are using artificial intelligence, is that right?

00:28:22.000 We are.

00:28:22.000 Talk a little bit about that, then I want to have more macro conversation on AI.

00:28:27.000 We use a lot of applied AI.

00:28:28.000 We don't build foundational models ourselves, nor should we.

00:28:31.000 But AI is really, really great at automating repetitive tasks in a high quality way.

00:28:37.000 So what a lot of our competitors That's a good way of putting it.

00:28:39.000 What a lot of our competitors do is they'll hire teams of thirty or forty or fifty people to listen to samples of phone calls, because we do a lot on the phone.

00:28:47.000 And they'll listen to samples of phone calls and say, hey, is this Medicare advisor giving a good experience or a bad experience?

00:28:52.000 But they're listening to one or two percent of calls.

00:28:54.000 What we do is we have an AI listen to 100% of calls, flag issues, and much faster, much more real time and much lower cost.

00:29:01.000 Which company is able to build that kind of model for you?

00:29:04.000 We're always testing the latest model.

00:29:08.000 So we use So is that a large language model?

00:29:10.000 Okay.

00:29:10.000 Yeah.

00:29:11.000 So it's a large language model.

00:29:12.000 So we use all the big guys you'd expect.

00:29:14.000 And they'll be able to do a boutique thing for Is that how it works?

00:29:17.000 You would go to a ChatGPT or a Gemini or a Grock and you say, hey, I'm a corporate actor.

00:29:22.000 And they build is that how?

00:29:24.000 I'm always interested how the backdoor corporate stuff works with these.

00:29:27.000 So I know front facing AI just the way it works is we go to their APIs.

00:29:31.000 So we go to Gemini An, Anthropic, OpenAIs, APIs.

00:29:34.000 Perplexity.

00:29:35.000 Perplex, yep, whatever.

00:29:36.000 What do you mean by API?

00:29:37.000 So it's an app, basically a backend program that allows us to programmatically communicate with that service.

00:29:47.000 So instead of me logging into a web user interface, a chatbot, it says, hey, tell me about X. I can connect our two databases, for example.

00:29:58.000 And that costs more money, obviously.

00:29:59.000 It costs more money, usually, because an enterprise is using it.

00:30:03.000 And then on top of that, we are the ones building or working with other companies that build more products around it.

00:30:09.000 So if we wanted to build a scorecard for our Medicare advisors.

00:30:12.000 Sure.

00:30:13.000 We're the ones building that or working with other parties building it.

00:30:15.000 The OpenAIs of the world, the Anthropics of the world are not building it. 1.00

00:30:18.000 I just think that's important because people only think of Jack GPT as what they see front-facing, but back-facing, they could be scanning phone calls to make sure seniors save money.

00:30:27.000 Exactly.

00:30:27.000 Yeah.

00:30:28.000 And so that's exactly what third parties like us do.

00:30:31.000 So let's talk more broadly about AI.

00:30:33.000 I mean, you're in the tech space.

00:30:34.000 You come from that whole world.

00:30:36.000 Are you an accelerationist?

00:30:37.000 Do you have a little bit of skepticism?

00:30:39.000 Do you think we should have more government control?

00:30:42.000 What is your philosophy when it comes to artificial intelligence?

00:30:44.000 I think of AI in the same way I think about kind of any technology revolution, which I think makes me both an accelerationist and a skeptic at the same time, which is that I think it's a much bigger change, but in the same way that technology accelerates, it's not qualitatively different than the internet or than a cloud-hosted database.

00:31:07.000 It is something that will make us much more efficient, much better, and allow us to do many more things than we used to be able to do.

00:31:15.000 to your point on ordering chinese food I was never able to just click a button 30 years ago to get Chinese food to my door.

00:31:22.000 Today I can.

00:31:23.000 It's magic.

00:31:23.000 And so AI looks like magic today and it will continue.

00:31:26.000 to make it more interesting.

00:31:27.000 More efficient.

00:31:28.000 What are your biggest concerns with artificial intelligence.

00:31:31.000 I think people will rely on it far too much without human oversight or human intervention.

00:31:38.000 And maybe in some contexts that's okay, but broadly I don't think that's okay.

00:31:43.000 I think from a more metaphysical perspective almost or a religious perspective, I think it's very hard to have a thing that humans have built as compared to an omniscient being.

00:31:59.000 And I think that's very dangerous.

00:32:01.000 What do you mean by that?

00:32:03.000 There are groups of people who think about AI as omniscient.

00:32:07.000 It has all the information, it has all the data.

00:32:09.000 It's not...

00:32:10.000 It doesn't have a soul.

00:32:11.000 It doesn't have a good...

00:32:14.000 Exactly.

00:32:15.000 It doesn't have a good way to personify this information, but it does have a lot of raw input.

00:32:22.000 And so people think, oh, I can just rely on this supercomputer to make my decisions.

00:32:28.000 And I think a society that just relies entirely, it's almost like a society that just relies 100% on technocrats is probably not going to.

00:32:41.000 I'm hesitant to say the government should have some dictate that implicates how we..

00:32:46.000 how we use AI.

00:32:48.000 I think that's very hard for the government to do as we just said.

00:32:50.000 The government's not always the best with technology.

00:32:53.000 I think a lot of it has to be free market and there do there do need to be some controls for what disclaimers do we allow, how do we source the data that goes into AI and how is it checked.

00:33:05.000 I think I think knowing whether the information that we're looking at is whether it's correct or incorrect.

00:33:10.000 And by what standard and by what standard exactly.

00:33:12.000 That's the key.

00:33:12.000 Yeah.

00:33:13.000 Because AI starts determining the standard.

00:33:14.000 Exactly.

00:33:15.000 It's hard.

00:33:18.000 TikTok has helped US businesses contribute over 24 billion dollars for the US economy.

00:33:22.000 That's real money flowing into small businesses like Arizona.

00:33:25.000 Taco King, who went viral on TikTok and had $1.3 million in sales in their first year.

00:33:29.000 Now they're hiring more staff to keep up.

00:33:31.000 Or Bluffcakes, who started as a home baking side hustle and became a national cookie brand.

00:33:36.000 Or the She Mechanic, whose business tripled in just a year with help from TikTok.

00:33:39.000 Now she's in a bigger space with a bigger team.

00:33:42.000 TikTok is helping small businesses thrive, and now that's adding up to more jobs, more growth, and over $24 billion flowing into the U.S. economy.

00:33:49.000 Learn more about TikTok's contribution to the U.S. economy at TikTok economic impact dot com dot That is TikTok economic impact dot com dot So yeah, do you give any credence or any of your brain space to singularity or the kind of more Armageddon darker takes on artificial intelligence?

00:34:11.000 I don't.

00:34:12.000 It's not something I think about at all.

00:34:13.000 No, that's okay, but why?

00:34:15.000 Because I view AI as, I don't want to say just another technology innovation, but just another technology innovation.

00:34:22.000 I don't view it as something that will take over the world in sort of a doomsday.

00:34:28.000 Sure.

00:34:29.000 So, I mean, trust me, I'm not making any proclamations here, but a big argument sometimes on the right is, you know, it's Cyberdyne systems, Terminator 2, it's going to take over our grid.

00:34:42.000 In some of the large language models, Gemini, there's some evidence to show prior that it has contempt for humanity.

00:34:50.000 Is there any truth to that?

00:34:52.000 I'm not the one building the model, but the way I read it.

00:34:55.000 I know, but as a technology.

00:34:56.000 Yeah, the way I interpret it is the models are trying to give us what we want to hear often, and they're trying to figure out what we're trying to use it for.

00:35:08.000 There are plenty of people who are prompting and asking questions of these models who may have contempt for humanity or who may ask questions that indicate contempt for humanity.

00:35:16.000 So that's where I think it's lear very easy to imitate or to ape these conversations.

00:35:23.000 It's very hard to truly have an AI that makes these decisions.

00:35:28.000 At what moment do we know if it's reached singularity?

00:35:31.000 Will we ever know?

00:35:32.000 That's a great question.

00:35:34.000 I think we would probably know.

00:35:36.000 How?

00:35:38.000 I think we, well, there's, has the AI reached singularity?

00:35:41.000 And there's, have we relied upon the AI in a singularity?

00:35:44.000 Well, then there's the third question, how do we know if it has?

00:35:47.000 Right.

00:35:48.000 So I don't think we would know unless we are relying on it is where I was getting it.

00:35:51.000 Okay, so build that out.

00:35:52.000 So let's say an AI has secretly exists today that already knows everything and is smarter than all of humanity.

00:35:59.000 And knows itself.

00:36:00.000 And knows itself.

00:36:00.000 Which is the key, right?

00:36:01.000 And can build more of itself, right?

00:36:02.000 Yeah, and it looks outside of itself and can really look at, as humans do, introspectively.

00:36:08.000 Absolutely.

00:36:09.000 Let's say that exists.

00:36:10.000 Like, why would it stay hidden today?

00:36:14.000 Probably because it's trying to amass some kind of power.

00:36:16.000 That's sort of what, at least what we would think is a rational reason.

00:36:20.000 And we're not reliant, or at least that we know of, on an AI as a singularity.

00:36:25.000 But I kind of think of it similar to, like, are we living in assimilation?

00:36:30.000 Like, how would we know?

00:36:32.000 Yeah, we wouldn't.

00:36:35.000 But I don't think we are.

00:36:37.000 So you're a religious Jew is that correct?

00:36:39.000 Yes.

00:36:40.000 You eat kosh fruit. 0.97

00:36:41.000 I'm Shobra Shabbas from a Christian perspective.

00:36:44.000 I have a belief that the entire spread of the simulation argument in Silicon Valley is there.

00:36:53.000 It's the politically correct way to say you're a theist because it's a lot of technologists that actually want to say they believe in God and the way they do it is like we live in a simulation.

00:37:03.000 If you think about it, if you say we live in a simulation, it's a cutesy way of saying that this is designed and there's intentionality behind it.

00:37:12.000 I like that.

00:37:13.000 I think it's sad, but I like it.

00:37:15.000 No, but it's a counterfeitit replacement for a monotheistic creation.

00:37:21.000 I'll take people that want simulation more so than the people that say there's no, this is all randomness, just a bunch of cells.

00:37:29.000 Yeah.

00:37:30.000 Because simulation posits a designer.

00:37:32.000 Look, for me, the reason I grew up a conservative Jew.

00:37:37.000 I have kept kosher my whole life.

00:37:39.000 different points in my life I've observed Shabbat.

00:37:42.000 And to me, it's as much about the discipline and the forced introspection and the forced alertness of what's going on in my surroundings and sort of the approach And there's just a lot of value to humanity and to society to have those things, whether you believe in this entity or not, I almost think is not the only question.

00:38:11.000 There's also just what's the value of it, and there's tremendous value to it.

00:38:14.000 Yes.

00:38:15.000 So the, just to close the thread on artificial intelligence, you're kind of a maximalist with some skepticism.

00:38:23.000 You say that you think it's like every other technological revolution.

00:38:27.000 Do you think there's anything that makes this a different category?

00:38:29.000 So there's two schools of thought, right?

00:38:31.000 Hey, don't be a Luddite.

00:38:32.000 to term you used earlier it's fine we're going to go from horse buggies to you know cars is there something different about this though that makes it seem less technological and is to your words more of a metaphysical or theological debate the reason i i think it is less qualitatively different is because people were saying the same thing about the internet.

00:38:58.000 People were saying the same thing about prior technologies.

00:39:01.000 So I do think that AI is and has proven to get much better, much faster than prior technologies.

00:39:08.000 And I think the next thing after AI will also get better faster than AI did if there is a next thing if we're not you know hitting the singularity quantum computing yeah quantum computing which is very exciting exactly and and AI I think will help the insolvable illness yeah I think will actually help with quantum computing those together yeah could be very powerful absolutely in closing here ask chapter.com when did you start the company in 2020 And you guys have how many employees do you have now?

00:39:36.000 We've about 200 employees.

00:39:38.000 Wow.

00:39:38.000 And how many, tell me about some of the success stories that you could share, some of the anecdotes.

00:39:42.000 Yeah, I mean, without sharing specific names.

00:39:46.000 Yeah, but we help people, we help a lot of people.

00:39:49.000 every day.

00:39:49.000 I get texts and emails pretty much every day from our members thanking me and our team for support.

00:39:55.000 One example is last week a woman emailed in saying that we saved her $31,000 on her prescriptions because she was on a plan that didn't have any of her prescription coverage.

00:40:07.000 Yesterday a friend texted me that she was visiting her parents for the weekend and her dad was just raving about chapter because he had spoken with one of our advisors and he had so much peace of mind.

00:40:22.000 And so there's both the dollars and on average we save people $1,000 to $2,000 a year, but there's also just the peace of mind and the security that comes because it is Medicare is not just it's not just healthcare it's not just financial it's really the on-ramp to retirement and people need this security yes and that's amazing and you guys could grow limitlessly at this point is that right i mean millions and millions and millions of people could potentially use it last question why do you think conservatives lose on

00:40:52.000 healthcare i i know you're non-partisan but just if you were to give an independent analysis why is it that conservatives lose so terribly on this topic do they i don't i don't know if anyone wins on healthcare i guess the democrats kind of do by you know by saying free healthcare free stuff.

00:41:09.000 Let me ask it in a different way.

00:41:11.000 Do you think that, what is your take on the push towards Medicare for all, single payer, this whole make the whole medical system like the VA?

00:41:24.000 I think it's not going to happen.

00:41:26.000 There's no political will for it.

00:41:28.000 But in general, I also don't think it's the best idea.

00:41:31.000 It's hard enough to manage a massive program of Medicare.

00:41:35.000 Medicare for all would basically be Medicare Advantage for all, and Medicare Advantage has a lot of issues.

00:41:41.000 But to your point earlier, I think the to your question, I think it really comes down to just Republicans or Conservatives are often seen as more focused on cost cutting and Democrats are often seen as more focused on providing more services.

00:41:56.000 And this isn't a normative statement, it's just what they are.

00:41:59.000 And I think that's that's largely why.

00:42:00.000 But no one's really created a shared vision for what the future of healthcare should be, for what the future health system should be.

00:42:07.000 I don't think either party has done a particularly good job at it.

00:42:09.000 Ask chapter dot com, Kobe, anything else you want to mention about this that we didn't get a chance to cover?

00:42:14.000 This has been wonderful.

00:42:14.000 Thank you so much for having me on.

00:42:16.000 Ask chapter dot com, if you guys are watching out there and you are on the verge of having to enroll.

00:42:21.000 So if someone's currently enrolled, they can re-analyze, is that right?

00:42:26.000 Yes, it's totally free.

00:42:27.000 So we encourage anyone to give us a call if they have any questions or they just want to know if they're already on the right coverage.

00:42:32.000 So everyone can kind of get a little pulse check and that's totally free.

00:42:35.000 Totally free.

00:42:36.000 at ask chapter dot com.

00:42:37.000 Yes.

00:42:38.000 Kobe, thanks so much.

00:42:39.000 Thanks.

00:42:40.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:42:41.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk dot com.

00:42:44.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - August 21, 2025

Breaking the Medicare Cartel

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