Name: Theo Asks Donald Trump About Healthcare Reform, Big Pharma and Opioids
Uploaded: 2024-08-26T13:00:21.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo Asks Donald Trump About Healthcare Reform, Big Pharma and Opioids' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo Asks Donald Trump About Healthcare Reform, Big Pharma and Opioids' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-26. Transcript available.

One thing that you did, recently we had Bernie Sanders on, and I know, that's
very interesting.
Certainly, you guys don't agree on a lot of things, but I think you both
acknowledge how horribly rigged the health care system is against the American
people.
Because hospitals and insurance companies get away with hiding their prices
from all of us, and literally they can charge whatever they want.
You know, it's like you sign up and say, yes, I'll pay.
You trust the hospital, but then you get home and the bill is, it's whatever,
you know?
Which pretty much feels like some form of extortion to me.
That's what it seems like to me.
It's a form.
But you had an executive order where you created a federal rule forcing
hospitals and insurers to publish all their prices.
Yep.
Right?
So that people would be able to know, okay, if an MRI costs $600 here and it's
$5,000 there, then I can go here and save myself money.
But that hasn't even been enforced.
Like, hospitals.
Biden, Biden got away with it.
Hospitals and insurance companies, they're not in, they're still not showing
their prices.
They hated it.
Of course they did.
And because it would, would have made it very competitive.
And Biden let it go.
He didn't, he never enforced it.
And to get that approved was a big deal.
And that would have brought down the price of, of, you know, so many things,
not only, you know, just care, right?
Care, physical care, mental care.
That would have brought down the cost of care by 50, 60%.
And Biden and Kamala didn't press it.
It was a big thing to get it.
But I'll be pressing it.
And because I'll be pressing it.
Yeah.
And because I'll be pressing it, there are some people that are vehemently
against it for financial reasons.
You know, for money reasons.
Those people can go to hell, dude.
That's insane.
Yeah, no, they, they're bad people.
Especially because one of the leading causes of bankruptcy in America is
medical debt.
I mean, it's, that's crazy.
And I don't even think I made that up either.
No, it's, when you think of it, at first when you said it, I said, wow.
And then I'm thinking about it, I'm saying, it's really not a wow.
It's, I understand it.
Yeah.
Tremendous lobby, tremendous, powerful lobby.
Well, yeah, because, I mean, think about what else is going to put you in
medical,
like in that much of a debt, it's like, I think that's, I believe that that's
accurate.
Who's behind, who's behind the healthcare insurance, that whole thing?
Like who's behind it all?
It feels like Chuck Schumer is this kind of like deviant mastermind back there
somewhere.
Well, he's one of the people that has hurt and he's one of the people that
keeps the prices high.
And he's, you know, gets a lot of contributions from the people on the other
side.
Yeah.
And him and plenty of other people, a lot of people.
It's a very powerful lobby.
But wouldn't they want people?
You know the most powerful lobby?
The lawyer lobby.
That's, that's the point.
And that feeds into that also.
You know, it all feeds into it.
Wait, hold on.
Just so I understand, Donald.
Sorry.
So that, that lobby is a very powerful one.
Yeah.
But why do those people want people to suffer though?
Just so they can make money?
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
It really has to do with money.
That's crazy.
How much money do they need?
They probably start off by saying this is terrible.
And then they eventually say, well.
But can we just as a country say, hey, how much?
Okay.
You need $3 million.
We'll give you that.
Fuck off.
Yeah.
We want to be healthy.
Yeah.
Like, can't we make a deal with those people?
They're very tough to deal with.
And they've been taken care of by drug companies and others for years.
You know, you have politicians that have been for years being taken care of by
people that
make a lot of money and they want to keep making a lot of money.
And it is, I mean, in that case, it's not a power thing.
It's a money thing.
Yeah.
A lot of money.
And it actually takes me into something else I wanted to talk about.
Like alcohol, alcoholism and addiction is something that's really ramped up.
Even like you're saying, like in the past 20, 30 years in our country, right?
And during the opioid epidemic, they estimate that like almost 600,000 people
died.
Yeah.
And that doesn't even include the broken hearts and the deaths of families and
circles of trust.
All, you know, just people that lost a brother.
It doesn't even include the actual siblings, you know?
And so the ripple effect of that is huge.
And there's that Sackler family that pretty much got away with it.
You know, they had a financial slap on the wrist, but, uh, we're one of the
only countries
that allows, um, drug advertisements and farm pharmaceutical companies to
advertise on television.
Like, what do you think is, are things that you can do, um, to help curtail
that when you
get into office?
So, well, we did a great job.
We had, does that make sense or not?
Yes, it does make sense.
And we had, uh, committees, blue ribbon committees in certain cases, but
committees that would
meet, uh, the big problem we have is, you know, fentanyl is probably the
biggest opioid
is bad.
Opioid is bad too.
Yeah.
I think that's bad because everyone thinks, you know, in many cases they think
they're
going to do away with pain and literally the time is so short.
If you take it for like two weeks, you're almost addicted to it.
It's incredible when you, oh, well the whole, yeah, all of that is horrible.
Which is a bigger problem in our country, would you say?
Opioids.
Bigger than alcohol.
Oh, for sure.
I think it's, that's one of the biggest problems.
And compare that to fentanyl?
Oh yeah.
Well, that's the problem is people are making fake opioids because they can't
afford real
wins or they're just getting them off the street and then they put fentanyl in
them.
Yeah.
Um, fentanyl's like laced into everything now.
It's horrible.
It's horrible.
Yeah.
They found something in a baby rattle somewhere.
I think, I don't even know where that was.
Um, but one of the things I was wanting to ask you about was like, so there's,
like the big pharma lobbyists, like there's 1800, uh, big pharma lobbyists in
Washington,
D.C.
Right.
There's only 535 total, uh, representatives or senators total.
So just the fact that there's this whole other almost drug government that's
there kind of
pushing the, you know, pushing agendas and influencing things.
Like, how do we stop that?
Man, it just seems like it's obviously killing people.
Like people are dying.
You know, it's like, what do we have to do that our own government won't help
us?
Well, you have to stop listening to lobbyists.
You know, I was not a big person for lobbyists.
And if they have even a little access to like a president or a senator or a
congressman or
woman, uh, they get a lot of money.
Yeah.
And in some cases they just take the money.
They don't do anything.
But, uh, you have a lot of lobbyists in Washington pushing.
And certainly a lot for the, for all of the things that we're talking about,
including alcohol.
The lobbyists are winning it.
Yeah.
They're winning.
They're making a lot of money.
Absolutely.
Can you stop that?
Can, can a president stop that?
Like, how do we stop that?
Well, one way you could stop it is to say, if you're going to go into
government, you can
never be a lobbyist.
Uh, in many cases, they have rules and regulations where you can't do it for
four years, three
years, five years, whatever.
You mean be a lobbyist after you were an elected official?
I mean, you could say, you could say that you, if you're an elected official,
or if you
work in government, you can never be a lobbyist.
You have people that work in government and they give out contracts to the
military and
then they leave and they work for them, for the people that they're giving out
contracts
to.
That's exactly what happened with the Sackler family, with the drug companies.
They hired people that were on the FDA to work for them so they could loophole
the laws
or, you know, but can we outlaw lobbyists or we can't do that?
Well, there's a whole constitutional thing there.
I mean, can you make somebody never, ever go into the business if you're, if
you work
for government and especially if you're giving out contracts, in other words,
you're a powerful
person within some industry, the Navy, the army, any, you know, anything, it
could be military
procurement, etc.
There's a whole thing like, there's a whole question as to, you give out a
contract and
then all of a sudden you're working for the person you gave out the contract to
or the
company that you gave out the contract to.
Right.
It's like you're playing both sides in the net.
Well, it's, and it's obviously a problem and it's a big problem and we were
doing things
about it, but then we had to get down to other businesses.
We had to solve some, we had a lot of problems.
We had to deal with this, yeah.