Name: Sen. Bernie Sanders | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #635
Uploaded: 2026-01-21T16:30:29.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Sen. Bernie Sanders | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #635' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-01-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Sen. Bernie Sanders | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #635' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-01-21. Transcript available.

Sen. Bernie Sanders | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #635

Today's guest is a senator from the state of Vermont.
Before that, he was a congressman.
He was a mayor.
He's a mittened meme, actually.
I'm thankful for his return to the show.
Today's guest is Senator Bernie Sanders.
Shine on me
And I will find a song
I've been singing
I love this.
You know, this is an historic hotel.
Oh, yeah.
Leonard Cohen used to spend time in here.
Yeah, my mom used to play Leonard Cohen for us when we were kids.
She liked him, and so she would play his
When the Walls Came Down.
Remember that?
Yeah, and here is Hallelujah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Here in New York City, there is a
Yeah, it's called the Youth Choir of New York City.
Does that ring any bells?
It's kids.
Pull them up.
The Youth Choir of New York City?
Is that it?
Yeah, it's beautiful.
And among other things, they do a beautiful, beautiful rendition
of Cohen's Hallelujah, which I love very much.
Yeah, I haven't been to see them.
I would like to go check them out, though.
Do they perform pretty often?
Mm-hmm.
What's beautiful about it?
These are kids from the city, often working-class kids.
The guy does a fantastic job, and the quality is really wonderful.
And we're trying to do something, and there it is.
God, you can't say a word here.
It's up in.
There it is.
Those are the kids, and beautiful, and wonderful.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's nice.
No, I haven't gone to see that.
What did I go?
I went to see a Knicks game.
They haven't won a championship in 53 years.
Right?
I didn't even realize that.
Well, I'm done.
He's a mayor.
That'll change.
Yeah, there we go, huh?
That's why, hey, we'll start maybe getting some more foreign players.
Hey, they got some good guys at the Eurostep, you know, changed a lot of things.
I saw that you were out there on the nurses' picket line, the New York nurses.
Yep.
Yeah, that's awesome.
We went the other day, too.
We had a great time.
Oh, wow.
That's a nice crowd.
Jesus.
When you were there, that was there, was that?
Oh, that's me today.
There I am.
That's you this morning.
Who's that handsome guy in the brown coat?
Oh, that's me.
All right.
Who's that kid with him?
Oh, that's the mayor.
Oh, yeah, that's Zoran, huh?
Yeah.
Yeah, there we were.
We went out there the other day.
We had a good time.
We stayed for a few hours, walked around, shook some bells, you know.
Great.
Got out there.
I love nurses.
My sister's a nurse.
Where is she a nurse?
She's a nurse down in Louisiana.
Good.
But I figured that if, you know, things start here in New York, a lot of big
things start here.
Theo, let me just say something.
I really appreciate the work you do and other podcasters do.
This is one of the technological revolutions that is really good, you know.
Sometimes I go on TV and I'm asked to deal with an issue in seven seconds.
I can't deal with it.
You can't deal with it, right?
Yeah.
Takes a little bit of time.
So thank you for what you're doing.
Well, I appreciate that.
Yeah, we're trying to learn as we go, too, and it changes a lot, you know.
But were you at Mount Sinai?
Which one did you go?
Mount Sinai.
Yeah, that's where we went.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'll tell you, I was really proud to go there and be alongside mayors
around Mamdani.
You know, I'm the former chairman of the Health Education Labor Committee.
And I'll tell you, Theo, I have met with nurses all over this country.
I love nurses.
It's no great secret that our health care system is broken.
Everybody knows that.
And the people who are keeping it going are, in fact, the nurses.
You know, they're with you when babies are born.
They're with you when you die.
They're with you in between.
They're at your bedside.
They're the backbone of the health care system, and I love them.
And I'll tell you something.
Time and time again, nurses would come into my office, and they'd start talking,
and suddenly
they'd start crying.
And you know what they were crying about?
They were crying about the fact that they were unable to do the jobs, to do the
work that
they were trained and wanted to do, that they didn't have the number of nurses
they need,
the staffing ratios that they needed.
They broke down.
And I was just a couple of years ago, not dissimilar to what's going on in New
York City right
now in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
These nurses went on strike.
You know why they went on strike?
Because they needed help to provide better patient care.
It wasn't even about money.
Right.
They're just saying, hey, I can't even be a nurse.
This is my calling in the world, and I can't even do it to a decent potential.
Exactly.
And it's tough enough.
We talked last time about patients being stressed to the gills, not only
dealing with
their physical ailments, but having to deal with the stress of begging for
insurance companies
to support, just all of that.
And now you're going to put the nurses under the same stress.
Exactly.
It's pathetic.
And I'm sure you know this, the CEOs there are these big, huge hustles.
One guy is making $26 million a year.
Another guy, I think, is making $16 million.
Another guy is making $5 million.
They're bringing in all these traveling nurses, spending hundreds of millions
of dollars rather
than sitting down and negotiating a decent contract with these dedicated nurses.
There they are.
You got them up there, huh?
Yep, and I'm grateful.
I want to just mention these wonderful CEOs by name today, just so, because
look, it's
time where we put a name with people who are making certain choices.
And so we have Brendan Carr.
That's, I know he's over at Mount Sinai.
Brian Donnelly, there he is.
Look at that big smile.
I'd be smiling too if I just made $15 million this year.
That's Philip O. Ozua, who looks like a guess who character.
And Stephen Corwin from Monopoly, I don't know, that's alleged.
These are the CEOs, current, and I think one is just leaving one of his posts,
who are,
these are who nurses are asking for help from.
Right.
Is that right?
And just to be clear, Bernie, what are the nurses asking for?
What they're asking for, what they call safe patient, nurse-patient ratios.
That means if you're a nurse on duty and you have too many patients to take
care of,
you can't do your job.
A patient calls out, needs your help, you can't get there.
So they want more staffing to be able to provide the quality care that patients
deserve.
And I know in addition to that, I think they were, they wanted healthcare
benefits not to be cut.
Right, for themselves, right?
Which is pretty, if you think that nurses, nurses can't get healthcare,
they can't be sure that they're going to have healthcare, they're working with
the sick.
We can't say, hey, we're going to do our best to make sure you don't get sick.
That's pretty crazy.
And the other thing they worry about, and I hope we can discuss this a little
bit, is AI and robotics.
They've raised that issue as well.
Have they really?
And there was Dr. Oz, who's head of CMS in Washington right now, was talking
the other day, let me get it straight.
I think it was Alabama, rural Alabama, where they're weak on the number of obstetricians
that they have.
And he was proudly talking about how they have robots now who are providing
examinations for pregnant women.
And who's controlling those robots?
It's not some pervert at his house, huh?
Well, but the point is, if you're a patient, do you really want a robot
examining you?
Right.
So, I mean, I think all of this, Theo, adds up to the fact, and I'll tell you,
I've been all over the country, and wherever I go I talk about this, whether
you're conservative, you're moderate, you're progressive, you understand the
healthcare system is broken today.
Yeah.
We are spending, this is insane, do you know how much we spend per capita, add
everything else, right, Medicaid, Medicare, what you pay out of your own pocket,
how much do we spend per person on healthcare in the United States of America,
do you know?
Take a wild and crazy guess.
Per year?
No, per person.
Oh.
Per person.
Okay.
$15,000 per person.
Okay.
So a family of four spends, theoretically, $60,000.
Oh, wow.
That is double what any other country on earth is spending.
You got it?
Yeah.
You would think that if we're spending, you know, if I buy a $100,000 car, you
buy a $50,000 car, my car should be a little bit better than your car, right?
And yet, despite all of those expenditures, our system is worse than others.
We're the only major country not to guarantee healthcare to all people.
But it's because there's these kind of darker agreements between hospitals and
insurance companies, right, and the cost of drugs.
Yeah, it has to do, essentially, look, in this day and age, running a
healthcare system is very difficult.
Technology changes.
It ain't easy.
I admit that.
But what is the goal of a rational healthcare system?
It is to say, first of all, to answer the fundamental question, is healthcare a
human right?
What do you think?
Should everybody, regardless of income, get healthcare?
I believe that based on how much money our country has, I think it's wrong not
to provide that to people because we waste it in so many other ways.
Okay.
Good point.
So the issue here is, why is the wealthiest nation on earth, the United States
of America, the only major country not to guarantee healthcare to all people?
Okay.
That, to me, is a fundamental issue.
So today, despite spending so much money, 85 million Americans are uninsured or
underinsured.
And if Trump gets his way and throws another 15 million people off of Medicaid,
raise that number to roughly 100 million.
Okay.
There are estimates out there that when you have that many people uninsured, no
insurance, and underinsured means high deductibles, right?
So if you've got a high deductible, you may be insured.
I've talked to people, I suspect you have, their deductibles, $10,000, $15,000
a year, right?
So if you don't have any money, what the hell, how do you go to the doctor?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you add all that together, people get sick, they can't go to the doctor,
some 50,000, 60,000 people die a year in America unnecessarily because they don't
get to a doctor on time.
That is pretty insane.
So in my view, I push very hard to introduce the legislation, what we call
Medicare for all, expanding Medicare to cover every man, woman, and child
without out-of-pocket expenses.
We could do that without spending, to your point, not a nickel more than we're
currently spending.
Yeah.
How can we get that move forward, though?
Why is this, why does this just continue to be this thing, you know?
Why does it continue to feel like nobody really wants to take care of us, you
know?
Oh.
Now you're getting into another issue.
Yeah.
All right.
You want to go there?
I mean, yeah, I think we can go to a couple of these places.
All right.
Let's do it.
All right.
Look, in one respect, the healthcare system is working extremely well.
Not for ordinary people, not for you, not for me.
It is working very well for the insurance companies who make zillions of
dollars in profit, the drug companies who charge us the highest prices in the
world for prescription drugs.
And that's the function of the current healthcare system.
Right.
Okay.
So, again, you know, running a healthcare system, whether it's in Canada,
Europe, wherever it is, it ain't easy.
And they all make mistakes.
They all have problems.
But if your goal is, if you and I sit down and say, okay, how do we provide a
healthcare to all people?
And how do we do it in a cost-effective way?
All right.
Will we come up with a perfect system?
No.
No.
No.
But that's our goal.
Right.
But if we sit here and say, okay, how can we charge the highest prices in the
world for prescription drugs and make $38 billion next year?
Yeah.
How can we deny people the insurance that they paid for, right?
The benefits that they pay for, that's a whole other scam.
And that's the scam we're working on.
Yeah.
It is an effort to make huge profits for the drug companies and the insurance
companies.
And that's why we've got to end this broken system.
