Analys: Hur kommer dr Oz att ändra Medicare och Medicaid? | NTD NYHETER

Dr. Alex Bliss, thanks so much for coming on. I'm happy to be here. Now, doctor, I want to get your thoughts on RFK Jr.'s nomination in just a moment. A lot to talk about there, but on Dr. Mehmet Oz, there are 68 million people enrolled in Medicare, 80 million in Medicaid. What changes, if any, should these people expect? Well, I'm not sure what they should expect, but what I hope happens is that, you know, first of all, we need to preserve, but also strengthen, improve Medicare. And the way to do that is to increase choice and competition, because the prices of care have to come down. And if you want to push down prices of care by government decree, you're going to reduce the availability of medical care. That's how single-payer systems do it, and they have worse outcomes in every major disease and cancer, et cetera. And that's not what I think President Trump has in mind. I think we need to reduce the prices of all health care so that we can improve access and quality, because that's the only way, competition, that you get both things to happen. You get prices to come down and quality to improve. And you know, the other thing to do, I think, for Medicaid is very important. You know, in the U.S., we have a lot of politicians who have expanded Medicaid with massive, hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, and it's really a substandard health care system. It's a second-class health care system, and they pat themselves on the back for that. That's not exactly what I would want to do. What I want to do is make Medicaid a bridge to the excellence of American health care that we all enjoy, and that, frankly, all the congressmen enjoy, rather than pretend that you're doing something great by calling people who are low-income and poor insured by giving them substandard health care. Again, part of the key there is increasing competition, bringing down prices while improving quality. Now, doctor, I don't know if the high prices you're talking about are related to this, but in Trump's statement today, he said that Oz will work with RFK to, quote, address the illness industrial complex. What is your understanding of that? Well, I think that Bobby Kennedy really raises some critical questions here. First of all, in a general sense, the health care and health care as an economic sector is the most regulated sector in the economy, and there's a massive amount of fraud and waste, including in Medicare and Medicaid. That has to go, and I think there's a big focus of the Trump administration now on getting rid of that sort of waste of money. The second part is that health is contaminated with political agendas, and this is really obvious in the NIH, where they've got this big DEI effort going. They just released a 63-page report. I mean, all that is not the role of the NIH. That has to go. We have to depoliticize things and focus on what's the big health care issues, and this is, again, what Bobby Kennedy is stressing. First of all, proving safety before we start injecting our children or ourselves with drugs, that's critical. Secondly, really getting rid of the corruption. There's a lot of pharma corruption. There's a lot of other kinds of corruption going on in the health care sector, in the FDA, in the NIH, in the CDC. Some of these employees share royalties with the industries that they regulate and approve products from. Okay, that's an overt conflict of interest, and Bobby Kennedy knows that he wants to get rid of that. The other thing that we want to do, I think it's very much in concert with what he's doing, is focusing on the really critical number one disease in the United States in terms of its morbidity, its costs on health, as well as its actual cost money-wise, and that is obesity. We can't continue to be this culture where we somehow make it out of political correctness. We glamorize obesity. I think we've all seen for the last couple decades women's fashions magazines putting morbidly obese women on the cover and saying, this is the new healthy. Okay, this is ridiculous. We need to get rid of that and make it the reality, which is that being overweight and obese is extremely harmful to your health, and I think he wants to target the nutritional side of that to make sure that we become healthy again. Right. Doctor, a couple of things I want to ask you on that, a lot to unpack here. The first one is, you mentioned these agencies are sharing royalties with businesses, these health agencies, public health agencies. Can you just explain that for us? Sure. Over the decade prior to the pandemic, over 10 years, it was exposed that $325 million of royalties were shared with NIH employees from the drugs that they research and help end up putting in information on that will serve to regulate and approve those drugs. Okay, that's an overt conflict of interest. I think people are shocked to learn that, but that's in the government accountability papers. So, we can't have shared royalties and getting, frankly, it's not clear necessarily that people are evil. It's more clear, though, that there is a conflict of interest. You cannot be objective, that's the term, conflict of interest. We have to remove that. Secondly, there's another problem going on, which is that there's sort of a revolving door between people that approve devices or drugs, and then they go and serve on the advisory boards of those very companies. We saw that during, frankly, the last Trump administration, but it was not unique to them. Scott Gottlieb, who was in the president's ear about waiting for the vaccine, was on the advisory board of Pfizer. Okay, Steve Hahn was the head of FDA in the Trump administration when I was there, and they approved Moderna's vaccine for COVID, and then Steve Hahn is now working for one of the companies that is one of the owners of Moderna. So I mean, it's not just them. This has been going on for decades. We don't want to eliminate the crossover between private sector and government because we want people who are good to come in from private sector and work in government. We want people who are good from government to work in the private sector, but there has to be something done there to stop that, again, conflict of interest. What we don't want to do, by the way, is to completely create a 100% bureaucratic class. That is one of the big problems I hope that Bobby Kennedy addresses, which is we have these career bureaucrats who really control the American public through the agencies. They're not really accountable to the public because they're not elected. So they take over. This is what people mean by the deep state, when there's career bureaucrats accruing power like Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, and others that have really spent their entire careers running things in the government agencies. So you think that RFK could possibly eliminate some of this perceived conflict of interest or actual conflict of interest? Another thing, Dr. Atlas, you brought up, there's fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid that's pushing up prices. Can you give some examples of that, please? Well, sure. There's hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and waste in those programs in California alone. There are multiple documented studies going through this stuff now, because what happens, as you can imagine, when you have a bureaucracy and a regulatory system that is so overwhelming, you said we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on these things. It becomes quite complicated. This is one of the things we want to do, in my opinion, is get government away from health care itself. There's no reason to think that government should be an insurer for health care. They don't know anything about it. I'm not sure why people think government is the answer. When they get involved in things, they're not doing things as well generally as private sector. Government should help people who are poor and low income afford things, but my view is that we should get government and government regulations that impede competition and therefore artificially prevent price competition. Let's force transparency with the government, get rid of the fraud and waste, and make health care providers, doctors, hospitals, post their prices. Let's see their results, let's have them compete for the patients and have the patients control the money. Right, right. And doctor, since RFK's name was floated, there's been talk about possible changes to the vaccine schedule, the food pyramid, even government food subsidies, etc., a lot of things that may not have been on the radar for people before that. What changes should Americans expect, especially Americans with young kids at school? Well, I think the biggest concern of, if I may speak for what Bobby Kennedy's saying, and I don't, I'm just giving you my take on it, is he's really pushing more for having vaccines and other drugs prove safety, prove efficacy. Let's see the data. And I think any parent, I'm a father, I don't want to inject my children with drugs that aren't proven to be safe. In fact, I don't want to take anything that's not proven to be safe. Is that happening at the moment? Well, there's a paucity of data on vaccine and on vaccine safety. And I think that some of these things need to be flushed out. And if the data is there, let's see the data. I think one thing that that the public should be aware of is that Bobby's, Bobby Kennedy's bringing up very important questions. You shouldn't be worried about the question. If you're, if my bottom line is, if if you're worried about the question, then you must be nervous that you don't have the answer. So you're saying there's some data on these. I know I had heard in the past that Bobby Kennedy, he wanted some of these perhaps reports, pieces of research that are not public at the moment to be made public. Is this an accurate assessment of things? Well, I'm not speaking for him, but but I could tell you that the people in government, they work for us. I mean, you know, we have we can't lose sight of that. Their employees, everyone in the FDA, the CDC, the NIH, the executive branch, the president, their employees of the American people. OK, we want to see the data. One of the biggest problems I think that we saw during the pandemic was this idea that the government and the people in public health leadership are going to persuade us by telling us what to do by mandating our behavior. No, that's not acceptable. Let's see the information. This is a free country. We want to have the ability to make decisions for ourselves. And again, I'll bring up that. I think one of the things, if I may guess, that Bobby Kennedy is saying is, OK, that's fine. They have vaccines and things and offer vaccines and drugs and everything else. But there's no there's no room for mandating these things. This is a free country. I can't imagine having a country claim it's free, but force you to inject yourself with certain drugs. Right. We see this with the vaccine schedule for young kids all across the country. This is true. But a minute left, doctor, you were an advisor to President Trump during the pandemic, but you were also critical about the government's handling of the pandemic. You didn't support the vaccine or mask mandates, the lockdowns or school closures. What for you are the main lessons to take away from that period? Well, there are several lessons. You know, one of them is we can't have career bureaucrats delegated authority. OK, these people are not necessarily experts as a public. We must understand the era of trusting people based on their title alone. It should be over. We have to be critical thinkers. I saw a really huge amount of incompetence and lack of critical thinking. Secondly, we don't run the country by mandates. We run the country in my in my desire would be to give information, to show the data to people are intelligent people. We trust adults to take information and, you know, let them make decisions. I don't think mandates should ever be done. There's never a time to do a lockdown that is against standard pandemic management. In fact, the lockdowns killed and destroyed millions of people and they failed. And that's all that's the data over and over again. And so that's that's a big, big lesson. And the bigger lesson sort of in a general sense is we don't manage people by fear. OK, that's what was done during this pandemic. The media was complicit in this, by the way. I hate to say it. That's your field. But the government was really pushing people by fear rather than giving them information, letting people understand. I can guarantee if you show people the information and they determine that they're going to die if they walk outside, for instance, and hypothetical, they're not going to walk outside. You don't have to tell them they must stay inside. Secondly, these things were done grossly wrong. We need many more people from the outside to come in because the people in government that have been there for their whole careers, particularly their bureaucrats, they don't necessarily have the expertise. They're not able to be challenged on the data. But we need we need a whole new look at what was done. But we're in a free country. We can never forget that. These kind of mandates, completely unacceptable. A lot to unpack. Dr. Scott Atlas, we appreciate it. Thank you for joining us. All right. Thanks for having me.