All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Healthcare Needs Builders, Not Bureaucrats: Dr. Mehmet Oz Live from Davos

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

(0:00) The Besties introduce Dr. Oz (3:26) Trump's vision for healthcare in America (13:26) AI & self-directed healthcare (30:10) The future of GLP-1s and affordability (35:06) The Medical Fraud Crisi...s (44:02) California fraud and accountability (56:57) Immigration and addiction Follow Dr. Oz: https://x.com/DrOz Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-01671-6

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, everybody, welcome back. It's all in at Davos. My bestie David Sachs is here. We're having a great time. We're here. Can you guys catch this in the background? Oh, my God. It's amazing. It's stunning. This is the Davos experience. It looks real. I know. Well, it kind of looks like a green screen from here because this is so picturesque. It's just so picturesque. It's not a green screen. It is a real deal. And we'll look over the ledge here. And what you'll see is all of the virtue signaling ESG, DEI executives. And you'll just, it's emanating. from this entire area and they've put solar over every single building here. None of it's plugged in. It's just for aesthetics, but we're really excited, David and I, to do a bunch of interviews
Starting point is 00:00:40 here. Wow, today we've got a great one for you. And we're going to talk about health and we're going to talk about the health care system with none other than Dr. Mehmedaz. You're the administrator now for CMS. You've gone from being America's doctor, dare I say, to being a civil servant like my friend David Sacks. Why did you choose really height of your power's career to go into public service like this?
Starting point is 00:01:05 So I'm in the change business. You guys are as well. And if you're in the change business and the project you're pursuing is not making a significant change, then you want to move onto something else that could make the impact you desire. And especially in health care, we don't have the luxury of fooling around for years of our lives, pursuing interests that don't result in meaningfully changing the quality of life, but also the opportunity that the American people have. And so I loved being a TV host, did it for 13 years. I love practicing surgery, which I've done my whole life until recently. This is the best job I've
Starting point is 00:01:40 ever had. And it's the best job I've had because of the people that I get to work with, but also because you truly do get to make the change that I desire. I think a lot of folks, the reason they watch the own podcast is they want to change stuff too. And I encourage everybody to, you know, take some big swings. And you'll break things once in while but if you want to be able to change meaningfully the the infrastructure of whatever's bothering you you got to go out of full speed and this administration offers us a unique opportunity to do that it is interesting david you were used to going at a pretty fast pace as well and then i think our expectation was hey you get into public service it's going to be about consensus building and it's
Starting point is 00:02:20 going to take a lot of time say what you will about trump some people might not agree with every policy but he ships he's like a founder who shes ships and ships product fast. That's also been your experience. He's hard to keep up with. I mean, he moves incredibly fast and it makes him really fun to work for because he wants to get things done. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:40 Every day he wants to get things done. There's a sense of urgency. Yeah, and you'll be in a meeting with the president in the Oval Office and you'll tell him about a problem. His first instinct is to pick up the phone and call and fix it right then and there. And he does that meeting after meeting, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, And when you compound that desire to get things done and he acts on it right there, it has a huge impact.
Starting point is 00:03:02 And he seems to get great pleasure in bringing together, especially in this administration, which I think is distinctly different than the first. First administration, he was new to politics and he brought in a lot of career politicians that I think maybe people told him were the right people. This time, he has explicitly gone and looked for people with expertise who are proven winners in the field. He wants us to carry the water. This, I think, across the different parts of the administration, he wants individuals that don't have to rely on the president to tell the story all the time because so much of the narrative
Starting point is 00:03:38 that is reflected in the media is just completely off. I'm not even saying that they're doing it on purpose. They literally don't understand some of the secondary and tertiary impacts of the decisions you're making. And it's our job to therefore tell not just the media, but the American people what we're trying to do. And that's especially important if you're unorthodox in how you govern. And this is a fundamentally important reality, at least at CMS.
Starting point is 00:04:01 David, I don't know how it is in developing AI where there probably wasn't in a rulebook before anyway. But healthcare, you know, there have been doctors since the dawn of, you know, but since humans left Africa 50,000 years ago, there were doctors in the encampment. And so there is a way of doing things. And in government, that exists as well. But it's not always the right way to do things. So, for example, we have the ability to make laws.
Starting point is 00:04:21 Every part of the administration pretty much can. we get Congress to do stuff. It doesn't always turn out the way you want it to turn out. And it takes a lot of time. And then negotiated final result sometimes fall short. You have rulemaking, it's like a big area, which is administrative entities like ours, can write the rules that everyone has to follow. We're going to pay you this much. We're not going to let these people do that anymore. It does take some time. And it's prone to law fair. By that I mean, the people you're regulating, if they don't like what you're saying, they can sue you and they can stop you. And in this administration if the other party doesn't like what you're doing, even if it's the best thing.
Starting point is 00:04:55 We had a rule that would reduce fraud, but the blue cities didn't like it because it was coming from someone they didn't like the president. So they enjoined it and that's now caught up in court. Now, we'll win, but it could take years. So that's the second big way, right? So you make laws, you pass rules. The third way, which historically government has not used, I don't think as effectively as possible. And this president, because he's a great negotiator, is able to push us in ways that historically not been done is to just use the power to convene. The U.S. government can bring people together who would not normally talk. They can give safe harbor industry to come together and discuss problems that historically they would shy away. What's the great example of that?
Starting point is 00:05:33 I'm wondering if it's the drug companies who they have something to lose because Trump's been, President Trump has been very clear, hey, I want these prices lowered. Why are we the sucker at the poker table? We're paying 10 times what Canada's paying. Is that the best example in your brand so far? It's a great example. Most favored nation drug pricing specifically addresses the problem you outlined, which is we just pay a bunch more for the exact same product, made the same factory, often in America, than our counterparts do here in Europe. So the president says, we need to change that. So he says, go talk to drug companies, create some opportunities for risk for them, you know, make some rules, create some projects that if we were to act on them would really hurt
Starting point is 00:06:15 them. A little pressure. A little pressure. Let's create, you know, build the crowbars. and the baseball bats. Okay. Cut some trees down, hone the wood, but don't use them. Right. And he's very specifically said,
Starting point is 00:06:26 do not hurt the innovative nature of pharmaceuticals. They are important to our nation. They save lives. We want to have the most innovative industries in the world because that's where the opportunities are to differentiate ourselves. It's also part of our national destiny.
Starting point is 00:06:39 Be the best. So don't hurt the industry, but take some of the fat out of it. Pull it back and give it to the American people. Plus, it's the fair way of doing things. And metaphorically, When you think about NATO and the president's saying to NATO countries, we're all in it together to protect ourselves against external threats. You guys got to put up more money.
Starting point is 00:06:57 We'll put up more, but proportionally more. It's got to be fair. And they all did that pretty much with one or two exceptions. He did the same thing with pharmaceuticals. He said there's an external threat, which is Russia or, you know, foreign governments. There's internal threats like cancer. So we want everyone that chip in. We pay in the United States.
Starting point is 00:07:14 0.8% of our GDP towards pharmaceutical products. 0.8%. Almost 1% of our GDP goes to drugs. That's not the health care system, which I think is 17%. Right. One percent of it, a full 6% of our health care goes just directly to the drug company. So we want... It's quite, quite impressive. Yeah, thank you. So point, I only bring us up because the percentages make a difference here, 0.8%. Comes from us playing blackjack. That's actually a calculator. I know. I know you... No, no, it comes from playing blackjack and poker together. I've lost a lot of...
Starting point is 00:07:46 Two outers over here. Well, I've been, I've lost a lot of money to this. guy and I don't play them in chess anymore. Bend, but don't break. You want them to bend a little bit, be reasonable, but you don't want to break the industry. As a doctor. Let's the upshot of this, because you hear this term affordability a lot. So the average American is going to pay less for their drug prices? We're going to pay less. The Europeans, we are telling all the countries, we're in the middle of these discussions. We've just gotten the British to say yes, and other countries are talking to us about the fact that they pay 0.3%. So less than half of what but we pay percent-wise is being spent by them.
Starting point is 00:08:20 And they get away with it because there are people don't realize that if you get cancer, more advanced cancers in Europe, your survival rates way below the U.S. And if you don't get access to the drugs, which they don't for several years on average, that we get into the U.S., yes, you can get it for cheaper, but your people are paying a price. And this is going to see the most important message
Starting point is 00:08:37 that I'm going to deliver today. The most important message is, don't think about health care like an expense. Think of it as an investment, because if I can get the average American to work one year longer because I got their medication at a better price. They didn't turn away at the drugstore. Or because we're able to do something else.
Starting point is 00:08:52 Correct. Morbilities. Whatever. Missing. The movement. We'll talk about all this. But if you can get the average American to work one year longer, that is worth $3 trillion to the U.S. economy.
Starting point is 00:09:03 It's massive. So we need to get people feeling their best, feeling that they have agency over their future with confidence that they're going to make a difference in the world. So they want to keep trying to do it at the workplace. And that extra one year, which gets them closer to Medicare, by the way, also helps deal with other financial crises that we're facing as a nation. So this is the way to think about it the right way. Get the actual cost of care down. Don't just pay more money into the system.
Starting point is 00:09:29 Get the actual cost of care down to the money we're spending gets us more value. We're spending twice as much as these other countries who have universal health care. Now, you did point out that they get things later. So we have a better system, but we pay through the notes for it. That would be an accurate way of describing the current state of affairs. Precisely stated, yes. Okay. So how do we get every American health care?
Starting point is 00:09:51 Because I believe a lot of the tension we have comes from a fear from people maybe who are not as well off as the people on the pod right now. And they live with that fear. We don't live with that fear. We know if we need to get health care, we're going to figure it out. We'll be able to pay for it out of pocket or insurance will pay for it. But there are people who go bankrupt because of this. You believe in universal health care, I would assume, as a doctor?
Starting point is 00:10:13 I want everyone to have access to health care. But how we pay for it is the defining issue here. How do you keep the system incentivized to take care of you? If I tell everybody in America that you have health care, and then I tell the doctors, give them health care, but I don't deal with the financial cost, then you all of a sudden start to restrict the access to care. So you can get the health care, like you're doing socialized medicine countries.
Starting point is 00:10:36 You just have to wait six months or a year or longer, or you don't get to care at all. And when you start having that discussion with Americans, They say, wait, whoa, wait, well, why. Hold on a whole side, I was like, yes, of course I want to get the health care for an affordable price. But the question, the fundamental question is, how long till I actually get the care? Being denied is something they live with. So they complain about their universal health care.
Starting point is 00:10:56 We complain about not having universal health care. What are the two or three? Well, but the thing I would look at is the flow of patients who seek treatment internationally. So I hear lots of stories about Canadians coming to the U.S. to get treatment because they don't want to wait two years. To get the latest treatment. proceed, not just the latest, to get some procedure. Yeah. Because they could be dead in two years. So they come here. I don't hear any Americans talking about going to Canada to get treated. We actually do have a number of examples of that in surgeries and treatments that you have to pay for out of pocket.
Starting point is 00:11:30 Cosmetic, dental, people are going. And this has become tourism. And there are people who do change locations. Yes. For elective procedures. You mentioned cosmetic surgery. That's definitely a trend. And also there's some procedures that we don't do in America. Themselves. some cells, they're still going through the regulatory process. But the bigger issue really is one David's raising, which is most Americans complain that the health care system is broken. Almost none would leave the country to get top-tier health care for a life-threatening problem. And so we have this sort of bizarre opportunity. I do think it's an opportunity. How do we make the top-tier health care available to folks who need it, but do it at a price that is sustainable? And that's where I think
Starting point is 00:12:09 your specialty area comes into play. Before this administration, I think because we didn't have the right technologies to promise convincingly that we could do this, there was a hesitancy to make big shifts. We're taking big swings because we think AI is ready. We think the tech transformation that could happen in healthcare is worth subsidizing. And by that I mean, making it possible for top-tier entrepreneurs or building apps that can help you deal with the medical crisis that you're dealing with, they're diabetes. We can put money into the system to make that worth you doing so you can get investors to support you. You can get a fair valuation. technology to lower the price. Obviously, that's a huge win. Let me ask you the difficult
Starting point is 00:12:48 question as a doctor. There have been studies that came out recently that not only do LLMs currently give better advice than the average general practitioner, they have better bedside manner and the customers or the patients enjoyed the LLM more than they enjoyed a GP. You see that? I haven't seen. This is a study that came out of either Harvard or MIT. I'll put it in the show notes, but this is a pretty ground-brown. What are your thoughts if you were going to a new society? Is this idea that you have to go to the GP, they ask you a bunch of questions,
Starting point is 00:13:23 then they go on their medical texts, figure out what their advice is? Is that the best modality, or would it be better for the calm and cold, for an ankle sprain to do what most Americans without insurance are doing, or people who are self-directed, they go on a large language model, it says, here's how you deal with these issues,
Starting point is 00:13:40 and they do it themselves, and they can take care of it. a couple of things, wouldn't it be better to just have them do this stuff and then decide if they should go see their GP? I think there's a hybrid of that that de-risks it a little bit. Early on, there are definitely problems with hallucination and the like that Americans be very intolerant to. We actually understand of a human being who has an MD degree makes a mistake. We think AI is perfect and are completely intolerant. They've been a minor transgression. What you said earlier is true, and these studies have been done several times now, the large language models do better on-board
Starting point is 00:14:13 So they're general knowledge, they're better than a doctor. They're more patient than a doctor. If you talk to an AI informed avatar, they'll answer the same 10 questions on diabetes all day long and not get bored. Talk to a general practitioner, after they've talked to 10 patients of diabetes who ask the same 10 questions,
Starting point is 00:14:30 you get a little terse in your responses. That's just human nature. I don't want to answer the same question every time, but that's what patients need you to do. So I think we have the opportunity, and we looked at some of these models. In fact, John Doer brought a bunch of very thoughtful, thoughtful entrepreneurs into the building to talk about the possibility of us taking the average
Starting point is 00:14:48 general practitioner and making them five times, maybe even 10 times more efficient. Now, here's the big deal. They're not enough GPs in America. We probably need two to three times more just to keep up with Europe. It's just per capita. We're way below because my son just finished medical school. There aren't many kids in medical school at Columbia where he went who were going to become GPs.
Starting point is 00:15:06 They all want to be ophthalmologists and, you know, orthopedic surgeons because they pay a lot more. And they got big loans for their. Yeah, and they're in debt. You're in debt. And this is even, Columbia is free. If you don't have money, you don't have to pay tuition at Columbia. They did that so that kids would go into general practice and hasn't had the desired impact yet. But the broader question is, how do we allow AI to play a role as this transition period happens?
Starting point is 00:15:29 So people feel confident. And one way of doing it is to allow it to do most of the work. And then especially with the genetic AI, take the paperwork out of it, the busy work out of it, and feed the doctor the key information. What's the most important thing I do as a doctor? I look at you in the eyes and I read you and I try to connect with you. 50% of our cortex, of our high cognitive function, 50% of it is to read your face. We're hardwired to be social animals to understand the subtle little, David's board, you're not.
Starting point is 00:15:58 I got to change the pacing. I got to get back to him. He's doing card calculations in his head. Yeah, he was in fairness to David. He was out to 1 a.m. They dragged him to four meetings. I was in bed at night. I have good sleep health.
Starting point is 00:16:09 I got my whoop. I got my sleep score. I am a pillow princess like you, Dr. Oz. I hear that you're extreme about your sleep. Well, I'm a good thing. My wife is a world-class steeper. She brings your own pillows. Your wife is delightful, by the way.
Starting point is 00:16:21 I did an hour interview with Lisa before you even got on stage here. I was like, wow, she's impressive. To build on this point, I mean, I think it's interesting. I think we're going to get smarter doctors and smarter patients, and they're each going to use their own version of AI. So what patients are going to use is a consumer product, chat, GPT, you know, but you GROC, you know, and so forth. What's interesting, I think, is when they can dump in their blood panels.
Starting point is 00:16:45 Yes. Because they are so good at reading PDF, you know, just unstructured data. So you dump all your stuff in it. You ask for a diagnosis. You get smarter. You can research your own condition. You're not wasting, frankly, the doctor's time by asking basic questions. You're a better consumer.
Starting point is 00:17:00 You're a better customer. Right. And so you're going to educate it. And then the doctors, they can use chat dbtbt or what have you, but actually they're using specialized, much more specialized, tools that the ones I've seen, they will give you a citation directly to a medical journal that you can bring to your doctor. Because that's very important to doctors.
Starting point is 00:17:18 So you know it's not hallucinating it. Just getting the answer from a, you know, from a chat box on the end up. Yeah. And it's like, oh, that was on Joe. You need to know what the sorts is. Which is fine. If you get information from Joe and then we want backwards to a for a respected medical journal.
Starting point is 00:17:31 So let me ask you about this trend. This is self-directed health care. There's function health doing blood labs, superpower. Whoop just started. offering them, ORA, Apple Watch, 8Sleep. I'm an investor in that one, full disclosure. It's doing great. These things are now putting all that data together
Starting point is 00:17:48 and starting to tell you your life's, your health span, your actual age versus your health age. I don't know what that metric is. But people are now measuring things and getting some knowledge of this and then going to a GP. The problem I'm having is, and I'm not price sensitive, I could get any concierge doctor I want. There's very few doctors who want to work like this
Starting point is 00:18:10 at the moment. That's something's got to change. But what do you think of this new group of people who are doing self-directed health care doing two blood labs a year, putting it into a database, Pronova with the 3D scans, Nico, Daniel X, new company doing a $300 full body scan. All of this, is this going to be the paradigm shift? 80-20 rule. If 20% of Americans do what you're saying and they will, it would make all of medicine function better. I'm actually concerned about the other end of the spectrum. Tell me. The people who don't go to their doctors. Medicaid patients, Medicaid patients are twice as likely. Medicaid is the folks who are vulnerable who are, you have made less money.
Starting point is 00:18:46 They're getting government health insurance. Right. That is our universal health care. That's what we need help. The chance of a Medicaid patient who doesn't pay for their health care because they don't have the means to do it, the chance of them canceling their doctor's appointment is twice that of a Medicare patient. And so it's hard to take care of them.
Starting point is 00:19:03 Now, they have two jobs. They'll get fired if they leave the job early. They don't have to, the flexibility of moving their calendar around. They don't have transportation. There's lots of reasons they don't show. But if I can't get healthcare to them, that's a major crisis for us. And so the real opportunity for AI is democratizing healthcare. See, you guys are already smart.
Starting point is 00:19:20 You just listed off top of your head a dozen companies all doing great work. Most people have no idea these companies exist or what they do exist. And so if I can put into AI, my labs, and I don't know much about healthcare, I can get information sent to me in a way that I can process it. And at the time, I'm ready to hear it. Now, I'll give you one more data point that might be useful. All Medicare patients, all seniors over 65, all of them are given a free wellness exam every year.
Starting point is 00:19:45 What percentage of people take their free medical exam with a doctor? Less than 5%. No, it's not that bad. It's less than 50%. Less than 50%. But most people don't do it. It's there. And part of the reason we think that's happening is you don't prioritize it.
Starting point is 00:19:57 And here's the more important data point. People who actually see their doctor think they're sicker, but they're actually much healthier than people who don't see their doctor because ignorance is bliss. don't go to their doc or seek any kind of health advice, think that they're doing great, and actually objectively, they're doing much worse. So we have an opportunity to democratize this by saying, okay, I'm going to meet you where you are. You don't care about going to see a doctor, even though it's free, it's yours. In this new health tech ecosystem, we're building out on with Amy Gleason, who also ran Doge, you know, helping to roll this all out. We're making it easier for
Starting point is 00:20:28 every tech company to participate. 600 companies have signed a pledge, agreeing to interoperability, data, transparency, and to build these tools for the American people to be able to use them. Now, once I deputize you to be better equipped, take care of yourself, you change the system. Because when you ask a doctor a question, the first time you're the only patient,
Starting point is 00:20:48 they don't pay attention. The second patient who asks the same question, we change. As a physician, I'm telling you. It helps us to have patients pushing us to pay attention to, for example, ambient collection of information in the doctor's office. So I get a medical report on what you told me. Why? Because 50% of what a doctor tells the patient is forgotten before the patient leaves the office.
Starting point is 00:21:08 So when your kid asks you, hey, what happened with the doctor? You don't remember. You're nervous. You're anxious. The doctor spoke quickly. Use big words. Break all that down. All of a sudden, information gets flowing easily. Now you've got a lot more stakeholders. And who's the ultimate stakeholder, the patient. So the medical records who historically have been hijacked by medical record companies. And hidden. Like, how do you ever get them? Yeah. And all those companies now are saying, all right, we get the joke. And this is again, back to the president. He's not fooling around in this stuff. When he tells you he wants you to share data, you know he's going to come after your ass if you don't deal with this problem.
Starting point is 00:21:39 And so they've all come and say, all right, you know, we're not on the joke now. The pharma companies, when we're negotiating most favorite nation. You know what they said when we challenged them and said, you're charging several times more for the same products? They said, all right, well, we knew one day
Starting point is 00:21:51 you'd come knocking. We knew, did you. And we actually think the president would do something to us, so we're going to negotiate. And you don't want to throw away that power. You know, don't beg for forgiveness, this push for action, you know, make things happen.
Starting point is 00:22:04 And if they don't work out fine, you'll get more bites at the apple. Just on that point about the pledge, because I got to attend that event at the White House. You organized it. Well, don't be modest. I mean, it's going to be a little bit too much credit, but it was, honestly, it was you and Amy Gleason and Secretary Kennedy, and you guys just happened to invite me for some reason. But it was really interesting because, so this is my kind of layman's understanding of it, which is the law gives us the right to our own medical records.
Starting point is 00:22:31 But in practice, we don't get them. HIPAA regulations. Well, it's because the companies that store the health records do it in proprietary formats. And we don't really know how to get that data and what will we do with it even if we did. So the key is to get those health records share to all the other medical companies in the space that we might want to use. Hence the power of the pledge, get these 600 companies agree. But I think that AI is kind of the magic glue here because.
Starting point is 00:23:01 AI is so good at reading data from different formats and translating it. Perfect. So you don't need like a perfect API anymore. You just get the unstructured data, dump it in and now it just works. Which is what we're starting to see. I'm taking my 8 sleep data, my whoop data, my blood panels, and I'm putting it into all four of the major ones asking it. I take pictures of every one of my supplements or drinks.
Starting point is 00:23:25 What impact will this have? Which impact will this have on sleeping? I think that's like this gigantic. Yeah, you being able to realize the promise that the law gives you to actually own your own medical data, but to get it in a usable format that now you can use again a chat interface to understand it. It's technological obscurification. Let's call it what it is.
Starting point is 00:23:45 They're trying to use this proprietary formats always to get a technological advantage and to have a moat around their business. AI just decodes that and makes it usable and now you can interact with it. Can I bring up one other example? So Dr. Ross, you mentioned democratization. You and I've had a conversation about certain states. are actually trying to ban the use of AI to be used in therapy. And I think the point you made to me is, you know what?
Starting point is 00:24:08 There's a lot of places all over the country, like rural areas, where there aren't psychiatrists or there isn't psychiatric care. So at least AI provides a baseline level of service. Version one may not have been perfect. There may have been some hallucination, but it is getting better and better every year. If you ban it, then a lot of people are just going to have nothing, right? I mean, beautifully stated. Just go over, that's unwrapped that a little bit, but I'll be just at a high level say AI is coming to a neighborhood near you. You're not stopping it. Yeah. So it's going to be there and patients are going to use it. And so you have to engage it. Running from it, you know, we cannot stick our head in the stand on this one. There's other things you can sort of delay, but I've encouraged every governor go full bore at this, but do it in the right way. Allow professionals to function at the height of their licensure. Why don't we use pharmacists better? There's probably 70,000 pharmacists, right? And the thing by this way.
Starting point is 00:25:01 Almost all Americans, 95%, live within five miles of a pharmacy. They don't live near a five, you know, near a hospital usually. So we don't have access to care in many ways. If we just took AI and allowed pharmacists and doctors, GPs, to function at a higher level, it itself would be worth the opportunity. So I'm not having been saying advocate at all to an AI agent that doesn't really understand you. We can't control. Maybe, you know, some of the country gets involved in it.
Starting point is 00:25:26 At its very practical level, we do not have enough practitioners. There just aren't enough people to take care of rural America. 60 million Americans living in rural America don't have access to mental health services. Our vets commit suicide at a crazily high rate more than we lose in war because they don't have access to mental health services. Many of them do live in rural America. And so if we're going to fix those kinds of problems, which are time consuming, you're not going to get Park Avenue psychiatrists to go practice medicine. At $800 an hour. At $800 an hour in the north slope of Alaska in the winter.
Starting point is 00:25:56 It's not going to happen. And so this $50 billion investment that we as a country just made, just the money was part of the rural health, the working family tax cut legislation that the president pushed through and Congress got behind. $50 billion, the largest investment ever made in rural health care through our agency, was given up by the end of the calendar year. All the governors have the money. And we charge them to make a difference in their communities.
Starting point is 00:26:21 You know your communities. They almost all came back with some AI element. They all know to really be able to get health care in rural America. you've got to right size the system. Right sizing the system means, you know, the hospital is going to work out differently. Doctors will work differently with each other. But AI is the core element of so much of this. And these micro hospitals, just like people are putting ADU units in the back of their homes
Starting point is 00:26:40 to get an extra, you know, apartment for grandma and grandpa or as an Airbnb. My understanding is there's a bunch of startups working on the equivalent building a micro hospital, a room with the central services, perhaps a nurse practitioner, who there's more available. and then you telemedicine in. Just bringing the medicine to those areas without having to build a giant hospital is also a win, yeah? The microclinics, I think, have a huge opportunity to provide top-tier care. But this goes beyond that. We have AI-supported robots that are going to be doing ultrasounds in parts of Alabama where there are no obese. We have drones delivering prescription medications to the north slope of Alaska where there are no roads. We have a bending machine.
Starting point is 00:27:26 that can dispense smart dispensing of medications. By the way, this is happening in other countries. So we want this take place in America, and why not take advantage of an opportunity with a huge massive inflow of money, which is a rural health transformation fund does, $50 billion, to start to do some innovative work in rural parts of the country,
Starting point is 00:27:44 which is the foundational element of who we are as a nation. Those values ripple up to the rest of us. I also think that states now are talking to each other differently. Now, now you've got money that's out there that can be used to change the world, they start talking about AI and technology generally very differently. Now it's not a sparse research. We're living in a world of abundance and AI makes it that much more abundant if we use it correctly. And it's not going to happen today, but we believe by the time the administration has completed this work, we will have dramatically changed the face
Starting point is 00:28:14 of how Americans work with information in the health care system. Some of it's just blocking and tackling, as you said, medical record companies, not data block. Some of it's forcing health information systems to share data more comfortably and elegantly at a fair price. And part of us putting money into the system, seeding it the right way. But the most important thing is to make it safe to go outside. We want to make it comfortable to take financial risk to invest in these areas. That's why 600 companies have invested. Every major AI company, every major foundational technology company, but all a bunch of a insurgents that I, that I promised, they're all rushing in. The three places entrepreneurs have been reticent to take on, to build a, to build a
Starting point is 00:28:53 new products and services, education, housing, healthcare. These also happen to be the ones most regulated, most controlled by the government. So to the extent you can give them access and make it go faster, it's going to work. The only investments we've ever made in those spaces are ones that go direct to consumer. Because we know going through the government, there's just not enough runway for those companies to get to the other side. Let me ask you about- We're open for business.
Starting point is 00:29:19 And I got to make this plug while I'm here. We want to work with industry. We believe the private sector will come up with better on. ideas come work with us. And we're also looking for people. And we had nine engineers, nine engineers when we came in. And all of CMS, our cobal based infrastructure, built in the 70s, where we don't have engineers that- You're talking about in the department, you had nine engineers out of what's the denominator of employees? 6,500 employees and 40,000 contractors. So there's, you basically have an HR person in government working with a government affairs person at the company. There's no engineers
Starting point is 00:29:50 there. 16 basis points, David. We took out, we took three billion. to cost out. There was a company that we fired that had billed us $200 million, not a single usable line of code. And here's the good part. When we fired them, you know what they said? Nothing. Yeah. We knew it. We knew it. Yeah, we were underperforming. No accountability. Underemforming. God, we could go on about fraud forever. But I want to ask you about this wonder drug four years ago. I was listening to my friend Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose, who are biohackers, and they're always on the edge of this stuff. And he wanted to lose some visceral fat. Kevin was in
Starting point is 00:30:21 great shape and he heard about this diabetes drug, Osampic, and that he was going to give it a shot. He dialed the pen all the way up, he puked, dialed it back down, lost his visceral fat. I heard that. I was like 40, I was 213 pounds at the time. Went to my doctor. He said, I have no idea what you're talking about. You're not diabetic, but you are fat. And he said, you're a fat bastard. I think I said that. And I had just gained like two or three pounds a year for 20 years. And I used to be a marathon runner. It used to be 16, 5, 170 pounds. So now 172. You're a gazelle right now, by the way. Well, I had a little muscle too.
Starting point is 00:30:55 Thank you, Dr. Ross. You look great, too. But this is a miracle drug. This, in my mind, we now have theoretically, tens of millions of Americans have experienced it. It's going to be in pill format. The four horsemen of the apocalypse, heart disease. Kidney failure, liver disease, dementia. Dementia.
Starting point is 00:31:15 These are all four of four are impacted by obesity and these GOP-1s seem to be impacted. acting them. I was like, you know what, if Trump just, President Trump just gave a national, anybody can get this drug if they want it, I think he'd win the election. He won anyway. What do you think about a mandate to make it available, to make the fat drug available for all Americans? Would that be? So I'm glad you came to work today. So about two months ago in the Oval Office, the president basically did that. He said that we're going to take the prices of these drugs, which are now prohibitively high for many Americans, 12, $200 cash pay. It's crazy. It's going to be a starting price of around $200. Easy. And with the pills,
Starting point is 00:31:59 it's $150. And the pills will come out. The first FDA approved pills will start this month. And so we believe at that price, $5 a day, because Zincarap, it's right. It's basically a coffee a day. At that price, we will, within two years, return money to the American taxpayer. It's going to save us so much money from reducing hypertension, diabetes, and the downstream illness is the four, of the apocalypse as you mentioned, that we will save money. That we spend over half the money, I believe, within health care on these chronic illnesses driven by obesity. And so, if you directly or indirectly, because you hurt your knees because you're overweight,
Starting point is 00:32:37 or you get autoimmune problems, or even cancer is linked to obesity because you have a metabolically active state. All of these are going to drop precipitously. We have pretty good data on this from internal modeling. So we agreed to those prices with the two major companies, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. we will launch next week, I don't know when this podcast airs, but launch next week Trump RX with those products. So you can cash pay at a price that is completely affordable. And here's the good news. Every Medicare patient gets it for $50 copay. Every Medicaid patient gets it for nothing.
Starting point is 00:33:07 Amazing. So the people who need it the most, the folks that are most fun. Well, this is when when people say the president doesn't want to protect Medicaid, he doesn't love and cherish Medicare, it drives me bonkers because he's doing more for underserved Americans than any of the president ever has giving Americans where the obesity epidemic lives, underserved Americans, vulnerable Americans who are on Medicaid, access to these drugs for no out-of-pocket costs truly democratizes the weight loss issues. Because right now, what's the number one zip for weight loss drugs? Number one zip code, upper east side of Manhattan. I was about to say it's got to be Manhattan or L.A. L.A. is number two. Okay. Right? Because people can afford it or
Starting point is 00:33:43 because they're vain. They're vain. They want to lose two pounds for their daughter's wedding. And they can afford it. $1,200 around the year. Nothing, yeah. Right. But, 12, $1,200 for someone that's not making money, you're just not going to take the drug. And they're the ones that die early. The life expectancy in rural America, I'll go back to them, in vulnerable populations, nine years shorter than yours in the same country. It's something that came out of left field. What does that tell us about what's going to happen in medicine going forward?
Starting point is 00:34:10 Because GLPs, how long of a journey has that been? And then getting to market and then, you know, this off-label use, starting with people with diabetes, what does that, what is that, how does that inform you of how we can make even more impact in the future? How do we make another GLP like discovery and implement it the way President Trump has? Well, this, you know, the drug actually came for, it's a poisonous chemical, a venom, actually, that was deciphered and found to have an impact on some of these core cells in the, in the, in the, the appetite system of the body, which is so fundamental to who we are. Yeah. That is very hard to hack the appetite. But,
Starting point is 00:34:50 GOP-1s are just the tip of the iceberg. There are more and more sophisticated ways for us to be able to address not just appetite, but addiction, addictive behavior drops of GLP-1s. So the newer drugs are going to be even more effective at that. Red at True Tide is the one you're trying. For example, Red Tried, but the other thing, what they say is the form factor matters. In sending someone an injection that goes bad in the warm weather, that a lot of wastage, you don't know the exact dose.
Starting point is 00:35:15 The pills make it like most of the drugs. And now the drug, the price point is much lower. as well, so it's easier for us to deliver that at scale to the American people. So it does leapfrog us beyond today's problems, which is a big theme of our administration, don't bother fixing today's broken pipes if the world you're billing doesn't have pipes. And that's what we're doing with drugs like semi-glutide and terseptide, which is the lily product. We're also getting these companies to unsure their production facility, hire American workers, stay innovative.
Starting point is 00:35:43 This is why, again, the president doesn't want us hurting innovation. With the same day, we did the first most favorite nation drug event. We had an executive order on childhood cancer, 20 beautiful children, smiley, bright eyes, all of whom, all of whom should have been ghosts. They survived because technologies were afforded to them. They don't exist in other parts of the world to keep them alive. That's our goal. But I need to, I be poorly served.
Starting point is 00:36:06 I hear the bell tolling. If I didn't get into the other thing. For whom we don't know. For the bell toils, for sure. And so long for you, Jacob. I think that's so long. I think that's totally for the pharma companies who don't bet in the knee. No, actually, but the issue right now that is consuming us is the fraud,
Starting point is 00:36:25 the waste and abuse. What have you found, Dr. Oz? Tell us, what is the most concerning to you? Well, as a preamble, without a better visibility in where the money spent, which we need technology to be able to do. Or audits. Well, audits are interesting. You can audit the spreadsheet.
Starting point is 00:36:43 You can't tell if the input to the spreadsheet was legitimate. unless you actually go and do site visits. And states don't want to do that. So let me just give the key blocking it these states. Of course, of course. First of all, let me just, I'll tell you, that's a good question. Why would you let fraud happen? It is by federal law, by federal law, mandated that if you give a patient a welfare program,
Starting point is 00:37:04 SNAP, Medicaid, you must also give them the ability to sign up to vote. So you're basically recruiting voters at the same time you're giving them free government services, which then you must. might actually end up recruiting a different kind of voter. Like you don't have a law that if you go to an NRA convention, right, for, you know, gun advocates that you sign up voters, right? You can go to that event, not get signed up to vote. Obviously, they will be probably skewing to the right. So there is an issue there. We also have an active role of unions, especially in California, where we have a major problem because the unions have seemed, this is all what I'm hearing from talking to people on the ground,
Starting point is 00:37:41 seem to have gotten involved in, for example, signing up home health care workers and personal care services. There are more Americans, I believe, providing some of these home-based services that maybe might exist in retail in America. We've shifted the entire employment economy towards some of these services.
Starting point is 00:37:58 And here's the risk, if you really want to understand why we have fraud in America. When I give you things that your family used to give you, we're going to have fraud. So your family used to drive you to the doctor's office. Your family would take you home,
Starting point is 00:38:11 after you got home back from the hospital to make sure you got well nourished and taken care of. Your family would carry the groceries up the stairs. Your family would negotiate your contract with the landlord. Guess what? Healthy human services does all that for you now. All you've got to do is ask. And in some states, it's so easy to do that you end up with significant fraud. So they have intercepted the transaction, therefore that's where grift can occur and fraud.
Starting point is 00:38:34 Also, the government's paying for it. Right. And so when the consumer is paying for it out of their own pocket, they have their own incentive to get value for the transaction. But when the government's paying for it, who really has the incentive to make sure that value has been provided in exchange for that money? Yeah. And this is what happened in Minnesota, where you had a subculture. It was probably not, you know, just mathematically, most of the indictments are with Somalians. So the Somalian community realized, hey, my goodness, no one's watching.
Starting point is 00:38:59 Now there's an adage, you know, that only the morons get caught in health care fraud because it's so easy to do. And if you get, you still $5 million in Medicare, Medicaid, you go to jail for 18 months. I mean, for many people, that's a pretty good deal. Yeah. You know, sit in the pen for 18 months. But unfortunately, I'll just give you a lay the land. There are twice as many durable medical equipment providers. They sell wheelchairs and knee braces.
Starting point is 00:39:24 There's actually 20 times more in South Florida than McDonald's. I mean, how many do you need? Turns out they're all Cuban, pretty much. They all seem to fly back to Cuba and escape, you know, law enforcement. They bill millions of dollars. They get away with it. What's the solution? There's got to be a really practical,
Starting point is 00:39:40 He's a solution. There are, and I'm going to share that, but let me just give you two others because you would remember these. We have seven times more hospice in California. Hospice is for people at the end of their life. Seven times more hospice than was there five, six, seven years ago. Seven times more. We don't have that many people dying in California.
Starting point is 00:39:55 And more importantly, the survival rates on hospice, again, designed for cancer patients dying within six months. The survival rate for most of these hospice centers is 100%. Wait a second. They shouldn't have gone to hospice. Exactly. Is the government paying for it? Yes.
Starting point is 00:40:09 Okay, that's a missing agreement. But no one's dying because you're not supposed to be in the hospital. When do the government start paying for that? Oh, 40 years ago. Oh, okay. It was designed. And then what happened in the last seven or ten that the fraud just wouldn't be successful? Foreign governments got involved.
Starting point is 00:40:22 In L.A., the hospice is driven by the Russian Armenian gangs. They're foreign nationals. They fly back to Russia. We had a big $15 billion bust on these guys earlier in the year. Again, they all escape. The other thing is no one's watching because there's a opportunity if you get into these businesses to make a lot of money. and it becomes, I'll give you, I'll just tell you a true story about a whistleblower.
Starting point is 00:40:42 Again, I can't prove this, but it's what he said. He said that he was building a beautiful mansion. He owns all these hospices. He's a doctor, but he's a fraudster. And so he built this pusher house. The plumber comes in and says, hey, you know, I hear you in the hospice space. The guy says, yeah, I made my money in hospice. The plumber says, you know, I've got a sidehouse, so I own a hospice too.
Starting point is 00:41:01 Right? Then the carpenter hears them. And he says, me too. Yeah. I'm in the hospice business. We're all in the hospice business. Absolutely. So then the guy says, okay, well, he realized he's got to get ahead of these guys. So he goes to a major hospital in L.A. and a doctor at the hospital, very prominent hospital that
Starting point is 00:41:16 everyone's heard of, says, hey, listen, if he gave me $1,000 a month, I'll send hospice patients to you, which is how it's done in L.A., by the way. You get paid, you send patients over. So the guy says, okay, what about the actual inpatients? Like the people hospitalized, can I get them? And the doctor, it says, I can't do that. Because it turns out the members, there are some members of the board that own hospice, and they like the patients to go to their centers. You see that the corruption starts in organized crime, but if you tolerate it, it poisons the whole system. And that's the bigger reason we've got a problem. So what are we doing? We have a fraud war room. I'm going to put a moratorium on some of these services. We're not going to let new people
Starting point is 00:41:55 sign up. We're going to actively and aggressively stop paying Medicaid if we can prove that states are not obliged in their fiduciary responsibility to the American people. Because states administer you know, I pay the bills at CMS. So we're going to stop paying on behalf of the taxpayer if we don't think you're taking care of the money. And people should know there are whistleblower laws where you get a percentage of whatever's reported and they should look into that. And the fact that we have so many people in the administration now communicating that, hey, we want to have you report fraud to us has changed everything. The number of people reporting fraud must have gone up since. Dramatically, people in the government.
Starting point is 00:42:36 government, this is probably the part that's most rewarding to me, many government workers are Democrats, probably most. What they tell me again and again is they just came to government to do their job. They wanted to do the right. And they were told not to do their job. They were told not to focus on the fraud, to focus on getting more people who signed up. But if you don't take care of the fraud, this is an important message, you will kill the system. Eventually, you will destroy Medicaid. And I'm not going to let that happen on our watch. Medicaid, as Hubert Humphrey said, it's there to protect those at the dawn of life, which are our children, 53% of kids are born into poverty. We take care of them. Those at the twilight of life, those are the seniors, right? We owe it to
Starting point is 00:43:15 them. Every great society takes care of their most vulnerable. We're great people will do that. And he, Hubert Humphrey said, you have to take care of those living in the shadows. We are not going to let them get hurt. When you let organized criminal elements steal at scale from the federal government, you are killing those programs. We now have so many kids signed up falsity for autism that the kids with autism aren't getting access to care. Yeah, this is the incredibly frustrating thing having talked to some young parents who are millennials, Gen Z. They're going to work. They had two jobs. They would love to have childcare. But the child care dollars are being stolen, therefore they can't access them.
Starting point is 00:43:53 And the same thing's happening across the system. I think this could be just such a defining moment for America. Because on the other side, we have socialists, lunatic communists running, some of these cities who want to seize people's assets, want to raise taxes before fixing fraud. This is like pouring water into a leaky bucket. Well, you're talking about California. And New York. Yeah, and I couldn't help but notice that Gavin Newsom arrived here at Davis yesterday. He's here.
Starting point is 00:44:20 Yeah, he was encouraging European leaders to defy President Trump, which is a weird thing for a governor to come here to basically advocate for foreign leaders to defy the American president. What next? Like partner with communist countries? I mean. But I think honestly, it's all a distraction because the real thing happening in California right now is everybody knows there's massive fraud there. You see that image on the internet where it's an iceberg and the tip is Minnesota. But California is over the water. I mean, it's the fourth largest economy in the world. Yeah. We know there's massive fraud. I think Newsom knows there's massive fraud too. That's why he's vetoed audits. I mean, can we just pause for a second? audit. Vito audits.
Starting point is 00:45:02 Right. Who would veto an audit? Someone doesn't want to get caught. A criminal. A criminal will veto it. I'm not saying he's a criminal. No, this is to government spending what the ban on voter ID is to elections. Why wouldn't- You only do that.
Starting point is 00:45:17 You're banning the thing that helps you catch the fraud. Yeah. So why would you ever do that unless you want the fraud to happen? Exactly. It's, yeah. It's- Distraziad. Now, even the-
Starting point is 00:45:29 Disraziad, as we. we say here. Gras, but California, the budget is $350 billion, by far the biggest. It has doubled in the last decade. And it's like three times per capita. Two and a half times the inflation rate, okay? And they're still running a huge deficit. And that's why they're now driving all the job creators of the state with this proposed
Starting point is 00:45:49 asset seizure. Wild. If they just clamp down on the fraud, they wouldn't have this hole in their budget. Just LA County alone, just in hospice at home health care, we believe it's about $3.5 million dollars. Just in those two programs in one city, there's probably 10% of all home health care expense in America is in L.A. So there's so much to do to improve the system that would restore confidence. And when you have governors who are unwilling to do their job, and it does make people think that, listen, when smart people don't do things, it's not an accident. They're not doing these
Starting point is 00:46:21 things because they have ulterior motives that either aren't transparent to you or they think you're not smart enough to figure out. We need to ask those questions. This president's not contolerated, but the American people shouldn't either. We had an interesting moment. Our friend Elon Musk had asked us after he purchased Twitter, now X, to come in and we were looking at the bills, trying to figure out how this company was hemorrhaging cash at a level that just didn't even seem possible. And one of the things was they had just signed up for tons of software and, you know, basically subscriptions. And CFO comes in, auditor comes in, we're all trying to figure it out. And Elon just said, they're at Twitter. Yeah. And Elon says,
Starting point is 00:46:58 how are they paying all these? They're like, oh yeah, they're on credit cards. He said, okay, cancel all the cards. And so we said there and were like, yeah, cancel the cards. Immediately, I get three back channels from software companies who are like, hey, I know you're helping Elon. I saw a story in the New York Times. Our bill stopped getting paid.
Starting point is 00:47:18 Can we come in? And I'm like, yeah, we're not using your software anymore. Nobody's ever used. It's never been installed. The software had been, you want to talk about fraud at a scale that was direct. This is a private company. This is at a private company. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:47:32 But your point is, look, when when, when, when, when no one is minding the store, bad things are going to happen. And when no one has minded the store for decades and the government's paying for it, you don't even have that private sector profit motive to basically be efficient. Then think about how the fraud just metastises. It's got to be 20, 30 percent. Hundreds of billions. It's got to be a double digit.
Starting point is 00:47:57 I'm going to guess 20, 30, percent of all these fraud. All it took was a YouTuber with a video camera to actually show up at the Minnesota daycare centers that were receiving millions of dollars. The Learing Center. Yeah, the Learing Center. They're all empty. Yeah. Douses of them. Each one's receiving millions of dollars. Yeah. And that's one program in one state. And these aren't low life's doing this. They're the lives involved, obviously, but these are politically connected groups. Sophisticated. Yeah. And that's why I'm emphasizing. These are government, boring government-backed efforts at times, but certainly the people doing them are often foreign nationals.
Starting point is 00:48:29 And we are being taken advantage of because we're like a big hippopotamus. You know, all you need to penetrate Medicare and Medicaid is a beneficiary number. They can buy those and you're off to the races. So the solutions are, I'm not claiming they're simple, but they're eminently doable, but you have to expect that of your leaders. There's going to be some low hanging fruit here. I can tell you, you cutting off payments and saying very simply, hey, we've cut off payments. All you have to do is sign this attestation that you do. delivered the service, and I would like you to attach your driver's license and passport to it.
Starting point is 00:49:01 And by the way, you've been randomly selected to come into the office. We want to hear all about what you're doing and jump on a Zoom call. Right. So you're saying cancel the credit cards. Yeah. And then... And just let them then reopen the account or tell you... Yeah, come in. Yeah, we just want to re-verify what's going like. Literally... Zero baseline budgeting. Exactly. I'm saying the program's over. And that's the thing that I think Elon found when he's doing Doge is these payments were just on... Auto pay. Obey. O'Don pay. every year. Auto pay equals.
Starting point is 00:49:28 With no code explaining what the money was going to. Auto pay equals for all. That's all you have to know. And if you look at like some of the great, I mean, if you want to talk about like some of the good stuff Lena Con did and I was opposed to about 80% of it, one of the things she did that was really well was she said, if you sign up for a service, you have to be able to cancel it the same way you signed up. So newspapers, these bastions of virtue, you'd sign up for Wall Street Journal.
Starting point is 00:49:54 You'd probably have had this experience. you try to cancel it. They're like, give us a call. And then you're on the phone for an hour and just want to cancel it. And I asked the woman, I said, hey, can I ask you a simple question? Why can't I just cancel online? They're like, oh, well, because of fraud. I'm like, but you took my money through the website. So that's where the fraud would actually occur. She's like, yeah, that kind of makes sense, but I'm just an operator, Mr. Callaghan. They said, okay, fine. But this is the same concept, which is if you want the money, hey, why don't you come into the office? And we'd love to hear how the program's going.
Starting point is 00:50:25 your check right here. Come pick it up in person. Want to hear about it. And can you just take a picture of the service you provided? Just taking a picture of the service you provided and then send it in. How is this hard? And like you said, how do you argue for, California already has some of the highest tax rates in the nation. And now you're arguing for more taxes, novel taxes, taxes that no one's ever seen. Unconstitutional tax. Unconstitutional probably. And will require a massive new enforcement mechanism before you do that you haven't even wrong the obvious fraud out of the system yeah this are our biggest allies are state auditors i met with the state auditor in minnesota uh she confided that you know she's been trying to get this on the radar just people didn't want to listen and i
Starting point is 00:51:06 talked to folks within the agency healthy human services uh you were shuttled around one woman was actually escorted out of the building for raising the reality that there was fraud and this happened over several years and eventually either you leave if you're ethical, or you're quiet because you don't want to get fired. And you make it such a harsh environment for anybody to just tell the truth. This reminds me a friend of mine who is a billionaire now.
Starting point is 00:51:32 Thomas Pedofy, you probably know him, interactive brokers, really great guy. And he said he was growing up in Hungary. And he said when he was young, he knew that everyone was lying to him. But that wasn't the big problem. The big problem is he knew that they knew that they were lying to him.
Starting point is 00:51:47 Right. So pretty soon, we are all in on the fact that there's a big lie. whole thing is corrupt. And so working in these agencies, the good people are weeded out. The people who are left either don't care aren't good people. Or complicit. And some of them are complicit. But I think fundamentally there was a misalignment of values. And this actually was probably the most important thing we had to do in that legislation last year, the Working Families Tax Legislation. We had to align the president with the governors. There were so many ways of getting
Starting point is 00:52:14 the federal government to give you money that wasn't really yours. Legalized money laundering, schemes, all kinds of things that clever consultants had figured out over the years, that we estimated we would have lost $5.4 trillion just for Medicaid, which is again why I often joke, we were becoming one massive health care system with a small country attached. It doesn't work long term. If we don't take bold action, which again, a major message on a lot of things the president is doing, if you don't take bold action on some of these issues, you're leaving the next generation with a train wreck.
Starting point is 00:52:44 They can't fix it anymore because the train's gone way off the rails. Yeah, and just think of the absolute hypocrisy. You have someone like Mandami who says he wants to increase services, provide more for the citizens, and they're not doing the audits. They're not fighting fraud. Gavin Newsom is talking about wanting to provide more for the bottom half of society, but not doing the audits. And frankly, this whole budget poll that is causing this now asset seizure tax, it all started
Starting point is 00:53:08 in 2022 when Newsom promised Medi-Cal for all, including illegal aliens. And so what happened is in Big Beautiful Bill, President said, listen, we're not going to reimburse for illegal aliens like- Think about incentives there. Right. So then the SEIU at UHW, the health worker union, union, they're upset because they don't want that funding cut because it indirectly impacts them. So that's how this whole thing happened. I think about the layers of fraud there that you've got, you know, the government of the
Starting point is 00:53:38 California is paying for illegal aliens. Probably shouldn't be doing that. I mean, if you asked the American people, which is you know, you know, the government which is who you both work for, how many Americans believe that illegal aliens should get universal health care? I think you're going to get like 98% are going to say absolutely not. And the 2% with purple hair and Berkeley who want it, I don't know what their motivation is. I just to finish the point, if you are going to have the politics of Gavin Newsom and you're going to tell, bet a cow for all in the state, even illegal aliens, doesn't that create a responsibility on
Starting point is 00:54:12 you to audit the system and make sure it's not being abused, when you then turn a blind eye to the fraud and you refuse to even acknowledge it, you just pretend like it doesn't exist. And you veto the audits, that's doubly wrong. But it doesn't hurt California. This is the part of the story that's so infuriating. You don't audit the books in California because the federal government is paying anyway. So why would I audit the books to find out that my people aren't getting free money from the federal government?
Starting point is 00:54:38 Let's talk about illegal immigrants. So Gavin Newsom was giving us a hard time for threatening the the health insurance of illegal immigrants, just to be very transparent. If you're on Medicare, you don't get free dental, you don't get free vision. You do if you're an illegal immigrant in California. This is the inferiority. Anyway, so you've got taxpayers in New Mexico, right, which is a blue state, but a poor state, paying extra tax dollars to the federal government that are recycled back into LA to deal with the fraud that I'm talking about. So illegal immigrants, he's mad, he's mad, he's mad, he's mad, we're horrible people, we're Republicans, you have no conscience,
Starting point is 00:55:07 you have no heart. As soon as we made it clear, we were no longer going to pay for illegal immigrants in California. What did he do? He took them off MedCal. Now, he didn't take them off, he'd come up on the federal side. So in theory, only emergency services are going to get paid for for illegal immigrants in California, which is a national law. And it's reasonable. Reasonable. Now, we're all, we want babies delivered, car accident, victims. Yeah, of course, get health care, but not elective hernia surgery, cataracts, you know, you have to be an American citizen who paid into the system to get these. So anyway, so we deal with this. Gavin says, we're only going to pay for illegal immigrants through our own state-based system.
Starting point is 00:55:42 We've audited him now. This data is coming out this week. We have now found over $1.5 billion of money spent wrongly. We've audited it. They're not having been arguing. One and a half billion dollars from that California charged the federal government for illegal immigrants that they're not allowed to pay charges for. They have to pay for it themselves. He's not happy.
Starting point is 00:56:04 But they're paying us because they know we're right. So you're going to see something happened very interesting in California. As soon as the money is being paid by California government. officials, they're going to start getting more serious about this. And that's why it's so important for us to say, we're not into this anymore. I'm not going to let taxpayers in Alabama and Mississippi, New Mexico, you know, our poorest states pay for the fourth largest economy in the world and they get less. And they get less. And you know, we're a country of immigrants. You could absolutely believe in legal immigration and want the border closed. That's what we saw in the last election. That was the
Starting point is 00:56:40 deciding issue, I think, at the end of the day. I mean, they also picked a terrible candidate on the other side and you have a primary, put that aside. You have an amazing candidate too. Incredible, tremendous, okay? The best ever. The greatest ever. Minimizing. I'm just saying, I mean, you kind of went up against a way, anyway, we put it inside. You know, the thing that I think is super important is incentives matter. You've said this many times without explicitly saying it in our conversation. The incentive for people to come to America illegally is to make a better life for them. themselves and to have a job, employment, and these social services.
Starting point is 00:57:16 If the social services aren't available, some number are going to stay back, and if the jobs aren't available, then why would you risk it? Why would you pay one of these coyotes five, $25,000 across the board? You wouldn't. You would get in the line to do it properly. And that's a very simple solution here. You just change the incentive. Make it impossible for an illegal alien to come here for those two things.
Starting point is 00:57:39 You know what financial value there is of having free health care in America? So many. Well, I'm not going to make you guess. Well, I was going to say for the employers, I can say it's very acute to insert yourself into the relationship with your employees because employees will not leave one company. They'll pick the company they work for based on the health care and they will not leave a company to pursue a better opportunity in order to keep their health care, which is dysfunctional because you want talent to move.
Starting point is 00:58:04 That's a uniquely Silicon Valley entrepreneurial way to look at it. From the employer market, we think the money should have. follow the patient, but broadly speaking, because I don't regulate commercial insurance for illegal immigrants, for your family, it's worth about $30,000. So there is no good reason for you to go back home again if we give you world-class health care coverage. Yeah. So this is a major issue for us dealing with the immigration problem because you cannot send 10 million people back legally who are here illegally. The president has said this, you know, I think he said it publicly, but I think he would. It will take us 200 years of legal machinations to send back people who
Starting point is 00:58:41 came her illegally. So there is no legal path to expelling people who came her illegally. You have to remove the incentives to stay here. Free housing, free food, free health care. Of course you're going to stay. Show me an incentive. I'll show you the outcome. If you look at the war on drugs, how unsuccessful it's been, people go to San Francisco for a reason for their fentanyl because they can buy it and there's no policing. And it is exactly a function of more policing means the price of those drugs go up, which means consumption goes down. Not only is there that dynamic missing in San Francisco because there's no enforcement and you can get fentanyl for five or $10 a hit, they also give you housing and $800 or something to that effect per month. So the
Starting point is 00:59:27 homeless industrial complex has now created an incentive and everybody in that, you know, really tragic, junkie community knows that, and they leave Texas. They leave other states to go there, and then they bear the brunt of it. And they are actually increasing the suffering. What's your take on these new super drugs versus the rescheduling of drugs? Obama wanted to do it in his second term. He didn't have the political willpower or will to do it. And Trump now is saying, hey, maybe for cannabis, we should rethink that and do what Canada has done in other modern nations how do you look at those specific drugs fentanyl nine or 12 overdoses a day in san francisco at the peak um and then methamphetamine which is just another we have good substance
Starting point is 01:00:14 use disorder medications we can't get people into the programs this is why homelessness is an industrial complex and the states that have done it well i mean i know mayor sweras in miami dropped a number by 90 percent and he did it just by making sure that you got arrested every time you peed publicly and they don't put you in jail they put you in rehab but it takes four or five six efforts you can't give people free showers great accommodations lots of food and then expect them to stop using drugs because you're enabling that behavior and not expecting bad outcomes which is what happened but i was in kensington philadelphia which is a drug capital of the east oh this is where they have that other super drug i forgot the name of it it's very pernicious
Starting point is 01:00:54 trank yeah trank is a terrible drug it creates massive ulcers on your body so i was I was there and I you know I I just walked the streets just talk to people like why are you here Where'd you come from? Why don't you go home? Etc. And then I ran to a guy who had just saved someone's life Giving them the locks zone as an inhaler and he said, well, you know, what happened? He says well, they OD'd I gave it to them and I said well, what did they tell you? How do they thank you when they awaken From near death from that dark abyss of darkness? And he said they're almost always livid at me. Yeah, you ruined their high And you ruin their escape. Oh, they're actually hoping to end this suffering.
Starting point is 01:01:34 The pain was so bad. That's why it seems nice. And that's why I was telling my friends in Minnesota. Minnesota nice is great when you really, really mean it. But nice does not mean allowing a public health system to be raped. It's not allowing people to abuse themselves expecting a different outcome than what historically has happened. You need to, if you really love people, you might not like them. But if you really love them, you'll do something that actually goes beyond like to make
Starting point is 01:02:00 you ultimately gain respect for them for you. There's a very simple. Tough love. Well, and if you were to take a Christian view of it and you were to talk to any of the parents, these poor parents who are suffering with a child addicted to drugs, and their adult child is on the street. And you said to them, we can arrest them and put them in jail. We can treat them incredibly severely and try to, you know, just lock them up until
Starting point is 01:02:25 they say, thank you. Please do that. But there are a bunch of lunatics who think you're harassing a homeless person who had a bad bead and you're infringing on their freedom. But the parents and the family would say, please lock them up. That's our last ditch effort. So it's not compassion. It is not Christian at all. That's a faculty lounge discussion with your tweed jacket on and your elbow protectors when you're pontificating about people that you read about. Right. And I point that off because I'm on the faculty. You know, I've been. You got one of those tweet. You talk to those tweed. I got rid of my tweet jackets. The elbow patches, they look terrible anyway. But, you know, you sit there and you act, again, this is the crazy thing about intelligence is people,
Starting point is 01:03:05 the more intelligent you are, the better you are to lying to yourself and others around you. Because you can construe almost any data into something that has, you know, a meeting that's not really there. And we have tolerated that for too long. I actually think that's an important part of President Trump's appeal. He cuts through all that BS. Don't tell me stuff that defies common sense because common sense is not so common. You don't have to accept it.
Starting point is 01:03:29 I think that's the other thing that I think Trump has, I think, taught some folks. We do not have to accept that state of affairs. You don't have to accept. And the framing of it, let's just call it what it is. You know, I've used the term here on our podcast and say junkies because I grew up in New York in the 70s and 80s and that's what we call people who are addicted to smack junkies. It's not derogatory. It's an indication of just how bad that disease is.
Starting point is 01:03:50 Calling it homelessness means you're trying to solve the wrong thing. Putting a junkie in a home. They have plenty of homes to go to. It's nothing to do with that. All right. We got to let, this is, how long will we be talking? Two hours? I don't know, but I can talk about Dr. Ours for hours.
Starting point is 01:04:04 All right. Okay. All right. Please. All right. So I just want to, yeah, let me just wrap this up. So, Dr. Oz first reached out to me during the transition because he's so intensely interested in AI and he.
Starting point is 01:04:17 Is when you were transitioning? Yes, during my. Transition, you supported him? Yeah, I love, I love David. Yes, we all. And he was looking for, for, for, for, uh, of AI experts in Silicon Valley to build his advisory panel. And this impressed me right away with the energy that you bring,
Starting point is 01:04:33 the knowledge, the passion. You really do care about improving health outcomes for all Americans. And I think we are very lucky to have you in this administration from the president on down. And I think the country is very lucky to have. You could be doing many, many different things. But you really care about this job. And I think it's really incredible what you're doing.
Starting point is 01:04:52 Thank you for your service. I wanted to have you speak to us on the pods to kind of long overdue. Well, you're very kind to have me on. I've enjoyed it. Big fan, obviously, of your work, in part because you brought a sense of clarity to many of the issues you discussed. And I want to thank you, David, for being a, first of all, using your ability to get people together. The power to convene is remarkably effective, but you've also demystified a lot of this and allowed the administration to embrace AI and technology in general. So God bless you. Great. Thank you. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time on All In at Davos.

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