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Join us as Dr. Kelly Victory discusses crucial healthcare issues with host John Rush and contributor Steve House. The podcast unravels the intricacies of pharmacy benefit managers, entities largely unknown yet immensely influential on drug costs. Dr. Kelly shares her insights on why these middlemen are a significant factor in the high cost of pharmaceuticals and what can be done to regulate them. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation that sheds light on why these issues persist and what changes could be on the horizon with future administrations.
SPEAKER 03 :
All right. Welcome. Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560, Thursday edition. Dr. Kelly Victory joining us as well as Steve House. I always start with Dr. Kelly. Welcome. How are you?
SPEAKER 14 :
I’m doing great. And I am cautiously optimistic that in a handful of days we will be on the really on the horizon of a brand new, not just administration, but really a sort of rebirth for this country.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, Steve, according to Joe Biden, we already are. He’s already accomplished all this. It’s all done, man. He’s got it all figured out.
SPEAKER 05 :
It’s all done. It’s all in place. We just have to live through whatever it was he set us up to live through.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. So, you know, Dr. Kelly, we’re good to go. He told us last night that everything’s all dialed in.
SPEAKER 04 :
I know.
SPEAKER 03 :
My favorite of all of the delusions.
SPEAKER 14 :
And I really find this off-putting is that, you know, Trump has already fundamentally brokered a deal for the return of these hostages. It’s such a big deal. I cannot even imagine the horror and the pain that these people, these families have gone through. But the idea that Joe Biden is trying to assume credit for that is really, really unconscionable. You know, Trump has taken the moral high ground and has not pushed back and come out publicly, at least, and said the truth, which is that, you know, you buffoon. This would never have happened were it not for me. But that’s the reality. And everybody knows that.
SPEAKER 03 :
He has been the Trump has been quasi president for the last 90 days or so anyways. And I don’t think there’s too many people that would argue that. And again, Steve, to Dr. Kelly’s point, I mean, yeah, I get it. The hardcore left, they’re never going to admit that Trump does anything right. But the reality is Joe Biden hasn’t done any. I mean, let’s face it. He hadn’t done anything in a year.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, you know, people forget, you know, the fact that we’re like. 40% higher in budget deficit right now than we were a year ago. But keep in mind, too, that I’m betting both of you that sometime next summer, the Nobel Prize Committee will award Joe Biden the Peace Prize for the Hamas-Israel deal in the Middle East. You watch.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wasn’t shocked.
SPEAKER 14 :
I think you’re right.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, at least I predicted that prior to Inauguration Day, Donald Trump would have at least the Israeli Hamas thing pretty well handled, which it’s turning out to be that way. I thought that he’d actually get the Ukraine-Russia deal handled, although the other administration, the current administration, continues to throw as many monkey wrenches into that deal as as possible, Steve. So the reality is, yeah, I’m off on that one, but that’s not on me. That’s on Joe Biden and his team.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it’s not only monkey wrenches, but if you keep funding the pensions of the people in that race or in that war, then the people who are supposed to come to the negotiation table don’t have as big an incentive to negotiate because what they need is being taken care of. for them by the United States of America. I mean, it’s a leverage problem in a negotiation that Trump would never do.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s right. All right, moving along. Dr. Kelly, I sent you guys an article, and we’ve talked about this. In fact, just a few weeks ago we talked about this topic, but we’ve been talking about this for a while. Wall Street Journal, they put out an article. Largest pharmacy benefit managers hiked up drug prices, the FTC says, and there’s all sorts of articles linking back to the FTC study and so on. And reality is, again, start with you, Dr. Kelly, but we’ve been talking about this, or you guys, you and Steve have been talking about this for years.
SPEAKER 14 :
Absolutely. And to break it down to the easiest possible explanation for listeners, a pharmacy benefit manager, a PBM, is what Steve and I refer to as a, quote, middleman. What they are is a broker. They’re sort of akin to, for pharmaceuticals, what a real estate agent is in the sales of real estate, of homes and buildings. They’re the person who connects the seller and the buyer. And in real estate, they take a pretty much set commission of a certain amount, somewhere between 4% and 6% in most markets. The problem with the pharmacy benefit managers, the PBMs, is they are the person who brokers the deal between, say, a hospital system or a doctor’s office or a big corporation and the drugs that they will make available for their patients. And instead of taking, you know, 4% to 6% or what they’re supposed to be able to take by law, which is 2% to 3%, they sometimes are taking well more than 100% commission. In other words, they are more than doubling the cost and sometimes tripling or more the cost of medication. And that has been one of the biggest drivers in the outrageous cost of pharmaceuticals in this country for some decades. And Steve and I have tried very hard to bring light to this, but we still have not cracked that nut. It is getting these middlemen out of the equation would be the quickest way to drive down drug costs.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, Steve, you know my background and where I come from on the automotive side. And I get it. Every industry, even automotive, there are, in some cases, middlemen that stock a product and they distribute it and so on. And they’re sort of, in this example, they’re that middleman as well, although none of them in our industry ever see the kind of profits that these guys are seeing. On the same token, Steve, there’s a lot of products in the automotive world that are are sold, in some cases, direct to consumer or at least direct to installer. So my question is, as just sort of a novice in that world from the outside in, why is a PBM needed at all?
SPEAKER 05 :
A couple things. I mean, number one, there’s so many new drugs that are created, you know, on a monthly basis by pharmaceutical companies around the world that it’s a complicated process. The hospitals are trying to take care of patients and make them well. And in the meantime, try to keep up with, you know, what they should or should not have on formula in terms of drugs. I mean, there’s…
SPEAKER 03 :
The amount of money, though, that these organizations, hospitals, et cetera, are paying the PBMs, you could put an entire department in the hospital and handle all of that on your own, or am I wrong?
SPEAKER 05 :
no you’re not wrong but the solution is here’s what’s going to happen john is that you know the pbm they’re going to tell congress that if you shut up down if you give up you know if you stop linking our fee to the price of the drug and drugs cost over a hundred thousand bucks so they get this massive number if you stop that then drugs are not going to be available however because of artificial intelligence because of some of the technology available today what’s really going to happen is is there going to be pbms that come along and there already exists i know the name of one right now and those pbms will charge a per member per month fee that’s a fixed fee to manage the drug distribution to the hospital through their discount programs like 340B to employers directly. There are competitors coming along who will do it for a fixed fee because the life of a traditional PBM is very limited at this point.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, that makes more sense. Dr. Kelly, I’ll let you chime in.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, the other thing that’s gone on historically, and the reason it hasn’t happened, John, is because the PBMs have been, you know, they are thugs. They are back alley thugs. What they say is if, you know, hospital, you know, ABC says we’re going to hire Kelly Victory instead. We don’t want these middlemen. We’re going to hire Kelly Victory. We’re going to bring her on staff and we’re going to let her, you know, she’s going to be our employee at the hospital and she’s going to go out and negotiate this thing and bring us the best prices and figure out what drugs we should have on formulary. The PBM will go around me and say to the pharmaceutical company, if you sell to Kelly Victory, If you let her do that, we will not let you sell anywhere else. You will go out of business. We will make sure you lose the contract. They are the mafia under a different name. This would be called, in any other industry, this would be known as racketeering. Because that’s exactly what it is. It is back alley thuggery. It is absolutely out of control. And it is the thing that is driving up drug costs for Americans. and it has got to stop. And Congress, both sides of the aisle, thank you, Republicans and Democrats, have been absolutely remiss. They have been absent from their mandate to look out for the American people, and they have done nothing about this, despite the fact that we have brought it to their attention over and over and over again. This has got to stop.
SPEAKER 03 :
Steve, isn’t this an FTC situation to where they should be the ones handling this and getting rid of what Dr. Kelly just said?
SPEAKER 05 :
I mean, is it a monopoly? Almost. It probably technically qualifies.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, but the Federal Trade Commission is also supposed to protect consumer rights and really watch out for the end consumer when it’s all said and done. And we’ve seen them meddling in things that, frankly, in my opinion, they had no business meddling in, and yet they won’t take care of this.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, and it’s primarily because there’s this… not real belief that without the PBMs, people will die, right? Because they won’t get access to drugs. So they’re hesitant to do that. But back in the days when Kelly and I were talking about PBMs, the one thing that should have happened is diabetics, especially diabetics. When we went away from insulin created by cows and pigs, and we went to a human synthesized version, which was $5,000 more per year for the insulin, although it did not deliver significantly better benefits. What should happen is diabetics should have gotten to a class action lawsuit and sued the federal government for not enforcing their own safe harbor laws that limited that fee to two to three percent. Kelly and I talked about this back in 2020. We had a committee when I was running for Congress. The way it should have been done is big groups like diabetics should have sued the federal government over this and forced their hand in taking care of the problem, but they didn’t.
SPEAKER 03 :
Which means they missed that opportunity and it just kept snowballing. Is that correct, Dr. Kelly?
SPEAKER 14 :
Exactly. And it’s now spun so far out of control. And everybody, you know, blames the pharmaceutical companies. And believe me, I am no fan of Big Pharma.
SPEAKER 04 :
Right.
SPEAKER 14 :
of these back alley thugs, these PBMs who are doing the negotiating for them. And they need to be eliminated there. We really need to. Congress has been, as I said, remiss. They did not hold accountable the PBMs to only take the two to three percent for which they were uh allowed and they now are charging sometimes many hundreds of percent in profits and you know that really is being paid for it’s being felt by the consumer unfortunately and so i am hopeful that in this next administration we will see that turn around
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I mean, this article, they’re talking about how the markups alone helped PBMs reap in $7.3 billion from 2017 to 2022. And I get it. There’s some costs that those guys have. And you guys know me. I’m a capitalist. I don’t mind people making money. And that’s not what I’m after here. But when you’re doing it, Dr. Kelly, the way you’re saying, to where you’re forcing your hand and you’re really, in a lot of ways, developing a monopoly when it’s all said and done, no, that is not the way it’s supposed to work.
SPEAKER 14 :
Exactly. And again, you know, there are Americans who are absolutely being crushed by the cost of their drug prices. And we’re seeing people having to make choices that they shouldn’t have to make, trying to spread out their insulin or avoid taking a blood pressure medication every day so that they can make a prescription that’s supposed to be for 30 days last more like 45 or 60 days. These are things that we should not have happening in the United States. particularly because most of these drugs are really dirt cheap. They are very inexpensive to make. The entire cost is in the marketing. The other thing I’m hopeful is that if Robert Kennedy Jr. is in fact confirmed to head up HHS, and I believe that he will be, I believe that he will go after and try to eliminate pharmaceutical advertising on television. If you cut out a lot of that advertising budget and the fact that then maybe they can get the cost of the drugs down to something that’s actually sustainable.
SPEAKER 03 :
But then all their lobbying power goes away, Dr. Kelly.
SPEAKER 14 :
Exactly. Not all of it. All of Washington.
SPEAKER 05 :
Go ahead, Steve. Not all of it. I mean, yeah, the advertising should go. Kelly’s right. But they still have the ability to find ways to get people to donate to candidates running for office, and they’ll still have market power that way.
SPEAKER 03 :
So in other words, what you’re saying is eliminating the ads doesn’t necessarily eliminate all the power they have over Congress and Senate. Exactly.
SPEAKER 05 :
It does help, though, because, you know, patients see ads and say, hey, I’ve got that problem. True. And demand that they get it. And, you know, it does push their scenario. Every other country in the world doesn’t allow this. I think there’s one country that allows advertising. Yeah, New Zealand. New Zealand. I think there’s a good reason why we don’t do it. But there’s still one lobbyist. For every congressional member in Congress, there’s at least one lobbyist out of the pharma and health care industry. Wow.
SPEAKER 03 :
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SPEAKER 11 :
No liberal media bias here. This is Rush to Reason.
SPEAKER 03 :
And we are back. Dr. Kelly Victory with us this hour along with Steve House. Appreciate both of you guys joining us. Dr. Kelly, a question came in even last week right after we got off air that I said I would go ahead and ask today. I know we’ve talked about this in the past, and I don’t know if there’s been any further progress in this area, but somebody was wondering if there’s been any studies or information on say, an unvaccinated man getting together with a vaccinated woman. They then have kids. Are the kids then, you know, do they then have that mRNA end of things when it’s all said and done, or does anybody know?
SPEAKER 14 :
I think the answer is we don’t know. There certainly has been concern about that, and I think it’s not unbased to have some concern about that. Because the mRNA does become incorporated into the DNA of many cells, And vaccinated people, therefore, if they procreate, if they have children, you could conceivably be passing that DNA down. That’s certainly a concern that Dr. Peter McCullough raised very early on. The reality is, however, that we don’t know. That type of genetic testing has not been done yet, and there’s no way to say. So I certainly don’t have any evidence that it’s true. I can understand the concern. And I think these are the sorts of things, again, I will get back to. This doesn’t make me anti-vaccine. The fact that somebody is asking this question, a very legitimate question, and that I and the people who designed these vaccines and pushed them as safe can’t answer that question. These are the sorts of questions, people, that are supposed to be answered before you stick a needle in millions of people’s arms.
SPEAKER 04 :
Great point.
SPEAKER 14 :
We should know the answer to this question. But, you know, this is insane that we that my answer is we don’t know because we should know. And that’s part of what the testing. There’s a reason why the average vaccine takes four or six to eight years to come to market. If it ever comes at all, there’s a reason we take years to study something before we put the stamp of approval on it. These things simply did not go through that rigorous testing. And as a result, there are lots of very important questions for which we do not have answers.
SPEAKER 03 :
And Steve, to Dr. Kelly’s point, we don’t have a lot of those answers. And the reality to Steve is, is, you know, I keep questioning. I know we’ve asked this on this program many times is is the whole why? I mean, I get it. You know, Donald Trump was duped. You know, he felt like the economy would be in better shape if we had a vaccine, because that’s what his handlers were continually telling him that, you know, the only way we can get back vaccines. work and get back to school and fly and do this and do that is to get the population vaccinated. And through that, we’ll have herd immunity and blah, blah, blah. We were talking about some of that stuff even back then, Steve. The reality is none of that happened and the entire world’s been duped.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, I was going to say, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, listen, if you had waited to have all the safety data you needed on this vaccine, if you would have dealt with Moderna’s death of a child and all that stuff, what would have happened is the pandemic would have ended a year earlier. There would have been a lot less people dead from the vaccine, and we would have gone into a room at some point. They would have gone into a room and said, okay, it’s a virus. It’s a coronavirus. So we know it’s going to get weaker when it mutates. We already know that the best way to do this is isolate sick people, not isolate healthy people. We’ve always known that. Masks are not going to save us. That’s why we’ve got to isolate the sick. It would have gone from Delta. to whatever the next one was, it would have got less viral or virile as it went. And by the time the vaccine came out, we wouldn’t need it. But unfortunately, we push the vaccine when we never should have.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. And again, we’ve talked about a lot of this on the program in the past. Those of you that are maybe listening to us fresh haven’t heard some of those things in the past. Again, Dr. Kelly, the answers that none of us have heard yet and not sure we ever will is the whole why. You know, why did this have to get pushed so quickly? What was the end goal? What were they really trying to do? The The things that we’re seeing come out of these shots and, you know, a lot of the turbo cancers and things that we’ve even talked about here in the months past, you know, leading up to today. The reality is those things have happened because of it. And I’m not even to this day. I still don’t know the why.
SPEAKER 14 :
Exactly. And so to use an analogy, you’re in the car world, John, can you imagine a car being brought to the market and somebody saying, well, how’s it doing on ice? Say, well, I don’t know. We actually never tested that. How does it do if you try to break with it when the pavement’s wet? I don’t know. We didn’t actually test that. That’s insane. They have to go through all of this stuff. You would never bring a product to market with a bunch of things that you hadn’t bothered to test.
SPEAKER 03 :
And really quick in that world, as we know, not allowed, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Department of Transportation, would not allow those things to even happen, Dr. Kelly, in the first place. That’s on something that’s mechanical that people get in and drive to and from. By the way, they still choose to get in and out of on a daily basis. That is a huge, huge difference in what we did with this shot.
SPEAKER 14 :
Exactly. So, number one, people have a choice what car they buy or don’t buy, as opposed to these shots where many people were mandated, coerced, shamed or forced. You can’t go to work without it. Correct. You can’t feed your children if you don’t take this thing. And on top of it, it’d be saying, and not only did we not test whether the car’s brakes work, but if they fail, you can’t sue them.
SPEAKER 1 :
Hmm.
SPEAKER 14 :
If they fail and your children are killed or maimed, you have no recourse.
SPEAKER 03 :
If those seatbelts don’t work, the airbags don’t go off, and your kids end up dead, oh well, not on us.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, you know, good luck to you. And so the entire thing stinks so bad. It is so outrageous that I keep trying to come up with analogies to make people understand just how bad this is. I wouldn’t buy a car seat that said on the outside, if this product fails and your child is maimed or mortally injured, you have no recourse. OK, you would expect to be able to sue. You would expect that has gone through safety testing before it is brought to market. If you feed your child or you feed your family a food product, you know, that that has metal particles in it or God knows what else. You expect some request. You expect quality there to be some accountability for the quality. These shots have none of that behind it. And if they did, then great. Then take away the liability protection and let’s have at it.
SPEAKER 03 :
The point being, Steve, is we didn’t. And one last thing I want to layer on to what Dr. Kelly just said. On top of all of that, we’re still pushing them, Steve.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, we are, because it still goes back to what we talked about last week. It’s the best business model ever made. Because you basically have forced governments to pay list price for a drug that is untested so that people will stop being afraid of a virus that they shouldn’t be afraid of. They should take normal action to, quite frankly… We would have been way better off, even if Pfizer and Moderna wanted to make money, if they gave 100% placebos, no vaccine at all. They put a bunch of shots in people’s arms, and people believed that they were getting a vaccine. They would have healed normally from the virus. We would have given a bunch of people vitamin D. Yeah, there would have been some losses because people die from the flu, and that’s the same kind of scenario. We would be far better off if they gave 100% placebos than create this vaccine.
SPEAKER 03 :
Absolutely. Dr. Kelly, along those lines, and not to shift gears completely, but I think this correlates to what we’re talking about, and that is, you brought it up earlier, the nomination confirmation of RFK Jr. What do you anticipate? I mean, we’ve seen some of the things that have already happened on the stand with the likes of Pam Bondi and others. And by the way, some of these… Senators are absolute knuckleheads. I cannot say it any other way than that. They’re dumb as rocks, literally. So my question, Dr. Kelly, is when RFK Jr. gets on the stand, who, by the way, is much, much smarter than the vast majority. There’s a few really good, smart senators, don’t get me wrong, but the vast majority of them are dumb as rocks. He’s going to eat their lunch.
SPEAKER 14 :
I think so, too. And I’m not where it’s going to be a very contentious hearing in the same way that some of what we’re talking about is going to come up.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right.
SPEAKER 14 :
Correct. And because the people on the left, unfortunately, cannot help themselves and they have to go down a path of questioning that has nothing to do with the job for which the person has been nominated. We saw that happen with the headset. That’s right. Half of the questioning, if not more, that was coming from the left side. was aimed at nothing more than trying to humiliate him, to try to embarrass his wife, to try to make it uncomfortable in hopes that his wife would stand up and leave in tears and he would say, I can’t do this. It’s unconscionable and it has nothing to do with the job for which he was being nominated. They will do the same with Robert Kennedy Jr. I guarantee his previous marital affairs are, And indiscretions will all come up and they have nothing to do with anything.
SPEAKER 03 :
And on top of that, they’ll throw things out like, so you believe we shouldn’t have vaccines at all. You know that question’s coming out, Dr. Kelly.
SPEAKER 14 :
Correct. They will try to tar and feather him as an anti-vaccine zealot, which is something that I say nothing could be further from the truth. He is simply advocated for transparency and for full and adequate testing. He is pro safety, pro data, pro science. And those are things that have been missing. He furthermore is going to be a real disruptor. He is going to expose the fraud, corruption and conflicts of interest that are rife within our government. And that includes HHS itself, CDC, FDA, NIH. The idea that people like Anthony Fauci and others own parts of patents.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yep.
SPEAKER 14 :
on drugs and therapeutics, for which they make money when they recommend that all Americans are forced to take something. These are things that are going to be very uncomfortable. There are people on both sides of the aisle, Republican and Democrat, who have been feathering their nests for decades with money from big pharma, and that has got to come to a stop. So do I think he’ll be successful? Absolutely. Will he weather the contentious Questioning?
SPEAKER 1 :
100%.
SPEAKER 14 :
He’s smarter than all of them put together. But he is, I believe, truly, even though he and I don’t agree on everything, I believe he’s exactly what we need at the helm.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, Steve, and by the way, I can’t disagree with anything Dr. Kelly said. But, you know, you and I both know that some of the questions that are going to get thrown his way, A, to Kelly’s point, are going to have nothing to do with the job. But on top of that, they are going to try to back him into a corner. And if there’s anybody, not that some of the folks that have already been up there aren’t really sharp, but he’s not going to be backed into a corner.
SPEAKER 05 :
No, I mean, look, they’ll ask him questions and not let him answer, that’s for sure. But here’s what I expect based on a conversation I had today. Someone’s going to say to him, you know, Mr. Kennedy, doesn’t your thought process on high fructose corn syrup put all hospitals in America at risk? And he’s going to say, what do you mean? And they’re going to say, well, you know, if you get rid of high fructose corn syrup in the American diet, people won’t need to go to the hospital anymore and they’ll have a risk of closings. Are you really going to be the guy that closes American hospitals? It’ll be something stupid like that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep, absolutely will be. I have no doubt, Steve, that’s what’s going to happen. Dr. Kelly, you and I both know that some of these – and by the way, for all of you listening, some of these senators are going to be prepped with some of these questions because, frankly, they’re not smart enough to come up with these things on their own. I’m being awfully kind, Dr. Kelly, when I say that because reality is they’re not that smart. They’re not even smart enough to think of some of these questions. Somebody’s probing them or priming them. Big Pharma, for example – is priming them with some of these questions. Am I wrong?
SPEAKER 14 :
No, that’s absolutely right. And even the people, the staffers who prepare the questions for these idiot Congress people, even they are getting their talking points from the mainstream media. The New York Times posts an article. Absolutely, purposely trying to paint Robert Kennedy Jr. as anti-vaccine, saying that he wants to, quote, revoke the polio vaccine. And he has a lawsuit to pull the polio vaccine. That is preposterous. He, Bobby Kennedy. filed a lawsuit to recommend that one of the six polio vaccines be removed from the market until such time as it went through adequate safety testing. There were five others. There are five others that are available. But one of them that was confirmed or allowed to get on the schedule in 1990 went through three days. Three days, 72 hours of safety testing. The only testing they did was up to 72 hours after injection and then they called it a wrap and said this is safe. Now in what alternate universe is three days worth of testing for something you were going to inject into a child. So Bobby Kennedy tries to do this, but the New York Times comes out there and says, oh, Bobby Kennedy wants to bring polio back to America. I mean, it’s those sorts of incendiary headlines that It’s so disingenuous. It’s so dishonest. And I expect the hearing to be full of that.
SPEAKER 03 :
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SPEAKER 15 :
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SPEAKER 03 :
All right, we are back. Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560. Dr. Kelly Victory and Steve House with us. Okay, Dr. Kelly, I’ll start with you. Once RFK Jr. is confirmed, which, by the way, I’m with you, I think he will be. He’s going to go through all of the nonsense that we just talked about a moment ago, but I think in the end he’ll get confirmed. What do you anticipate him doing first?
SPEAKER 14 :
I think a couple things will be top priority to him. Number one, I think he will address this issue of advertising on television. I think that’s going to be one of his first things. Second, I think he’s going to address the foods. He’s going to really look at the foods that we are making available online. through our tax-subsidized food programs, meaning specifically breakfast and school lunch programs. And I think he’s really going to crack down on what they’re able to provide. And I’m a huge supporter of that. You have to look at it and say that we are the only country where the people whose health care we subsidize, primarily low-income people, are also the most obese. We provide for the people. We’re on the hook for their health care, and then we give them foods that cause illness, that drive obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and those sorts of things. So I think he will look at the subsidies for foods that we provide in our schools and via the food stand, the EBT program, those sorts of things. I think he will quietly and be more slow and balanced in his approach to to the issues around vaccines i think he will address vaccine mandates and hopefully be on the bandwagon to eliminate all vaccine mandates the idea that anyone should be forced to take a particular therapeutic vaccine or other you know medical treatment and i think he will do that very quickly but i don’t think he’s going to come right out of the box and start saying we’re going to ban this vaccine or remove expect you know vaccine from the market I think he will address mandates first and then work backwards to which are the safe ones and which aren’t.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay. Steve, you want to chime in on that? I can’t disagree with anything Dr. Kelly said, and I know RFK Jr. is sharp enough that he will be strategic in the things that he does.
SPEAKER 05 :
I absolutely agree with Kelly. I think the one thing that I would do if I could, if I were him too, is I would look at the subsidy program, paid by health insurers for vaccines to be given to patients via doctors. I mean, I think doctors need to get paid for office visits and occasionally need to give a vaccine, but You know, we’ve heard and seen that some physicians are paid just a tremendous amount of money to make sure that patients all get vaccinated. And I think that’s the wrong kind of incentive. I think there ought to be more of a, you know, what’s necessary. Kelly was the one during the COVID who said, you know, risk assess yourself, risk assess your child. Do you need to give a Tdap to a two-month-old, right? I mean, and figure out how to change that. I think the incentive is wrong as well. No, and I agree with all that. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 14 :
The other thing I can tell you, because I spoke with him personally about this, is that he said that if he, this was back when he was running for president, he said that were he elected as president, and I think he’ll do the same thing at HHS, that he would call the editors of all of the major medical journals, the Lancet, BMJ, American Journal of Medicine, all of these into his office. and say either you eliminate your cozy relationship with big pharma, you stop taking money from the pharmaceutical companies for your journal, or he’s going to bring a RICO case against them, a racketeering case, because he is aware that it is the ownership, frankly, and that’s what it is, that big pharma… owns the medical journals and therefore the only articles the only studies quote-unquote that get published are the ones that come to the conclusion that the pharmaceutical company paid for it to come to in other words it’s junk science you know doctors have nowhere it’s rigged Yeah, we don’t have anywhere to turn to get legitimate, honest science, because everything you read, every quote study, actually is propaganda paid for by the pharmaceutical companies. And Bobby Kennedy, I believe, will address that very quickly.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I sure, I mean, I agree with you. I think he will as well. Like I said a moment ago, I think he’s going to be very calculated in the things that he does. He’s not a dumb man by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, Dr. Kelly, correct me if I’m wrong, but looking back on some of the previous administrations and so on, will he not be one of the smartest people in that role that we’ve had yet?
SPEAKER 14 :
Oh, I think by a long shot, and I have been very, very open about it. I’ve written a number of op-eds about the idea that If nothing else, Robert Kennedy Jr. is an unconventional choice for HHS, John, and that’s exactly why we need him. Because conventional picks, in addition to being dumb as a box of hammers, have led us and delivered us to the abysmal state of ill health where we find ourselves today. You know, 80% of American adults have at least one chronic illness for which they take medications. 80%. 50% have more than two. One out of every three school children is either diabetic or pre-diabetic. We have rates of autism, obesity, diabetes, hypertension that are through the roof. And that’s what conventional picks have brought us. So I would say, yes, he is not only smart, he brings a very different approach to it. He’s an attorney. He’s made a lifelong, you know, he’s had a lifelong relationship commitment to the health and wellness of children. And again, he and I do not agree on a lot of things. I prefer the carrot approach versus the stick approach. I’m not big on, quote, banning certain foods, for example, or banning additives. I believe it’s more powerful to say, you know, look, Kellogg’s, you can put whatever the heck you want in your breakfast cereal, have at it, but you aren’t eligible to participate in the school breakfast program. So you can put whatever you want.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, great point.
SPEAKER 14 :
But we are not going to allow breakfast cereal that have more than blank percent of sugar or that include artificial colorings or include artificial this. So I think that is a way more powerful way to do it rather than banning things. But that’s a stylistic difference. Directionally, I believe that he is spot on.
SPEAKER 03 :
Steve, you want to add to that? You’re familiar with this end of things and even the admin side of things as much as anybody.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, I mean, you know, I would like to see Bobby Kennedy really literally say regarding the vaccine schedules and everything we’re talking about that it’s time to take a step back and take a look at it. I mean, why don’t we investigate it a little bit? I mean, there’s so much that we accept and we put up with that we’ve never really gotten, you know, the play on. I mean, autism and the vaccines. I mean, we know there’s some stuff out there about it. The journals are a waste of time because of the incentive of the pharma companies, as Kelly was talking about. We need to take a step back. We will do less damage by slowing down than we will by going at the same pace.
SPEAKER 03 :
Agreed. Charlie had a question he just texted, which is a good question. Dr. Kelly, I’ll start with you. What kind of kickbacks and freebies do local doctors get from pharmaceutical companies? I mean, I know about some of the trips and different things along those lines. But, you know, for those listening, what do these you know, what are these doctors actually in hospitals even what do they end up with?
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, it used to be that they’ve cracked down on that a lot. Used to be when I was training, you know, you got a lot of freebies. You’d get invited to steak dinners and golf outings and get, you know, tickets to the to the football game or whatever that they’ve cut down on. So they found, as all things. you know, a workaround. So now, for example, during COVID, doctors, many doctors made hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives, but they got paid instead through the insurance companies. The pharmaceutical company pays the insurance company, and the insurance company pays it to the doctor. So they say, Dr. Smith, if you get 50% of your patient population vaccinated for COVID, we’ll give you a kicker of $100 a patient. If you get 80%, we’ll give you a kicker of $200 per patient. And it got paid through the insurance companies. So they simply have found a workaround rather than the pharmaceutical companies paying it directly to the doctor. they pay it to the insurance company and the insurance company pays it through the back door so it’s the same thing you know and your average internist for example makes somewhere in the range of 180 to 200 000 a year during covid many of them were making 500 600 000 a year they more than tripled their their income during those years simply by giving COVID and pushing COVID vaccines. And that is unconscionable.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep. Really quick, Steve, again, not a lot of time left, but when we look at some of these other folks, by the way, that going through the confirmation process right now, and again, some of these senators show their real colors when all of this is said and done, I believe, because some of them really have no clue how some of this stuff even works and what some of the job duties of that particular individual are when it’s all said and done. And I know it’s hard to say what Trump’s first day will be like. We’ve got a few minutes left here. What do you anticipate Donald Trump doing day one?
SPEAKER 05 :
Probably like 80 or 90 executive orders. He’ll start with the border. He’ll deal with… I mean, look, Bobby probably can do some of the stuff he wants to do, but Trump probably has to do executive orders on some of it as well. I mean, it’s a combination of things, but he’s going to do all kinds of things related to the border, I think related to anything he can economically. He’s going to undo… a bunch of stuff biden did from you know drilling to the relationship with iran to climate change i mean it’s going to be i read an article today i didn’t read the whole thing but it just called it a shock and awe this will be a shock and awe first day in office um he may go from you know noon before you know before he gives a speech he gets sworn in at noon um and then he eventually goes out and signs all these orders um because he takes he takes you know office effectively the moment it becomes January 20th. So I don’t know whether it’ll be 80 or 90. I think there’s an over-under in Vegas on that, so we’ll have to see what happens.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, and again, I don’t have any large predictions other than I think some of the energy stuff that we’re going through, some of what Joe Biden’s tried to even lay upon Donald Trump and that administration as he’s leaving and, quote, unquote, his legacy, which is not a legacy. They’re just trying to sabotage the Trump administration is all they’re doing. So, yeah, to your point, Steve, I think there’ll be lots of things that get done on Tuesday to try to undo some of the things the past administration did, how much of that actually – can be done legally. That’ll be another question, of course, that we’ll get into. One last question I have for you, Steve, before we move on. Actually, before we close out. How many lawsuits do you think the left will throw, or do you think it’ll be less than the last time around with Donald Trump?
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, my God. I mean, you know, first of all, Trump’s smarter. I mean, he knows how things work in Washington now. He’s better at it. So I’m not so sure how many lawsuits will get thrown at him, but I’m sure everything they dislike. And I mean, frankly, with what’s going on, I mean, you know, this first two years, he’s got enough power that he can almost dismantle the entire left party. agenda. They already know he did a lot of that with the Supreme Court and some of the other stuff he put in play, but he can address health care. I mean, that’s a big one, right? I mean, because not only is Bobby in charge of health, he’s in charge of health care. There’s a lot of things he can do. I think there’ll be hundreds of lawsuits against the decisions he makes. But that’s not atypical. I think that happens a lot.
SPEAKER 03 :
Got it. All right. I’ll let you go, Steve. I’ll let you go first. Appreciate you as well, always. Thank you. All right, man. Dr. Kelly, you as well. Thank you always. I appreciate it very much. And I guess when we talk next week, we’ll have a few days under our belt with Donald Trump, and we’ll see exactly what happens.
SPEAKER 14 :
We will. We will. I’m looking forward to Monday night.
SPEAKER 03 :
Awesome.
SPEAKER 14 :
We’ll talk next Thursday.
SPEAKER 03 :
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SPEAKER 13 :
It’s time to leave your safe space. This is Rush to Reason on KLZ 560.
SPEAKER 03 :
All right, we’ve got more hours coming your way. And, you know, back to Dr. Kelly and Steve’s point. Yes, we are all anxiously awaiting not only Monday, but then the official first full day in office on Tuesday to see what comes of some of the things that we’ve even talked about here this past hour. And don’t forget, if you have a question for Dr. Kelly or Steve off air, even text me and I’ll get that answered for you. 307-282-22. We’ll be right back. This is Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560.
SPEAKER 1 :
Bye. I’m a rich guy.
