Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 06-05-25_THURSDAY_6AM

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

06-05-25_THURSDAY_6AM

The Bill Meyer Show podcast is sponsored by Clauser Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at clauserdrilling.com. Here's Bill Meyer. So great to have you here on Conspiracy Theory Thursday. Heard a good one. 7705633. 770 KMED.

My email bill at billmeyershow.com. The first thing I wanted to talk about this morning is, well, I don't want to talk about the ad here, but I was reminded of this vintage television ad back in the golden days of 1970s television when people were concerned about jobs being lost to foreign manufacturers. Even then, this has been going on for a long, long time. There used to be more of us in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, but a lot of our jobs have disappeared. A lot of the clothes Americans are buying for women and kids are imports.

They're being made in foreign places. When the work's done here, we can support our families and pay our taxes and buy the things other Americans make. That's what it means when the label says union uh... the union only and

and anybody remember that and i was uh... nineteen seventy eight think, when they ended up doing this. Look for the union label. Look for the union label. And I couldn't help but think about the union label as applied to the Oregon state Democrats in the legislature. Because Senate Bill 916, really contentious idea, ended up passing the House yesterday.

It was a 33-23 vote. Mostly along party lines, the State House ended up passing Senate Bill 916. And this would give unemployment checks to public employees who go out on strike. Astounding! This would allow all workers, whether public or private by the way, to get unemployment pay two weeks after going on strike. In other words, the state unemployment insurance fund would end up paying workers to fight their boss. Isn't that essentially what we're talking about?

Yeah. Currently, you're only able to get unemployment insurance if you are out of work through no choice of your own, which seems like a reasonable way to operate something like this. However, Senate Bill 916 was pushed by labor unions that are influential among majority Democrats. The bill is aimed at giving workers more leverage in labor disputes. Now you think about this. You have the unions that already get the Democrats elected. They're huge supporters of the Democrats.

They already have huge leverage because they helped get Democrats elected and now they want private employers to pay the unemployment. Because remember, you don't pay, and you the worker, if you're a worker like I am, I'm an employee, I don't pay the unemployment insurance. The actual employer pays it. They end up paying into the unemployment insurance. The actual employer pays it. They end up paying into the unemployment insurance fund. So essentially you have unions that elect Democrats and then the Democrats are then going to vote to give more, well I guess more taxpayer money to the Democrats' friends,

the unions. So you know, and it was also innocent back in the 1970s. I remember singing this song. Okay, look for the union label. How could we change that for today? Would it be, look for the union label when you were buying an Oregon Democrat? We'll get your unemployment insurance right away and you won't and then you can go fight your boss some more. Boy, talk about a corrupt bunch of folks out there. Just amazing. This idea that you would put a thumb on the scale. Now, I'll be the

first to admit that a lot of power over the last 40, 50 years in the economic world has shifted from labor to capital. And we're probably in the middle of a rebalancing of that over time. That's just my opinion. you know, just take it for what it's worth, you know, that sort of thing. But should we be putting a state thumb on the scale of workers arguing with their bosses? I'd love to get your opinion on that this morning. That's one thing. So look for the union label when you were buying an Oregon Democrat We need to remake this for for 2025 My goodness, oh my goodness, so we got we have that story

There was something else that I was on social media a couple of days ago when that Ukrainian drone strike happened. And I ended up tossing out a comment on that on Facebook. I don't know if you follow me on Facebook. It's, you know, at Bill Meyer's show on Facebook. You just go to that. But I ended up saying I was concerned about this. I was concerned about this big, this big attack on the Russian bombers, those Russian nuclear bombers. They're kept out in the open and they're kept out in the open apparently because of

one of these SALT, Strategic Arms Limitation treaties. You have to be able to keep them out in the open so that they could be observed by us and NATO, essentially, just keeping an eye on that. I wonder how long those are going to be kept out in the open there. But Zelensky ends up having his drones and goes and and pounds them. And apparently damages or destroys quite a few of them. Pootie Poot is really upset about that. Donald Trump talking about that today and saying that he's going to end up responding somehow. But what I had ended up just mentioning is, is there some side of the deep state that

is out there wanting to make sure that Donald Trump, that Donald Trump rather, President Trump is dragged into a greater Ukrainian war? Because that's what it looked like to me. Because I'm no military analyst. I would be the first person to say, I don't know everything there is to know about the military. But the one thing that you can be pretty much assured is that those drones ended up using targeting information and intelligence from our people, NATO and the United States of

America. You have to know that. Ukraine doesn't have spy satellites and everything else going on, doesn't have big intelligence agencies. The whole country's been hollowed out. They've lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers because of this. And it's not that I'm unsympathetic to Ukraine's point of view, but I care about the United States of America. I don't really give a crap about Ukraine. I consider it one of the most corrupt little countries where people go and launder money

and bribe presidents and bribe the deep state here in the United States more than just by anything else. And so I'm not a big fan of everybody getting all hot and bothered and wanting to get involved in a hot Ukraine war. That's just me. And there were some people who said, well, what do you expect them to do? I think it was Linda Dembscher, who I must live in her head for some reason. She doesn't really like me much.

A Democrat or Prague from the Grand Spas area saying, Bill, you don't know much about this. You shouldn't be commenting on these these these foreign affairs. You really don't understand national affairs. Yeah, I know. Just a big dummy. I get it. So I was just wondering, because I'm just posing the question, it just felt to me like there had to be a deeper situation going on here, because Ukraine had been planning this for months back during the old regime, the Joe Biden regime.

And then, you know, some people were saying, yeah, I agree with you, Bill. Other people are saying, no, no, no, no, this is fine. I don't think much of your theory, et cetera. Well, we have David Stockman, who came up with a piece today on lurockwell.com. It sounds like he and I were kind of in tune on this particular issue. The deep states drone attack was aimed, and by the way, if you don't know David Stockman, he was one of Reagan's former budget guys back in the day. I think he ended up being fired back then. But one way or the other, you know, he's been

doing the analyst game for a long, long time. So David Stockman writes in his Contra Corner piece here, the deep state's drone attack was aimed to escalate the Ukraine war and deny Trump his Nobel Peace Prize. And he writes that President of the United States better wake up quick. The deep state is in the middle of, to put it gently, effing him yet again. We are referring, of course, to Sunday's utterly reckless attack on Russia's strategic nuclear deterrent, allegedly by the Ukraine military, yes, the one that is so feeble and incompetent that thus far it has lost one-fifth of its territory, despite upwards of 150,000 dead

soldiers and more than $200 billion of US and European military and economic aid. That is to say, Stockman writes, the Sunday drone attack, according to Zelensky himself, was nearly 20 months in the making. So it was surely hatched, kitted, trained, and prepositioned with heavy-duty support from US covert operations, and then actually triggered, launched and guided by U.S. intelligence assets. Stated inversely, it appears that forces which were most surely not the bedraggled Ukrainian military operating in rogue fashion attacked the heart of Russia's nuclear deterrent and yet and yet it is

likely that President Trump was not honestly informed ahead of time. After all, when President Trump had his Putin's gone crazy outburst a few days ago, he didn't even know by his own public admission that a swarm of Ukrainian drones had attacked Putin's helicopter while the latter was being transported inside it. And again, given the in-depth layers of protection around Putin, there was not a snowball's chance in that hot place that the Ukrainian military pulled off this near-miss on Russia's demonized dictator without heavy-duty intelligence support from the United States.

So this is coming from Stockman. Stockman plugged into a lot of this sort of stuff. I mean, he could be wrong just like I am, but it just, my spidey sense was just clanging, you know, five alarm fire bells, you know, in my head when that drone attack happened, because it struck me that the only way it could have happened was with Western support, intelligence, and targeting. At the same time that President Trump is trying to negotiate some sort of agreement, you know, between Ukraine and Russia, something that everyone can live with, you know, this kind of thing. And when you see something like this going after the nuclear deterrent, the bombers, everything else, this just strikes me as the deep state says, oh, okay, you don't want to get involved over in the Ukraine. Well, we're OK, you don't want to get involved over in the Ukraine. Well, we're going to force you to get involved here.

But I know the people say, yeah, I don't understand what's going on. Maybe I don't. Maybe I don't. To me, I'm just paid to, as Matt Morse says from Grants Pass, he says that stock guys is paid to notice things. Well, as a talk show host, I'm kind of paid to notice things. And I don't know, I kind of noticed this.

Didn't you notice this too? Doesn't this strike a chord? Or are we just kind of crazy thinking that there seems to be a push to drag President Trump, who of course ran on wanting to be more of a peace president than ever, getting him dragged back into bigger conflicts? What do you think? So

there's a conspiracy theory. I first floated it after the drone attack and I just had a bad feeling about this and then stockpited and a few others are kind of writing sort of the same thing. So maybe we're just all stupid. I don't know. You can give me your opinion one way or the other. 7705633, 770KMED. Try to get Trumpy pulled into it. Trumpy Claus. Okay? 7705633.

We have some other headlines too, along with look for the union label on the Oregon Democrats. I don't know, we got a lot going on this morning. Dr. Jane Orient, MD is going to talk with me about what's really going on with the increasing cost of medicine. Really, really important talk I think we're going to have. And what more importantly could be done about this? And she has some suggestions. We'll kick it all around and more. 770-KMED, rather, 770-5633. This is the Bill Meyers Show. Fontana Roofing keeps rolling out new products, constantly challenging their in-house creative marketing team. You know, we really need to let people know we have gutters covered.

Wait, we're already airing a commercial that covers our on-site custom gutter division? No, I mean we literally can have them covered with gutter covers. Oh, you're right. We need to tell people that they don't have to call those 1-800 numbers for gutter protection from leaves and debris. They could just call Fontana Roofing to get a quote on gutter covers from a trusted local contractor. Yeah, since we've done the research and now install an industry-leading brand, we need a commercial that's informative but clever and quirky. Let's mull this over. Indeed. In the meantime, I say we hit that food truck. over. Indeed. In the mean

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for the latest road construction, road cams and gas prices in our region. Be prepared with the travel report on KMED.com. Brought to you by Lithia Body and Paint on Bullock Road in Medford. Hi, I'm Lisa with Kelly's Automotive Service and I'm on KMED.com brought to you by Lithia Body and Paint on Bullock Road in Medford. Hi, I'm Lisa with Kelly's Automotive Service and I'm on KMED. Conspiracy Theory Thursday. Open phones for a little bit before Dr. Jane Orient, MD.

I also have another doctor, Dr. Carol Lieberman coming up. I don't really know much about that Diddy thing. I just wanted to ask her a little bit on how to interpret this because I guess a lot of people are talking about it and I've never been a big fan of Diddy but it is a big deal. I think she has an interesting take on it being America's psychiatrist and also I get her take on the Egyptian gentleman who took his homemade flamethrower allegedly of course to the crowd over in Boulder Colorado over the weekend too. So interesting conversation. Also have a local mom who wanted to come on and well she's more than a mom. She's also been involved deeply with FFA and she thinks that there's a problem with

FFA. This is Sonya Jones. Sonya Jones is her name. She called me up and I talked about a little bit and said okay we can discuss this. It's her opinion about what is happening over in the Phoenix school system, the FFA, but it has to do with maybe some animal cruelty issues that she claims to have observed. Chad McComas on the good side. They've got that elderly homeless, not a camp, but a development, this set free Ministries project. We talked with him about this a few weeks ago when they first announced it, and I think they're going to be having a media event later on and getting that rolling. Want to get a progress update from Chad.

Chad's doing some great work over there helping homeless people here in Southern Oregon. Dave, you wanted to weigh in here on the little talk I was having, Stockman's piece in Lew Rockwell today, and he's thinking like I was thinking too that this whole drone attack from Ukraine on Russia's bombers kind of struck me as orchestrated, had to be orchestrated by some of our backroom boys and girls in intelligence. Yeah, probably with the CIA. You know, Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham was in Ukraine the day before. Are you talking about Senator Lindsey Graham from Boeing? Senator Lindsey Graham from Boeing, right?

Yeah, from Boeing. From Boeing, okay, good, good. Just want to make sure we're talking about... Yeah, you know... Wouldn't that be great though if we had labels like that on all the senators and the reps and things of the congressmen when they did this? Whoever they were taking their military industrial complex donations from. Well, it could be Lockheed too. Oh yeah, it's true. Now Raytheon has a different name now.

It's called like RJT or something. I think it's called something different. Well, they changed their name, you know, every now and again. Aerojet used to be Aerojet, but now it's something, it's still Aerojet, but you add dynamics to it or something. Yeah, exactly. It went out back on Lindsey Graham, though. So Lindsey was over in, what, Ukraine before this? Yeah he was there the day before. I seen a video on him talking to Lewinsky, whatever his name is. Yeah. But anyway so Senator Lindsey Graham could be in a lot of trouble because Trump didn't authorize him to go there and do any negotiations on behalf of the United States. Well, you're assuming that he was doing negotiate, was he actually doing

negotiations or was he just going over there to see, you know, just talk with him and say, hey, you're ready to go bomb Russia? Yeah, well, it'd be illegal if he did. You got to get that cough check there, Dave. Yeah, it's my emphysema. Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to make fun of it. Yeah. All right.

I'm just saying that Lindsey Graham is part of the warmonger. He doesn't have any children, so his children don't have to go out and fight anything. Yeah, I'm surprised about all the people that just kind of talk about, well, it's okay. They want to support. You look over in East Medford and various other places, see these support Ukraine signs. It's like, okay, you want to enlist your daughter or son to do this because generally speaking, this has been a project of the Uber progressive state, for the most part. This has been part of that. And I guess if you're willing to go over and fight it and join it, and some people have,

some people have joined it, God bless them if that's what they want to do. But I don't see where our particular United States interest, the interest of we here at home has with that situation any more than if Texas were breaking away and we claimed that Texas was always a part of the United States that we would try to get them back in. Yeah, I know we're getting back into civil war sort of talk, you know, kind of thing, but I don't see it as ours. Do you? Are a fight? No, I don't see Ukraine. I mean, you know, they might be nice people, but you know, we can't fight every war for everybody

But this is a proxy war and this is a proxy war that some are hoping to take to a non-proxy and make it Hot and I just think it's an unwise thing to do right now Dave. I appreciate your call. Thanks for that and you take care All right, 631 on conspiracy theory Thursday you take care all right. 631 on Conspiracy Theory Thursday. Dr. Jane Orias MD will join me here in a little bit. We'll talk about why the heck that medical costs are so so high and it's not always what we're thinking. I know that Senator Ron Wyden will say it's corporate greed. Corporate greed. Well it's a little more complex than that but there are some things that could be done. She actually brings some suggestions on what could be done to reduce the cost and a

lot of it has to do with government putting its thumb on the scale. All right. Let me go to next line here. Good morning. Hi. Who's this? Morning. Good morning. Bill Thom here. Hey, Thom. What's going on? What do you think? Well, I agree with you. This attack on Russia is pretty profound. I'm trying to figure out if it's any more than just barreling towards World War III. I mean, has the deep state overtaken Trump and the world, and they're under the agenda of World War III. You know the...

Well, I know that Martin Armstrong, you know, the financier guy... Yes, I've been reading him and then, in inevitability of World War III. He says that the Socrates predictor of looking at cycles, and he says there's just absolutely no doubt that World War III on the agenda, and that 2026 would appear to be at last prediction, was the panic cycle that they were looking at it for the world economy. But this is, I think though, World War III is really a symptom of the collapse of the monetary systems and various economic world of the Western universe. It may be the engineered collapse so they can get into the digital dollar, economic world of the Western universe.

It may be the engineered collapse so they can get into the digital dollar and you're probably watching, you know, Trump set up this Palatine super surveillance central surveillance state going on so that they can monitor absolutely everything every American does. Yeah, Palantir is one of the, gosh, it's one of the scariest scariest companies that most people don't know much about. Yeah, it really is and it seems like on the one hand Trump's doing all his so-called conservative protective orders and so forth, at the other time he seemed to be galloping

towards World War III and the super surveillance state and the digital dollar and so forth. So is Trump a crowding horse for the conservatives? I, you know, like you said- I hope not. I hope not. Yeah. Well, you know, it's really a tough call because this thing, what happened in Russia seems

to be like, who's running the show, the deep state or, you know, rational people? Well, the fact that President Trump didn't know that this was happening, and this was of course being done with military arms that we supplied, you know, we supplied money and material to do a lot of this. Okay. Well, if Trump didn't know this, that means somebody other than Trump is in charge of what the hell is going on in Russia and Ukraine and so forth.

And that's, so either he knows and he's really part of the problem or even as much a deeper problem. Or as if he would be cut out of knowing about it. That's even more scary if he was cut out of it. Yeah, Tom Thank you for the call. Appreciate that always thoughtfulness on conspiracy theory Thursday. Hi. Good morning. Who's this? Welcome Hello, it's Jerry Jerry. How you doing? Go ahead good, hey, you mentioned Martin Armstrong a minute ago and I

listened to him recently probably a week or two ago, and he was saying that Sokhradze says that Ukraine, it doesn't even show Ukraine on the map. Interesting. His thinking was, you know, what's going to happen? Is it going to be blown up, taken over, or what? I don't know, but that's what he was saying. And Socrates is this predictive software that he invented some time ago, and I remember that he was essentially a political prisoner because he wouldn't give it to the government,

right? That's the story, how that went. Interesting, interesting time. So we are in those interesting times, my friend, at least potentially, and I'm hoping that very wise, very cool heads prevail on something like this, because when you're dealing with nuclear powers, you just can't do crap like that. You just can't go in there and be the proverbial bull in the China, You just can't go in there and be the proverbial bull in the China in the China closet as it were. Okay Here's the thought I would leave you with bill, but I

doubt that this will happen a Few a couple months ago. There was talk of the US Sending businesses in the Ukraine and sort of creating a buffer zone. Yes, so that you know Russia wouldn't be attacked and so forth. Well, why couldn't they do that in Russia? Russia has a lot of resources. They could go over there, take advantage of these resources for America and for Russia, create a buffer zone, and then if any EU country wanted to attack

Russia, it would be an attack on America too. That's interesting. Yeah. Well, I think what once war with Russia, even more than deep staters in the United States, is European Union. I think they're looking for a bailout and an excuse because, well, you know, what happens? War is the, what was it? Forget the fellow that wrote the famous quote, war is the health of the state. And it's even a bigger, war is even a bigger health for

the deep state that we have. Jerry, thanks for the call. Appreciate it. Dr. Jane Orient, MD, AfterNews, we're going to talk and switch it and pivot over to medical and how medical is so expensive. What could be done to actually fix that in a practical way? Do you take safe drinking water for granted? If you have a well for your water, no one's monitoring what's in your water. It's up to you to be sure that the water you and your family are drinking is safe and free of contaminants. Get your well tested now.

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60 monthly payments at $17.92 per 1,000 Finance, on approved credit with Ford Motor Finance. Good morning. This is News Talk 1063 KMED, and you're waking up with the Bill Meyers show. 20 before 7. It's a few weeks ago that the Oregon Senate advanced a bill that would remove medical debt from consumer credit reports. Now, I don't know if that's necessarily a wise thing to do, but it does illustrate the point that medical debt, medical costs have just been exploding. And I wanted to talk to someone who has been, frankly, on the cutting edge of thinkers trying to get to the bottom and restore more of that doctor-patient relationship. And that would be Dr. Jane Orient, MD. She's the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. And you can find out more about this group. It's a great group. My only dog in the fight is that I have joined them and I just love talking about what they're thinking here. It's aapsonline.org. Dr. Orient, it is great to have you back. Welcome to the show.

Good morning. You ended up putting out a piece yesterday, and I was just intrigued by this. It has to do, in fact, you call it the economic health watch. How can we decrease the cost of medical care? And there was a chart that you put up there that was about health care spending by category. And I was going to hold it up to the Facebook Live camera then for the people who are watching

know what's going on there. But there is just such an overweighting of medical costs, high medical costs, in one section of the medical world. I was wondering if you could explain a bit about what's going on here. Well, if you look at the percentage of costs in medical care that go for administration, it is absolutely appalling.

I mean, if you're running a business, you're building things or you're selling things, you're not going to be spending more than half of your revenue on administration. You know, there are people who do important things like they schedule things, they order supplies, and so on. But maybe 10% of revenue would go for that and the rest goes for making things and building things. But in medical care, so much of this goes to people who contribute absolutely nothing

to helping a patient. And when it comes as a percentage of the cost of administration is contrasted to the cost of care. Let's say that I go to a typical hospital and I want to get an MRI. What an MRI? What might be three, four thousand dollars? Perhaps at least if you're paying cash. I don't know. But how much of that? To get it from the hospital it would be at least a thousand dollars I think. Oh okay.

If you go to an independent imaging center it may cost you three hundred. So how is it different at the independent imaging center? You know, same machine in many cases and you still have to have trained technicians do it. What's the difference between what happens at a hospital, let's say, where many people would go for care as contrasted with the independent? Well, there's no difference. The quality of service would be at least as good at the imaging center and you can probably get an appointment the same day if you go in and say, how much does this cost? Here's my checkbook. The hospital costs are grossly inflated and they get away with it because of things called certificate

of need laws that say you have to prove that there's a need for this service and of course there isn't if the hospital is already doing it, they just don't want you to do it for one tenth the price. Okay, that's the main thing. So hospitals working to keep out competition. We've talked about a bit of that though. But as far as the healthcare administration costs though, of a typical procedure at a hospital or even outpatient out there in the world, how much

of the cost is actually administration percentage-wise? Is it about half of the cost? You go out and you pay $3,000 for a service, is half of it taken care of administration and various other things? I wouldn't be surprised. It's hard to figure out exactly how much that is. But certainly medical costs have doubled or even tripled since Medicare went into effect and so people thought this is free so we can get more and

more of it and we can charge more and more of it. And the doctor never has to look the patient in the eye and explain that this procedure is worth what he's going to be charging for it. And to see this, we have an example. It's the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, surgerycenterok.com. And it actually posts the prices, the complete price, the procedure costs, the anesthesia, the surgeon, everything, the facility fee online, and you can see it. And it may be one-tenth of what you would pay at the hospital. In fact, people have gotten a much better price in Florida

by saying, well, if I go to Oklahoma, it'll cost me this much and the plane ticket's not that much more and they can get a great reduction on price where they are. There are some other surgery centers that will do this. I can't name them off the top of my head, but Surgery Center of Oklahoma has set this amazing example. It's a beautiful place. They have a very clean, very efficient, very friendly, and has a low rate of surgical complications. All the best surgeons and anesthesiologists and nurses want to work there. So, Dr. Jane Orient, MD, with me this morning.

Doctor, though, back on the administration costs, because the chart that you ended up sharing in your piece here had, you know, the 2020, these are statistics, 2023 US healthcare spending by category, healthcare administration was about $1.3 trillion. That's a lot of dollars. Retail drugs were about half a trillion or so. Imaging services about $300 billion. Physicians salaries, maybe $200 billion in their nurses' salaries, a little bit less. All these other

sort of things including lab testing. And yet the lion's share of the healthcare dollar is in administration. So what is the administration doing which costs so much money, which has driven up the cost of these medical procedures? Well, it's trying to keep from having to pay medical bills. I mean insurance is like a gambling casino. The insurance company is gambling that you're going to pay the premium and they're never going to have to pay anything. And they will make all kinds of efforts to prevent paying things, pre-authorizations,

claims reviews, adding on a whole bunch of administration that cuts on the doctors time and ability to offer the service So the cost of the service through the doctors even through the hospitals to a certain extent is driven up By trying to collect insurance. Is that what I understand? Right. I mean you have to fight with the insurance company to get paid. And a lot of times they don't pay. And it just, I mean, it makes sense. If you come to see me in the office, for example, it would cost me at least as much to file the insurance claim as it costs just to ask you to pay $35. And now it's more like $50. But before it was much less. So there are direct pay practices now, which are sort of a subscription. And you pay the doctor

a certain amount, say $100 a month. And you can go whenever you like. You get a prompt appointment, you can get some drugs at cost. You can get some labs at cost, that's a pretty good deal. And that's a growing movement in direct patient care. And a lot of doctors don't do it that way, they just want to do payment at the time of service or what you get. But anytime when you're paying directly for the service and you're not paying a bunch of middlemen to go through, it is going to be less expensive. It's the middleman aspect. So the sand in the gears or the and you're not paying a bunch of middlemen to go through, it is going to be less expensive. It's the middlemen aspect. So the sand in the gears or the friction in the medical gears right now

is the entire growth of administration or middle people administering the payments of insurance claims and having to go back get to sign up which is why they're calling you on the phone all the time trying to tell you about their wonderful benefits. I was wondering about that. My wife Linda's on Medicare and she is there and they're always calling trying to get her to switch to a Medicare Advantage one. Now I know why. I was just kind of curious about this. It will offer you all kinds of relatively cheap benefits But if you need back surgery, they can deny and delay and keep you in pain for months and months before they might eventually agree to allow you to have the service. But yet the people who are denying get paid, don't they? The what? The people who are denying the care still get paid. Oh of course, yes.

See, that's what I'm getting at. It's like you have this entire industry, these entire industries of people who are hired within the system to either fight for care or deny the care, right? That's kind of what you're telling me in the administrative world here? Yeah, exactly. Okay.

And they have a big effect on the price of drugs too, because they've got pharmacy benefit managers, which are involved in fights to allow our drug to be on the formulary. So if you get our drug, the plan will pay for it but if you get the drug your doctor would prefer, it won't and maybe you have to fail on three or four drugs before you get the one that works for you. But you could try and experiment and you could go to the pharmacy and just pretend you don't have insurance and ask what the cost of the prescription is. And you may find that it is very reasonable.

And if you pay the pharmacist that, the pharmacist makes more money too. If your insurance pays for it, the pharmacy benefit manager will get a big slice of it. Oh, okay. Now I know that I've talked with other people here, Dr. Orient, about the pharmacy benefit managers and how that appears to be a bit of racket in which they'll take the kickback from a drug manufacturer in order to get drugs into... Yeah, except they don't call it a kickback. I forget what they call it. It's something that sounds like what we're behind in that. Well, it's a rebate or something like that.

Rebate, yeah, maybe a rebate. But the thing is though is that they don't pass the rebate along as a reduction in cost to the patient in the end. Oh no. Right? That's something, it's like, what you're kind of describing here is this, it's kind of like in the medical world, almost like a nest of those Russian dolls, those Russian dolls they would nest within each other and it's like here's a racquet doll inside

another racquet doll inside another racquet doll. Is it something almost you know that simple when you look at it? Yeah that's exactly what it is. So how do you take on that kind of racket, these Russian doll nests of administration that is just adding costs and complexity and reducing care and quality of care to people on the other end. Well, if you're a patient, I would be very cautious about signing up for managed care plans that promise the moon they'll give you everything that's necessary, but they decide what is necessary and they may not have a specialist that you

need anywhere within a thousand miles of you. Yeah, that would be a problem. What about people who are not in the Medicare world and just on conventional insurance right now? What would you suggest? Well, it used to be that you could buy a catastrophic insurance policy, which was really quite cheap, that would cover you if you had a big hospitalization. But Obamacare pretty much got rid of that.

Obamacare got rid of that, right? The whole process. Yeah, you could use the children's health claims for just going to the doctor. But you can't do that anymore, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the so-called Affordable Care Act. That really forces people into plans that cover all kinds of things that you might not need or want, but that really skimp on hospitalizations after car accidents, that kind of thing. Are you telling me that when possible though try to avoid filing the insurance claim and how would you do this? How would you go

about working this? Because that's what it sounds like. It's almost what you're suggesting here. Whatever you can, if you can keep it out of the insurance claim aspect, you'll be better off. Is that kind of the core of your argument here? Yeah, sometimes it is. Like even if you have an insurance plan that covers something that you need but you would like to get your imaging and your treatment more quickly instead of going through insurance you can just look into how you could buy it on the market. Is there an independent facility? And if you pay cash, you may turn out that you may end up paying less in the long run, even less than the copays. That's why I was getting at here thinking about it,

because even my particular plan, I'm still on company insurance. I think the deductible for me is somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 a year, $5,500. It's substantial. It's not a small amount of money in the grand scheme of things. So a lot of times I need an MRI or something like that, go to the imaging center and see what we can do rather than... Right. And the trick there may be making sure that it counts against the deductible because the insurance companies have ways of preventing you from doing that. How can you do that? How can you actually make a private cash pay count as part of deductible? Is there a way or method?

I don't know. I think it would depend on the plan and you have to try to get an answer out of the plan, which may be a chore. Yeah. Well, I'll give you a personal example. It was a couple of years ago, maybe it was three years ago, I don't know, when it had the bowel examination, you know, the colonoscopy that they're always trying to get people to do, right? So I never had that done. So they

said, oh, it's going to be about 15, I think it was going to be about a $500 copay at that time, I think is what it was called. And then I ended up getting a bill for $1,700 after that. And I said, well, why did he get a bill for $1,700? Well, you know, it was a preventative service until we found just this tiny little thing that we snipped out of you. It was, and once we snipped it, it became not a diagnostic, it became a diagnostic service. And then it'd be, and then you had to pay a lot more. I was thinking like, man, it was like, you know, heads I lose, tails they win, kind of a situation is what it felt like. And this is kind of that racket aspect that you were talking about, right? Yeah, the old bait and switch and I think you might have been able to get a cash pay colonoscopy for $1,700 without going through insurance. I don't know.

You have to ask around. Yeah, that's really interesting. Okay, we're talking with Dr. Jane Orient, MD, and she has a piece out there which I'm going to link to. It's Economic Health Watch, How Can We Decrease the Cost of Medical Care? And a lot of it is trying to keep it out of the insurance world. I'm going to grab a call here. Did you want to talk with Dr. Orient? Yes, I did. Hi, this is Francine. Yeah, Francine, you're with the doctor. Go ahead. Yeah, good morning. I'm so honored to speak with you. You know, in reference to what you were saying about, you know, the con that they do. I'm on an Advantage plan, I'm 75,

and they send things out to you. Well, there's a card, they offer a card, which I have to say has been very helpful. It's called the Care Card, it has so much money on it, and they've expanded it from buying Band-Aids and aspirins to the one it first came out to. Now you can actually buy food, but you are limited to places like Safeway Albertsons,

Fred Myers, that sort of thing. We've been trying to get them to let us use it at the co-op, but it's for over a year now, and we're having troubles. I just got a thing in the mail that says, use your care card funds and you can get extra money put on it. If you get a flu shot, we'll give you an extra $25 for the year. If you get a wellness visit in your home, you'll get $50 for the year.

Complete a health assessment paper and you get another 25. In other words, they're bribing you to go in and get all of these things done, which I won't do them. But it's just part of the con you're referring to I think. I think that if they have a nurse come to your home and figure out a bunch of diagnoses to add to your chart that the company may get paid more by the government. Well they're getting the insurance company is performing all of these things and they get paid for it, the diabetic screening, you know, they'll give me $25 a year if I go and get an A1C lab test, but how much are they getting?

You know, it's a question. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's like, you know, it's just a con and to get to you. And then also once they get you and they diagnose you, then they're going to say, oh, well, listen, you need this and you need that. Yeah, this goes on and on and complex patient so we collect more upfront. So more complex means more overall pain going to the people involved. Got it. Okay. Thank you doctor. Yeah thank you Francine. That's interesting. You're saying whatever you

can do avoid the Advantage Plan if at all possible. That's what you're saying right? That's what I think. Okay. Hey, I appreciate your take on that. And it's a really interesting piece. I'm going to link to this on KMED.com. It's on AAPSonline.org. Economic Health Watch, How Can We Decrease the Cost of Medical Care? As time goes on here, and I know the Trump administration, along with past administrations, is trying to look at

what's going on with Medicare and Medicaid and these just immense costs of, I'm going to use the scary air quotes, ensuring populations. We think we're going to have to almost go to these kind of defensive medical things, doing things more on our own in order to make a pencil. What do you think? I think if you want to get care, yes. And I hope that people do because if they don't, there are not going to be doctors out there who are willing to see them. Yeah, it's not a matter if you have an insurance card, it's if you actually get to have the care and that's been the rub that you're talking about here. Right, I mean,

I think that my job as a doctor is to say how can I help you instead of what's your insurance. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, aapsonline.org, great group and keep up on what's happening and I just want to make sure that people understand that your group is part of medical freedom. You're a medical freedom group and you want the decisions made between you and doctors, not between you and the government and you or the and the pharmacy benefit manager, you and the other people within that the rackets they were just talking about. Is that fair? Yeah. Okay, very good. Doctor, thank you for your time. We'll have you back and good hearing from you. Take care.

Thank you, Bill.