Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/10/24: Romania Elections Cancelled Over Misinformation, Gambling Next Opioid Crisis, Shooter Manifesto Reveals US Healthcare Rage

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss Romania election cancelled over misinformation, why online gambling is the next opioid crisis, and what the shooters manifesto reveals about US healthcare rage.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, the unexpected, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. On Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, you'll hear about these heroes and what their stories tell us about the nature of bravery. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. So a crazy situation has been unfolding in the NATO country of Romania. Let's go ahead and put

this up on the screen. Obviously, hugely relevant for us because of their NATO status, but also because of the role of misinformation, which was used as justification by Romania's top court to annul the first round of the presidential vote. So let me just read you a little bit of this. So I make sure I have the specifics right here. It says a top Romanian court on Friday annulled the first round of the country's presidential election days after allegations emerged that Russia ran a coordinated online campaign, what does that sound familiar to, to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round. The constitutional court's unprecedented decision, which is final, came after the president declassified intelligence on Wednesday that alleged Russia had organized

thousands of social media accounts to promote Colin Georgescu across platforms such as TikTok and Telegram. The court, without naming Georgescu, said that one of the 13 candidates in the November 24th first round had improperly received preferential treatment on social media, distorting the outcome of the vote. Georgescu denounced the verdict as an officialized coup and an attack on democracy, as did the second-place finisher reformist Elena Laskoni of the center-right Save Romania Union Party. So obviously, Sauter raised a lot of alarms among close watchers here because the contours of the allegations are very similar to the Russiagate allegations back in 2016 of this, you know, coordinated Russian influence campaign. The current president released these intelligence reports that indicated

and didn't even come to the conclusion that these TikTok accounts and whatever had changed the election result, didn't even directly reach the conclusion, just sort of alleged and hinted in that direction, that it was Russia that had created these accounts and was running them and, you know, conducting this malign influence campaign. And then they use this as justification to completely annul the results of this election. Also worth noting here, so, you know, the politics of this guy, Georgescu, or not my politics, he's a far-right politician. He was the only candidate that was sort of aggressively against Romania's support for Ukrainian military aid and, you know, was sort of adversarial vis-a-vis NATO, was more kind of pro-Russian aligned in terms of his rhetoric. And this is a big deal because Romania

has been an important military partner in that region. And there's a huge NATO base that is being planned for Romania as well. So this was a problem not just for the people who are currently in power in Romania. It was also a problem for us and our other NATO allies because it signaled potentially Romania could be going in a different direction and not be a reliable NATO ally and, you know, the seat of this giant military base that's being planned. Yeah, this is just classic NATO diplomacy, right, where NATO itself is more important than the literal will of the Romanian people. Also, maybe it's a good reason as to why former Soviet republics

should not be in NATO, right? Because maybe they have complicated feelings and populations. And if you have a restricted number of countries that have more of a unified message and goal, then it's a little bit easier to defend. I feel bad for these countries. I do too.

They just end up being used like our ponds and Russia's ponds in the region. It's not right. And caught in this like, you know, tug of war between Europe and between Russia. I mean, it's the same dynamic playing, that played out in Ukraine as well. Exactly.

And actually in Romania and Hungary and all these other Slovenia, you know, countries like that, they have long histories of both. So making them choose is ridiculous. It should be up to their own democratic populations. And if they want to be unaligned also. Fine, yeah, go for it. Exactly. Look, Romania is a proud people, proud country with a long history, you know, very interesting place.

And it's not right that they're basically having this like Westernstyle coup, which is effectively what this is, by canceling the election where within their own system, this man won. And again, it's funny, when you read the press, like the Financial Times, let's put this up there on the screen, the absolute vast majority of this thing is just, oh, Romania's Western partners are worried about a key ally turning towards Moscow as Bucharest is a NATO and an EU member that has so far supported Western efforts to back Ukraine in its defense against Russian aggression. And here's the thing. He did not even, Georgescu did not deny, or he denied saying that he wants to take Ukraine or Romania out of the US military alliance. And he said,

quote, he wants to renegotiate the terms of its membership. Okay, so what? Donald Trump has said stuff like that too. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. And yet, you know, he wins, what is it, 22%? No, sorry. The largest share of the vote was won by the center-left party, followed by the nationalists at 18%.

Well, so he won the first presidential voting round. This article is about the parliamentary elections where the centrist parties, mainstream parties, did well enough, even though there were huge gains by the Nationalist far-right groups, but they did well enough that it looks like they'll be able to form a sort of, you know, mainstream party governing coalition.

So all of the NATO types were breathing big sigh of relief about this result. looks like they'll be able to form a sort of, you know, mainstream party governing coalition. So all of the NATO types were breathing a big sigh of relief about this result. But it, you know, now the first round of the presidential vote has been annulled. They're probably going to redo the vote sometime in the spring and we'll see what happens there. But, you know, I mean, this would be like if in the U.S. in 2016, after there was Russian influence in our campaign, which we all know. I mean, we run multibillion dollar campaigns here. Like the idea that the weird memes that they were putting out on Facebook was determined as preposterous. But anyway, if that had been used to actually overturn the election. Or imagine this time because Twitter is, you know, run by Elon Musk who put a quarter of a billion dollars into Donald Trump's campaign, if that was used to overturn the results of this election.

And you can see how this could be used in both directions, right? Because then in 2020, they could have said, hey, you know, the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story that renders this election illegitimate and it should be overturned. And so you can see how, you know, this would be the road to hell and the road to completely, you know, just disregarding the will of the people. And, you know, to my knowledge, in spite of our State Department's rhetoric about how much they are committed to democracy, blah, blah, blah, I don't think that they've objected to any of these doings in Romania. Why would they, right? This is the project. This is what they actually want. Put the next one up there on the screen because it's interesting where they point out how the long history with Romania and their own struggles and all of that are exactly what this

quote-unquote resurrects dark memories of. So in their bid to save democracy, they are recalling their own dictatorial past, which they probably want to get away from exactly by expressing it through their democratic process. So if it's a democratic will of the people to elect somebody who wants to end aid to Ukraine, then so be it. And, you know, the funny thing is this may seem like fringe issues and stuff to us because Ukraine is just one of a number of things. But if you're Romania, it's actually a big deal, right? It's like not only you're in NATO, this is a country which you're very close to. You've got some of your population who can probably recall some of the USSR times and others and their own dark history as well.

And so you're overturning this election basically based upon the will of the European Union and of NATO. I cannot think of a better example to justify so much of the European far-right hatred, which is now basically pan-European at this point, of exactly these institutions, which claim to act in the name of democracy and are obviously committed to anything but. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And the last thing I mentioned, this base, I just wanted to give you some of the details because I do think this is very significant to understanding the geopolitical dynamics here. This is from another article, that military base in Southeast Romania

on the Black Sea coast would become the largest NATO military base in all of Europe, will surpass the US military base in Ramstein, is that how you say that? Germany in size. The new base will give Romania an increased role in NATO security architecture, a position of greater strength in

the Black Sea, which is militarily dominated by Russia, will be able to host 10,000 soldiers and civilians by 2030. So that's why we have such an interest in what is going on in this election, and also because of Romania already being an important ally in terms of our position in the Ukrainian war. But I mean, obviously, the hypocrisy is clear and it's very troubling. And so the first controversial decision was the outgoing president deciding to release these intelligence reports, which fueled all of this speculation and concern about Russian meddling in their politics. And then following on the heels of that was this top court in an unappealable decision

using those intelligence reports as the basis for annulling the presidential election results. So there you go. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye.

Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation.

To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother

to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice

in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself, and I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake,

the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished All right, Sager. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Sagar, the much anticipated anti-online sports gambling monologue. Let's have it. I want you to close your eyes and think back to the year 2018. Some ways, it feels like a long way away. But objectively, it wasn't. It was six short years. And yet, in those six short years, one of the most sweeping social revolutions in the United States has happened beneath our feet, and we are only just starting to grapple with it. That is the mass legalization and normalization of online sports gambling. The mass legalization and normalization of sports gambling has the potential to rival the opioid epidemic in the United States, its destruction

of the American family unit. And yet today, almost all lawmakers are lockstep in their support of it. The roots of online sports gambling boom in the United States trace back to a 2018 Supreme Court decision after a petition was filed by the state of New Jersey, challenging something known as the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or PASPA. PASPA passed in 1992, effectively restricted all legal sports gambling action to the state of Nevada. And now this is stuck in New Jersey's craw in 2009, especially after the Great Recession. They needed a way to bail out Atlantic City casinos. So on their behalf, they brought the suit against the law, where it would be eventually resolved in

their favor in 2018. Now in the nine years where New Jersey brought the suit against PASPA, something important also happened, the absolute explosion of something called daily fantasy sports. Daily fantasy sports was effectively a loophole, allowing people to place wagers on fantasy sports leagues and daily payouts, something that many Americans were already doing in their spare time. It aligned perfectly with the rise of the smartphone. Companies like DraftKings and FanDuel began their entry into the market under disguise. So it was at this time where the roots of the epidemic were laid. Wagers were already being

placed en masse by millions of Americans, and the normalization of gambling on the phone was planted. Perhaps most importantly though, these companies began to hone their strategies, which include insane levels of marketing focused on one specific message. It's a game of skill, and you can hit it big. Now, in a sense, they are correct, but there's a lot more subtext removed, which I will return to later. Suffice to say this. They were already tanned, rested, and ready for the Supreme Court decision, which opened the floodgates. On May 14, 2018, the Supreme Court struck down PASPA. Within a month, the state of Delaware began accepting single-game wagers, which would be seen

as tame today. By the end of the month, seven states had legalized sports gambling, and by today, as I speak, 39 states, including the District of Columbia, have now have it legalized. Now, it's important to note, when I say legalized, it doesn't mean that it's a free-for-all. What it really means is that a few mega companies like DraftKings, FanDuel, PrizePix, and others have effectively rolled up the legal sports betting market by getting separate states to grant them preferential licenses to run action in their state. This is important because the quasi-monopolistic way that sports gambling runs on a state-by-state basis means that it is not a fair marketplace. And two, it means that their excesses and sins are multiplied to absolutely stupendous profit and fundamentally are altering the way that American sports leagues will operate for decades to come. So let's take some time to ruminate on gambling itself and the attitudes of the United States towards it over the years.

It's fair to say the U.S. has undergone an extraordinary transition from effectively a nation of prudish Christians to much more secular libertarians in the span of just a few decades. This is evident in current social attitudes from everything on abortion, gay marriage, marijuana, and now sports gambling. Gambling itself was traditionally viewed as a sinful backwards activity that was actively discouraged by the state for centuries. Now, the compromise that we got to was one that I actually think is quite sensible. People will always gamble. Let's not make it too easy.

You can do it, but you have to go to a physical casino. There are governing bodies like the Nevada Gaming Commission, which makes sure that these games are run fairly. And in general, that attitude was to confine it to as small places as possible that are accessible, who are committed, but who did not want to make it part of everyday life.

Quite sensible, in my opinion. Should be applied to all vices. We understand they exist, but it shouldn't be too easy to indulge from cigarettes to alcohol. And this has been an attitude in America now for decades. But then everything changed. And now all of a sudden, sports gambling is not just legal,

but it's available everywhere. At the click of a button on your smartphone that's always in your pocket, to hundreds of millions of Americans. And the results are in. They're astonishing. Since 2018, U.S. customers have placed approximately half a trillion dollars in bets at legal sports books and climbing, turning a nation that had rare access to sports gambling into the largest gambling marketplace on earth. This has transformed the finances of everyday Americans in a way that has not happened in generations. My friend Charles Lehman summed up three separate large-scale studies. The top-line findings are this.

For every $1 waged on sports betting, household savings is depleted by $2. Legalized online gambling has increased the risk of household bankruptcy in a state by 25 to 30%. And worst of all, legalized sports gambling has massively increased the rates of domestic violence, specifically against spouses of those who lose. Unsurprisingly, all of these effects are felt by the most economically precarious households, and the financial effects are concentrated amongst young men. Fair to say it's been a disaster. So let's go through the arguments for why even though all of this is really bad, we should overlook it. First is philosophical argument. This is what living in a free society looks like. That just

because some people can't control themselves, we shouldn't ruin the fun for everyone. I understand that argument. I agree with it partially. But I would say this. The U.S. has recognized always that we can respect freedom of choice while also recognizing that when something is bad and trying to reduce that behavior for the societal benefit of all citizens, we should. We have arrived at this with a sensible attitude, for example, towards cigarettes. We know cigarettes are bad, so we tax them. We restrict their place of sale. We don't allow cigarette companies to advertise on television. We have developed good social norms around not wanting people to smoke.

Nonetheless, something like 20% of Americans still smoke, but it's down from a record of like 40 or 50% decades ago, and new uptake in smoking continues to reduce. Now, compare cigarettes to online gambling. DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, PrizePix are allowed to flood the airwaves with a single message. All you have to do is use your skill and your genius, and you can become a winner.

I will explain soon how this is a complete lie. But second is this, and what I want people to understand. It is impossible for these companies to run a fair operation that does not rely on exploiting gambling addicts and to still make a profit. A new study by the Southern Methodist University tracked 700,000 online sports bettors for five years. They found less than 5% of users ever withdrew any profit. The remainder of the users either broke even or lost money, covering the

winnings of those five. But worst is this, 3% of all bettors who lost the most accounted for 50% total revenue of these online sports betting companies. In other words, less than 5% of people actually realized any profit. The rest were losers, and the big losers lost so much, they made up 50% of total revenue. Now, couple this with the dirty secret of online sports betting. If you are one of the less than 5% who win, you're lucky if you're allowed to gamble for even a few months on these apps. Once you start to win consistently, these gambling companies are fully within their rights to limit your bet size to amounts to less than $10 or even $1, meaning that if you're any good,

they are allowed to restrict your action and their potential exposure. So this is an outrageously good business, isn't it? You can promise people they can get rich. If they actually do, you cut them off. Then you employ all company resources towards extracting as much as humanly possible from gambling addicts to make up 50% of your revenue. In other words, if these gambling companies were forced to allow fair play and then follow their own guidelines around restricting addicts, something they are legally required to do, they would go bankrupt and this entire farce would fall apart. Take the story of a New Jersey man known to us as Mdalo1990. In 2020, this man never placed a bet in his life. By 2024, he had lost approximately $1 million despite making an income of $175,000 per year.

He drained his wife's investments. He maxed out their credit cards. He drained his young children's savings accounts and sold the gifts that they were given for Christmas and their baptisms. Now, it's really easy to say, yeah, it's his fault. Screw him. But according to his wife's lawsuit, this user was contacted on a daily basis by DraftKings, VIP hosts. They facilitated his access to gambling products, despite knowing it was impossible for him

to be able to support the amount of money that he was placing on wagers with his W-2 income. Their own policies, as dictated by the state, require them to have gamblers placing large sums prove their ability to furnish funds by providing them a W-2 statement or bank statements. According to his wife, quote, they knew he would not be able to continue to gamble large sums of money if they required verification. And they also knew the source of the money was, quote, illegitimate. A modest amount of due diligence required by their own policies would have shown he did not have the

ability to wager, literally four times his literal W-2 salary. Throughout this entire time, again, on a daily basis, DraftKings threw so-called free promotions at him, whiskey glasses, VIP tickets, and more. Now, they do not do this out of the goodness of their heart. As I said earlier, people like this man constitute only 3% of gamblers but make up 50% of revenue. In fact, some people have caught on. A new number of pro sports bettors are mimicking the behavior of people like Mdalo1990. They log into their accounts in the middle of the night to make it seem like they cannot sleep without checking their bets. Why? Because it flags to the algorithm that they are gambling addicts.

It means that the company is more likely to shower you with so-called free promotional money and to continue your addiction chain. This is fundamentally different than alcohol or cigarette companies. Cigarette companies are not allowed to advertise, period, let alone literally sponsor major sporting events. Furthermore, cigarette companies are not allowed to identify their so-called super smokers and shower them in free and addictive cigarettes to encourage their addiction. Same with alcohol companies or any other vice. In this case, the statistics show us that the profit margins and the very business model of these companies rely on so-called problem gamblers to prop up the

revenue of the entire company. And now let me take it even a step further, because now imagine if cigarette companies had a super addictive special cigarette, and that cigarette was the one that they are marketing the most, pushing and making the most money on. That is the case of online sportsbooks, who are pushing a particular type of bet called a parlay bet. Most of you probably know what it is, but it's simple. A parlay bet is a contingent bet where several discrete events have to happen for you to win. Parlay bets, unsurprisingly, have the biggest payouts. And unsurprisingly, they have the biggest loss rate for gamblers. Why? Because they're unlikely. And yet, this exact bet, the parlay bet,

is the one most pushed, most marketed, and most used by online sports bettors. The largest online sports book in the United States, FanDuel, has amassed 46% market share in the United States, specifically by marketing massively profitable single-game parlay bets, which are gigantically profitable for the company. We don't have exact data. We do know this from the state of Illinois. 60% of all wagers in the state wagered online are parlay bets. We also know that the online sportsbook know that they will win with such regularity. They build it into their profit forecast before the customers even officially lose, and they remain the single

most profitable bet to the company. So again, bringing it back to a cigarette comparison, you target the most addicted, and you sell them the worst thing for them. The system is built on a simple premise. Ban winners, milk losers for all they're worth. All of you who are placing small wages for fun is great, but the thing is, it's only enabled by crippling addicts. Already, Gamblers Anonymous is reporting massive spikes in the number of young bettors calling their hotline, coming to their meetings. Some children as young as 14 have found their ways to bet their parents' phones are full addicts. This will only continue. Which brings me back to the comparison I made at the top. It took nearly a decade to reckon with Purdue Pharma and the OxyContin crisis.

It created an entire generation of previously not known heroin addicts. But the signs a few years were all there. And now we've unleashed in addiction with one of the highest rates of people taking their own lives and made it easily accessible to hundreds of millions of Americans. If anything, this trend is accelerating. Literally just a few days ago, the state of Missouri legalized sports gambling. Now the 40th state to do so.

And so when people come back to this in a decade and we have millions of gambling addicts, high rates of domestic violence, alcoholism, and we need to figure out what to do, let me offer this modest proposal. The solution is staring us all in the face. More of what we used to do. PASPA was correct about one thing. It is not fair that Nevada is the only monopoly on sports gambling. So instead, adopt a model what the UK used to have. Sports

betting is legal and available in person at parlors, which are widely accessible. People can access it, but it requires physically having to go to a location with cash. This introduces the same level of friction that all other vices are governed by in the U.S. Second, betting organizations must be subject to fairness rules. If they advertise anyone can win, then everyone must be allowed to win. They cannot be allowed to limit sharp sports bettors and must have a truly free marketplace. Three, we must have heavy oversight on the ongoing fusion between professional sports and gambling companies. You can call this nanny state intervention if you want, but here's the truth. The NFL, the National Football League itself, it only exists because of multiple acts of Congress and preferential treatment from the

U.S. government. Sports and the NFL are important to the American character. Gambling corruption scandals are already beginning to question the very integrity of the game itself. Leagues have become physically intertwined with multi-billion dollar gambling behemoths is a recipe for corruption and disaster. So I will end with a warning that I gave many years ago. Sometimes private industry can be just as much of a threat to your freedom and liberty as the government itself. And in this case, I think it is quite clear the damage gambling companies have wrought and will continue to do to America's families poses a direct threat to our country. I am clear-eyed. It will only get worse. But I hope I could help all of you at least think about what I believe is going to be

a major problem of our time. So what do you think, Crystal? Did I convince you? And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long.

You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girlard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation.

To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship

that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable,

showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the man who went down that day. showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself. And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal,

to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson,

wanted to send a message to the world. That much is clear. Police found bullet casings with the words deny, defend, and depose. His backpack was found in Central Park stuffed with Monopoly money. When police arrested him at a Pennsylvania McDonald's, he was in possession of a manifesto that read in part, quote, I do apologize for any strife or trauma, but it had to be done. These parasites had it coming. Even louder than this message, though, was the public response to the cold-blooded,

broad daylight murder of a CEO. From TikTok to Facebook to the Ben Shapiro comment section, Americans of all political ideologies and backgrounds came together to express their utter and complete disgust at a health care system that they experience as violent, which treats their lives as just as disposable as Mangione treated Brian Thompson's life. Their disgust, by the way, it's well-founded. Here in the U.S., we don't really have a health care system. We have a profit-maximizing, price-gouging system. Your health is at best incidental. Among wealthy nations, we spend more per capita than any other nation by a long shot. We should have the best health care on the planet and the healthiest population.

But of course, the reality is out of these same wealthy nations, we also have the lowest life expectancy. The UK is the second worst, and their citizens live on average nearly half a decade longer than we do. We are having entire years of our lives stolen from us. Now, sometimes the problems with having a system built around profit instead of around health can feel kind of abstract. But a recent New York Times investigation into methadone clinics

dug deep into the way that these sick incentives can play out in the real world. These clinics are a sort of microcosm of the way that profit motive perverts every corner of our healthcare system. So here is that backstory. Cadia Healthcare is a large hospital chain started by a former financier that has aggressively moved into the addiction recovery space in recent years after purchasing a for-profit chain of 165 methadone clinics from the private equity firm Bain Capital. Between the financier founder and the private equity connection, I'm sure you already feel really great about the care that these chains provide.

Now, at these methadone clinics, recovering opioid addicts can receive a daily dose of the narcotic methadone to help curb their cravings for more damaging opioids like heroin and fentanyl. These clinics are, of course, heavily regulated by state and federal authorities. But, according to the Times, Acadia uses all kinds of lies and tricks to skirt the rules and to juice their profits. As reported by the Times in their piece, Fraud and Fakery at the country's largest chain of methadone clinics, Acadia's clinics aggressively push quantity over quality. The more patients they take on and the more cups of methadone they hand out, the greater their insurance and federal government reimbursements. Now, I'm sure you can imagine the sort of behavior that this drives.

Staff are overloaded. They're underpaid. They have massive caseloads that they cannot possibly handle. They take on patients who are not even opioid addicts to be able to fill out their quotas. They routinely falsify records in order to meet federal and state guidelines, which require that the cup of methadone come with a certain amount of counseling and therapy. One staff member, for example, bragged that if they even said hello to a patient, they counted that as one of those mandatory therapy sessions. Now, I'll note here an Acadian spokesperson denies these allegations as they operate in compliance with all rules and regulations. The methadone

business, though, has proven quite profitable for Acadia. As the federal government has gotten more serious about dealing with opioid addiction following a drug company-fueled addiction crisis, Acadia has seen their methadone clinic profits spike 30 percent, adding about $3 million in revenue to the larger hospital chain's bottom line each and every year. Their greed-fueled business practices do not end with treating patients like cash cows instead of humans, however. According to the Times, they are working to get their money-grubbing hands on some of the settlement money secured by states and counties nationwide from those big pharma companies like Purdue Pharmaceutical, which helped to create the opioid crisis in the first place. In other words, Acadia is both profiting handsomely off

of this epidemic by providing substandard treatment and also trying to bilk the very money that is meant to go to the victims of this epidemic. It is truly sick. This may seem like a long shot, but the effort is already bearing fruit. According to the Times, quote, this year, for example, the company successfully lobbied the Kansas legislature to allow for-profit companies to receive grants from that settlement money. Christopher Hunter, Acadia's chief executive, has told investors that the settlement funds will be, quote, a really nice tailwind for the company. Gee, can't imagine why people despise these companies and the people that run them. In addition, they have been busy working the halls of Congress to avoid what would be a deadly threat to their business model, allowing people to avoid methadone clinics

altogether and receive their dose from the pharmacy like other medications. Ironically, Katie has been arguing that this bill should be blocked because of how critical it is to combine methadone with their quote, individualized care and quote, gold standard suite of services. You know, the very services that the New York Times found this company was often not actually providing and routinely lying about. So at the nation's largest methadone chain, humans are treated like cattle. They are denied therapy that could help them with the recovery. Staffers are overworked and put under intense sales-like pressure to deliver numbers. Records

are outright falsified and faked in what can only be described as mass fraud. And this is just one little corner of our profit-first healthcare system. It doesn't serve the patients or society. It serves only the corporate executives and shareholders who are at the top of that chain. Now, if you want to see how this plays out in other corners of the healthcare system, you could start by taking a look at the separate investigation from the same New York Times journalist into Acadia Psychiatric Hospitals. In that expose, you'll learn how they literally trap patients against their will and against the law so that they can maximize insurance payouts.

And if that isn't dark enough for you, Acadia employees have been accused by dozens of patients of assault and neglect. A Utah Acadia hospital was closed after state regulators investigated dozens of charges of assault and rape. Tennessee regulators found that Acadia had lied in their medical charts, claiming they checked on a patient every 15 minutes. In reality, that patient wasn't found dead for hours, had already entered a state of rigor mortis. Now, perhaps not all actors in our healthcare system are as negligent, abusive, and fraudulent as Acadia is accused of being.

However, this model of abusing patients for profit is, in fact, exactly what you should expect from the system that we have set up. Every greedy middleman ghoul in the system getting their cut and patients getting sick and stuck with the bill. New poll from Gallup shows that even before the CEO was slain, Americans were absolutely clamoring for a radical departure from the health care status quo. Gallup finds a new post-Obamacare high in support for the federal government guaranteeing a right to health care coverage. Only 32% of the country disagrees. And yet because there is so much money being made, so much cash flowing from those profits into the campaign coffers of D.C. politicians, health care reform has been all but abandoned as a national issue. We went from Bernie

pushing Medicare for all to Biden briefly pretending to fight for a public option to Kamala crowing about dropping prices for a handful of drugs with savings only going to Medicare recipients. That's how far we've fallen and how quickly. If Democrats are actually serious about getting back into power and truly delivering for the nation, they will heed the message that was sent loud and clear this week and fight to cut these parasites off once and for all. By making our country more humane, they will save lives, including, potentially, the lives of a CEO or two. And, Saber, I'm kind of— And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Thank you guys so much for

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