Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #589: Marianne Williamson, Vivek Ramaswamy

Episode Date: February 12, 2022

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 2/11/22) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Late Night series Real Time with Bill Marriott. All right, here we are in overtime. Mary Ann, for you. You've been evasive about your political future lately, but you're a champion of progressive candidates and ideas. Could you see yourself potentially being an effective leader in Congress?

Well, you ran for president. What about Congress, I guess, is the question. I actually ran for Congress once. Oh, you did? Yeah. Didn't one nor one either. What year was that? 2014.

Oh, so what's the answer? I don't know what I'm going to do. You don't know what you're going to do? Come on. No, I think about it. You're in your own head 24 hours a day and it never comes up. No, I think about it. A lot of people think about running.

Some of them will and some of them won't. If I ever was in position to do it, I sure would tax you more. Well, you know, Marian? I think she wouldn't be too bad there. I think she should be like John Quincy Adams, actually. He became a copious. congressman after becoming president, and he did it with a goal of abolishing slavery. Exactly.

I think you should go in that order. Yeah, that's what I say. Second John Quincy Adams. You do see, like, we did that issue tonight about the PPP program, $800 billion. It's outrageous. I know. But do you understand why people who pay a lot of, because the rich do pay the most taxes? I mean, look, I'm not saying that's not right.

Of course, the rich should pay the most taxes. But you understand why people go like, what am I, I'm giving up all this money? I mean, I don't remember the last year. paid less than half. I pay more than half. I'm not a, you know, I'm not Amazon with the army of lawyers. I'm just one guy. HGO is very generous. But the government, I'm in the 39% federal. California takes 13. That's over half. You take over half and you still have everything fucked up. You understand why people are like, well, I would give it, except you will fuck it up. Oh, you really think that most people...

Well, I'm just saying, we did the issue. $800 billion, and only a quarter of it went where it should. So, look, I don't think capitalism is a perfect system, but I think it is the least imperfect system of allocating capital, because when you leave it to the government, it actually hurts the very people who it is supposed to help in the first place. You actually saw billionaires print much more money over the course of the pandemic precisely because of these government policies that then fed a stock market

that became addicted to loose monetary policy and loose fiscal policy that, guess what, make stocks go up, and who owns stocks, rich people. So no surprise that there's a populist outrage both on the right and the left, but we need to find a different way of ultimately separating politics from letting free market capitalism be free market capitalism. If some guy ends up with more green pieces of paper than the other, so be it as long as we're all equal in a democratic system of governance. That's what I think.

I feel like this table, I feel like this table is a bunch of French aristocrats a week before the masses made it to the Bastille. This is not about what you think. It's not about what you think, because you are, and I, listen, I'm very glad free market capitalism has been wonderful to you, wonderful to you. It hasn't been bad to me. I understand the high side of this party. If you're in the party, it's wonderful. Not enough people can get into the party today. We're locked out. We're saying the same thing. They're locked up by government policy that actually favors the people

who are in charge. Like the stimulus. But it favors the- Again, with the PPP thing. It's not that we're, I'm not, I'll give you half. But then what are you? you doing with it? You're not giving it to the people I want it to go to. You're giving it back to these assholes buying jet skis. You know, I mean, that's what... Most of the people,

most of the people who do not want to pay higher taxes who have a lot of money are not complaining about where the PPP loans went. They, you know, as Martin Luther King said, if they give it to poor people, they call it a handout. If they give it to rich people, they call it a subsidy. But this didn't go to poor people. That's the whole

point. It did not go to the Four people. But those same rich people are the ones who do not want to pay for instance. Something like, President Biden, if he wanted to, could declare a national medical emergency and expand Medicare to everyone tonight. If President Biden wanted to, he could cancel all the college-low debt tonight. I'm glad you brought that up. This is the next question that we are sent in.

Why isn't universal health care making any progress even in a liberal state like California? The majority of people want it. And you said not because of the insurance company. The majority of Americans want Medicare for all. No, no, I didn't say that. I didn't say not just because. But that's what happened in California. It was that million-dollar check from the insurance companies. Well, it's also the pharmaceutical companies.

The pharmaceutical companies make more than the insurance companies a lot more. And their goal is not to make you healthy. It's the same corporate matrix. So look, so. I actually think that there's truth to a lot of what you guys are saying. But at the end of the day, they're able to deflect accountability for these questions by actually changing the subject. That's a big part of what we were talking about with this cultural elitism is ultimately part of the reason that you see Pfizer decide or give big corporation

decide that there's going to be a certain number of people who are going to staff its ranks who are diverse. These are the press releases you see from pharmaceutical companies today, not actually how we're going to bring down the cost of drug development. But also, I mean, can I interject the little factual that I recall? I mean, the facts exactly right, but they have done this, they've studied this. Why can't we have you in overhous? Because it is popular as an idea in California. The majority of people want to in the United States. Okay, but when they crunch the numbers here in California of what it would cost to have universal health care,

it's like taxes would have to be like 80% for everybody or something. There's a different way to do it. The numbers, and that's why they give up on it. Because the numbers just don't work. There's a different way to do it. Because, again, the corruption in the system. I agree with you, that's the system. Again, the pill, the COVID pill that they're working on,

I think it costs $17 to make and it's going to sell for over $700. That's the problem. We can't tell the gougers to stop doing that. There's a different way to get to universal health care and I think it's really important because no one's talking about it. You might take the administrative bureaucracy

that's responsible for administering those dollars just like the bureaucracy that administers PPP, by the way, they waste a lot of money, send it to the wrong places. And I would say let's actually dissolve that entire apparatus, CMS, Center from Medicare Medicaid Services, take the money and distribute it to the people

who can't afford to buy private health insurance to actually buy private health insurance. And if you crunch those numbers, it's about $5,000 to $6,000 a person. It gets you most of the way there. So get rid of the bureaucracy and give the money back to the people. That's what I said.

No, what we need to remove is the profit-making middleman of insurance companies. That's what needs to be removed. You're still helping the insurance company. You're still giving the money to the insurance company. I think the last time I read it about it, maybe the number is slightly over it. I think that the profit of the health industry was something like $11 billion.

Right? And? Is that sound right? I don't know, actually. Okay. And our health care bill is like $2 trillion. Yeah. I'm just saying it's not all there.

It's not all there. That's exactly right, Bill. It's the same people getting up PPP that are allocating health care dollars. That's the problem. It is. The insurance companies, yes, they did some terrible things. Way than they used to 10 years ago, when Michael Moore made sicko, they got away with whatever they wanted. And after that movie, things changed.

but right now we do not stop this gouging. We do not stop. I've read this. There's a hospital, like in one part of the city that charges, you know, $1,800 for a knee replacement. And a hospital two miles away, and it's $15,000. You know, I mean, there's no wide reason to what they can.

We've all been, or known someone in the hospital, have been in the hospital, and you get the bill, and you're like, the slippers are $45? dollars? It's the same reason dead people are getting PPP checks. The government can't do it. And people go over to European countries where it's a fraction of all of that where they do have socialized medical system. Okay, but what does that mean socialized? Why, how is that going to stop this? I mean, if it can, yes, if that's what is involved in socialized medicine, I'm all for it. So what's going on in Europe, though, Mary Ann, is this is just an important issue to see for Americans

actually to bring money back. And this is one of the things actually would give even the last administration a good amount of credit for at least spotting this issue, they're free riding on what happens in the United States. So I ran a biotech company. I can tell you any company that runs the numbers of whether a drug is worth developing looks to the United States first because they know the United States pays the highest price. If the United States paid the same price as Europe, that drug wouldn't have gotten developed. So what Europe figured out is actually the drug is going to get developed anyway. And once the company's already gotten it to market, they're going to give it to us anyhow so we can get it cheaper. So that's actually what you're seeing there is gamesmanship on the

part of Europe free riding the innovation in the United States. That's a complicated issue. But I think the right answer is get rid of the bureaucracy. And I'm not arguing with you about how fucked up our system is one reason why we went through this nightmare with COVID is because hospitals are run like airlines. Airlines want to sell every seat. Hospitals want every bed filled. That's why, oh my God, the hospitals are overrun. Yes, because you don't want to have any empty beds lying around.

They want them to be overrun. Not overrun, but they want to be at capacity because that's good for the profit. hospitals themselves shouldn't be a profit thing. That's the point. I understand that. Thank you, Bill. None of it will be about profit. Another thing that's really fucked up about the system is actually the number of COVID case counts or cadets due to COVID are overcounted.

Because if somebody shows up for a different cause, let's say they're hit by a car, but they ultimately actually happen to test positive for COVID. They actually get higher billing rates in return for actually counting that person as positive for COVID, which just tells you that people in a system, whether or not we like it, respond to incentives. We have to take that into account when we set up the system. That's what I say. All right. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of real time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch them anytime on HBO on demand.

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