I had a day off from work on Monday (as I do most Mondays), so I had both the time and energy to create a podcast. As always, be assured that these podcasts will not replace our usual written content. They are in addition to it, not instead of it. Also, if you like these podcasts, please share them, as we are trying to move into the third decade of the 21st century.

Today’s topics are tariffs, and why Trump’s tariffs are good, not bad; the divisions (perhaps good ones) that come from our siloed media world; and the reason that medical costs are so high and—sorry—will never go down.

You can also watch the video on YouTube or listen to it on Libsyn and Apple Podcasts.

UPDATE: Once again, my kind and generous friend has provided a transcript.

American Thinker Takeaways 11-17-25

ANDREA: Hello, everybody. This is Andrea. I have hopes for this podcast. I don’t know if they’ll be that fulfilled. It’s been aborted three times now because of technical problems and phone calls that I absolutely had to answer. Keeping my fingers crossed. We’re going to dive right in and the topic I start with is tariffs.

The reason I’ve been thinking about tariffs is because I was listening to Ben Shapiro. I like Ben Shapiro. I try to listen to him as often as possible. He is intelligent, informed, interesting, and I share his political and cultural values. Where we part ways is on tariffs. He thinks tariffs are a terrible idea. In a perfect world, he’s correct because barriers to trade are a bad idea. The free flow of goods and services is what enriches humankind and creates wealth. However, we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where America has become a dumping ground for other people’s products while… well, other countries’ products while those same countries put up high barriers to access. Obviously, the most obvious and problematic one is China, and that is why President Trump has been fighting a tariff war against China, but the whole world has been treating us like a dumping ground for their products. So we haven’t had free trade, we’ve had inequitable trade.

When it comes to China, the trade imbalance has been also a form of warfare. It goes with the way China has been dumping drugs into our country. China has been spying on our technology and stealing our technology. China has seemed to engage in low-level warfare. So, in terms of Trump, the thing about… I’m sorry, I lost my train of thought there, doodle-loodle-loo… the thing about tariffs is that they are a bloodless weapon of war. You can go to war with China, which is seeking to dominate the world. It is the world’s largest manufacturer. It’s got the biggest trade in the world and everybody’s buying from China. Trump is choosing to do it via tariffs, not via weapons. So that’s a good thing.

The other thing about Trump doing tariffs is that he is using the threat of tariffs against manufacturers to bring manufacturing back to America. America used to be the manufacturing hub of the world. After World War II it was the last country standing, which was a great advantage. It was the last country standing that wasn’t a Third World country or a backwards country or a communist country. But, starting in the ‘90s, we let other countries, especially China and India have our medicines, all of our computer technology, our drone technology, our military technology, our telecommunications technology, everything. And also just domestic stuff. Every single thing I buy for my house whether or not I want it to be domestic or foreign is inevitably foreign. The best I can do is insulate myself against giving China money by trying to buy things that are made in Vietnam or Malaysia or something. But everything we buy is cheap Chinese goods. And Trump is trying very hard not to reward this manufacturing sector or that manufacturing sector through tariffs, but simply to bring business home to America, both essential businesses like medicine, like computer technology, like drone technology, but also the stuff that is the fabric of daily life because he’s trying to re-invigorate manufacturing in America. We have to be able to be a self-sustaining country. It’s fine to get frivolities from abroad. It’s fine to get more stuff from abroad. It’s terribly dangerous if everything- everything- on which our world relies comes from not just abroad, but from countries that view themselves as our geo-political enemies.

Finally, I want to talk about the Smoot-Hawley act. This is really important because when people say tariffs are incredibly bad and they’ll destroy the economy, they’re pointing to Smoot-Hawley which was one of the things that helped plunge America into the absolute disastrous Great Depression. When things started going flipsy-whopsy at the end of the ‘20s, Congress thought it could bring more money in by imposing tariffs and it turned out to be a terrible mistake. In fact, it wasn’t the tariffs that destroyed the economy. In fact, there were other financial decisions that were even worse that triggered massive bank sell-offs and collapses and everything. But Smoot-Hawley, it smells bad.

[buzzing noise]

ANDREA: It’s always something. That’s my notice that my dog… yes, Mister Max. My dog needs his dinner. [dog barks] Yes, Mister Max. He’s on a very strict schedule because of his diabetes. I’m pausing. I’ll be back.

[click]

ANDREA: I’m back. The dog is fed. I refuse to be deterred by the endless obstacles in my path. Anyway, what I was going to say is Smoot-Hawley has a very bad rap and a deservedly bad rap but it is not the situation we are facing today. I have an article from back in April by Van Mobley at The Federalist and it’s entitled “Why Comparing Trump’s Tariffs To The Smoot-Hawley Act Is Dishonest”. And it’s so good I want to read a fair amount of it to you.

“Trump’s tariffs are not designed to encourage Americans to borrow money and maximize their consumption. Nor are they designed to encourage participation in speculative stock market or real estate bubbles. America’s free trade policies encouraged such excesses after the end of the Cold War, and we can’t stand a repeat of the folly. While his critics wrongly invoke the Smoot-Hawley tariff failures of 1930, Trump’s emerging tariff policies, particularly if combined with the appropriate monetary policy, will have much better results and Make America Great Again.

“As Trump’s tariffs are implemented, they will generate revenue for the federal government and encourage investment in atrophied as well as cutting-edge sectors of the American economy. In addition, they will increase the quantity and quality of jobs available for Americans as a whole, will persuade (and are already persuading) our trading partners to adopt fairer and less predatory trading regimes, will arrest a possible slide into recession, and will get our economy moving toward our long-term growth potential of 3 percent (or more) GDP growth per year.”

At this point, I’m going to skip a paragraph and get back to reading, but before I do, I want to say that his predictions have come true, for the most part. Despite Democrat machinations. So, there was a dot dot dot, now I’m back to reading.

“One of the few instances when tariffs failed was during the Smoot-Hawley tariff episode at the beginning of the Great Depression. But there are special circumstances surrounding the imposition of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that the free-traders hesitate to mention. When the United States raised the Smooth-Hawley tariffs, the U.S. was the world’s greatest creditor, and by raising the tariffs, we prevented others from selling us things so they could make money and pay us back. When they didn’t pay us back, it collapsed the global financial system and helped usher in the Great Depression.

“Obviously, today the circumstances are reversed. The United States is now the world’s largest debtor. If we can’t pay back our debts, the global financial system will collapse, which would be disastrous for the entire world.

“Trump’s tariff medicine will put us on a diet, help us produce more, diminish inflation, and position us to manage and decrease our debt. Thus, Trump’s tariffs are not only good for Americans, but they are also good for everybody else across the world. While the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were bad, Trump’s tariffs are good because the relative financial position of the U.S. vis-à-vis the rest of the world is now reversed. This fact must not be overlooked when assessing the wisdom of Trump’s tariffs versus the folly of Smoot-Hawley.”

And one other thing about the tariffs is that they are forcing a new look at the stock market. I have money in the stock market. It benefits me that the stock market is so high. My retirement funds are sitting there. My savings are sitting there. But it’s obviously bubbled like crazy. Because all throughout the Biden presidency, as was true during the Obama presidency, because the fiscal policies were so whack-a-doodle, rich people parked their money in the market. They weren’t using the market to build things, to grow things, to innovate things, to support things. They were just using money to make money. So the stock market is grossly inflated. And of course there’s also the AI bubble which is coming due. So I do expect a substantial drop in the stock market. Do I think it will create a Great Depression? No. I think we’re about to see some 2008 problems and that’s really bad for Trump. He’s got to yank it back because if the economy is not solid by next November, Democrats will take the House and many, many bad things will happen.

Part of why many bad things happen is because of the media. But I was thinking the other day, when I was growing up, yes, there were the 1960s, the 1968s was a very wild and violent decade. I was a little girl in the 1960s. I still remember the hippies being digusting. I… my very first memories of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and seeing grown-ups cry that was, too… I was two and a half, that was very upsetting. And then my memories pick up with Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, Martin Luther King’s assassination. There was a big bombing two miles from my house in… I lived in the Golden Gate Heights in the hills above the Sunset District. There was a bombing at a bank, I think it was, or a police station. Maybe a police station about two miles from my house. So, I was aware of all of this. Having said that, on the whole, America was more cohesive. And I was thinking about that, it was because we all watched the same news. We all had the same narrative. There were people who distrusted it, people who had different values, people who came from different parts of the country. But there was a cohesion. Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. We were a very unified country because we got all of our news from the same place. And I was thinking of that because I am anxious to see the BBC collapse.

The BBC is an utterly, un-utterably foul organization that was once enormously trusted. What could be more trusted than the British Broadcasting Corporation? Well, it was Jimmy Saville, they knew about it, they hid it. The Muslim rape gangs, they knew about it, they hid it. There was a story in the British media today about how Martin Basheer in the 1995 interview that Princess Di gave to him basically blew up the British monarchy. Apparently, he forged- and I’m being careful what I say here, because I may not understand the story, but it seems that he forged certain bank documents to gain entrée to her world so he could do the interview, and then he told her stories about Prince Charles that… when she said that there were three of us in the marriage, everybody assumed she meant Camilla, but in fact it was another woman, it wasn’t true, so there’s a whole bunch of sordid stuff there. BBC knew about it. The BBC, of course, did the editing of President Trump’s speech on January 6 to make it sound as if he were advocating violence against the capital. That was completely fraudulent. The BBC is claiming it was accidental. Well, okay. Me, personally? I’m not naming names because I don’t have names to name, but I kind of doubt it. So the BBC was a monolith that smoothed out British culture, pushing it harder and harder to the Left, covering the sins of its favorite people, whether it was Jimmy Saville or the Muslim rape gangs or the deaths in NHS hospitals. Utterly corrupt institution. But it created social cohesion because everybody knew the same story.

Today, America is very divisive. And I’m aware of the silo-ism because I do not post on social media anymore. People are interested in following- friending me on Facebook. I’ll usually accept, but I don’t post on Facebook anymore. I go to Facebook to see what people say, especially my high school classmates. Because many of them never left the 1960s and ‘70s ethos behind. They’re hard-Left. Many of them are gay, because I grew up in San Francisco. And I like seeing what they post. And they live in a completely different factual world from the rest of us. Especially one woman who gets all her stuff from Occupy Democrats, which does things like say, “Well, it’s true that the Democrat party deliberately hid the fact that it was Virginia Giuffre who spend time in her room with Trump. And Trump has… she has said he never did anything to her and she doesn’t know of him having done anything to anybody else, but he still could have done something to someone,” and she lives in this deranged world of absolute Trump madness, but on the other side I see people posting things, saying that Ashley Biden said that her father sexually molested her. She did not. What he said, what she wrote in her diary was that he took showers with him, which she believes now were inappropriate and that she has this vague feeling that she had been sexually molested or assaulted as a child. Didn’t name Biden as the person who did it. The whole diary, though, has an icky vibe of a child who grew up in an inappropriately sexualized household. She talks about hearing Biden and her mother Jill having sex. Just unpleasant, creepy things. So… but she didn’t say he sexually assaulted her. So we live in these silos now, where people no longer have the coherence of network news which sang the same song, even though it was dishonest. But we fight over things on the remnants of talk radio, which is now on the Internet, cable news, X, Facebook, TikTok, blog sites like Daily Wire or our own American Thinker, and it’s created a tremendously divisive society because sometimes all the facts correct, but we’re listening to different facts and sometimes, people are listening to actual lies. I don’t see a solution for this, frankly. I don’t want to go back to the BBC and the network news massaging America with lies. But I had hoped that the weight of the Internet would create a greater truth; a crucible, like a jury box where twelve men, good and true, each massaging, you know, going over there, the facts they understood from the trial, arrive at a greater truth and so far we have not achieved that, but I have hope. I think it will happen.

The last thing I want to discuss is medical costs. And it’s a big topic. It’s a hot topic again, because the misbegotten Obamacare is running out of money, as was inevitable. Naïve people thought it really would work as the Democrats promised, then the smart people on the Democrat side of the aisle intended it to be a Cloward-Piven project, which would break the system and lead inevitably to the glories of socialized medicine. I’ll start off by saying that there is no way I can envision ever getting truly affordable medical care in America. I’ll work my way up to it. First of all, Obamacare is part of why medical care is so expensive, because the government has been pumping money into it, especially since COVID. Whenever you pump money into something, it becomes more expensive. So it is a form of micro-inflation. So, macro-inflation is when the government just prints money wholesale and the whole economy explodes because none of the economy’s actual value has increased. There’s no increase in production or anything. There’s simply more money flowing around. So the candy bar that once cost a dollar is now going to cost two dollars or three dollars or four dollars simply to absorb the money. Eventually, products will always reflect the fact that there’s more money floating around and it will be allocated according to the products that exist. So, if there were once 100 dollar bills floating around, they would be allocated appropriately to X number of products. If they’re going to be 1,000 or 10,000 or ten million dollars floating around, and there are no more products, then those products will simply increase in price. Meanwhile, your savings will become less… have less and less buying power. There’s your inflation. But when you pump money into a specific area, when the government keeps giving money to a specific area, ostensibly to help people buy things, what happens is that area becomes more expensive. And it becomes more profligate. In the area of education, colleges and universities, the government kept giving more and more free money and more student loans, more grants, more funding, more whatever. Colleges became infinitely more expensive, but they also became more profligate. So while the teacher to student ratio at most colleges didn’t change, the number of non-faculty administrators increased by something like 500 percent. There’s all your DEI-this and your assistant provost of that and your secretary to the secretary of that, and all the gender studies and queer studies and womyn’s studies, spelled with a “y” of course. That all is because there was free money floating around. And, of course, taxpayers paid at the government end, so they got taxed more, and those actually paying cash for education, parents, paid higher tuition and those getting loans instead of getting a degree for $20,000 ended up spending $200,000 for a much less valuable degree. So government money has made medical care in America more expensive.

Another thing that’s made government… care more expensive is how the insurance companies and the government compensate. Open free market: I charge you, A, what I think you’ll be willing to pay, and in the case of the government and the insurance companies, it’s not very much, frankly. But, in theory, if it’s a free market, open-arms transaction, my costs are ten dollars and I’d like to make a ten dollar profit, so I’ll charge you twenty dollars. You have twelve dollars. So, you understand that I have costs to cover but you want my profit to be limited to two dollars. At this point, there could be a bargaining, where we agree on fifteen dollars or something. Or if there’s competition, I can go to another provider. Medical care is always going to be a little more complicated because you need highly trained people and because there are times when there emergencies where you are not able to engage in an arms-length transaction. So, you have perhaps a limited supply and you have moments where there’s no negotiation. But what happens because of insurance and the way our insurance system is currently set up and the way the government operates, is that they, as a matter of routine, simply pay ten to fifty cents on the dollar. So, we’ll go back to “the doctor has ten dollars in costs and wants a ten dollar profit”. He’ll submit a twenty dollar bill to the insurance company and one or the other will say “We will pay you five dollars”. Well, the five dollars not only deprives him of a profit, but it doesn’t even cover his costs. So if he’s going to get money on his costs, he has to raise the cost of everything. Since he got paid only a quarter of what he wanted, if he wants to get twenty dollars, he has to charge eighty. So right away the prices go up, but he’s getting the same money. But the costs have increased. Suddenly they’re eighty dollars for care that was once twenty dollars. And it goes up and up and up that way. As they keep charging more, the insurance companies and the government keep trying to pay smaller percentages and it becomes crazy. Bills are meaningless. So patients will get bills that say their day in the hospital was $50,000. That bears no relationship whatsoever to the costs of goods and services plus profit. That is simply the way that hospitals and other care providers are trying to align themselves so that the government and the insurance companies pay them enough for costs and profits.

The problem is twofold. One, we no longer have insurance. It’s called “insurance” but it’s not insurance. Real insurance is for emergencies. That’s how it developed back in the 18^th century with mercantilism and the beginnings of capitalism where insurers would say, “Well, I think across this pool of fifty merchant shippers, there’s a chance that twenty of them or ten of them will be lost at sea. If all of you merchant shippers pitch in a bit of money periodically, something our actuaries will figure out on an annualized basis, all that money in a pot, maybe there’ll be more than ten or fifteen shipwrecks and maybe they’ll be fewer. We’re gambling we’ll make a profit because there’ll be fewer shipwrecks. You’re gambling that by paying that amount, if something terrible happens to you specifically, the pool of money that we hold will compensate you. It’s always been a gamble, but the basic nature of insurance always has been, and was when I was growing up, that it would cover emergencies. Things that were unexpected contingencies and you were expected to be responsible for the rest. Kaiser came up with something different, and it was an enclosed system, which is why it worked and why it still I think works pretty well. Henry J. Kaiser had a steel company. He concluded that having a healthy workforce, because a lot of it was special to work, he didn’t want to just keep replacing employees, that having a healthy workforce was a benefit to him. It was a cost savings. So he set up on the site of his facilities medical clinics where employees as part of their compensation could get medical care. And we’ll talk about the nature of that medical care in a few moments because that’s really the nub of where I’m going. In any event, Kaiser eventually grew. It was the original HMO. But it is a completely coherent enclosed system, which is what makes it so great. I’ve been a Kaiser system patient since 1991. I adore it. Currently I travel five and a half hours to get my Kaiser care. Once I get Medicare and the government starts taking over my payments, even though it’s not cost-effective for the government or for the taxpayer, I’m going to get care locally. Much as I love Kaiser, five and a half hours for medical care is kind of silly. But that is another story. But the way Kaiser works is that because Kaiser is closed, it owns all the systems. It owns the blood labs. It owns everything. So it’s not worried… it’s not another third party making a profit. It’s just part of the cost of the overall system. So Kaiser continues to operate on the premise that keeping people healthy brings all costs down within the enclosed system. A very good system, but again, even it’s been affected by outside factors. Other insurance companies, though, weren’t set up that way. But thanks to Obamacare especially, and the theory that healthy people make for cheaper insurance, what has happened with health care is instead of health care now existing, health insurance existing to provide emergency services, catastrophic things, appendicitis in your six-year-old, the broken bone, it’s simply cost-shifting. Well, they’re not set up for that. So what they do now instead of my paying say, $100 a month, especially if I’m young and have no health problems, $100 a month so that if I break a bone, as my son did, then the health insurer covers it. What happens now is health insurance companies are charging $10-15,000 a year with huge deductibles and then they promise to cover everything. Oh, plus all your prescription meds. But if you’re paying $10,000 a year and a $5,000 deductible, they’re not really covering anything at all. It’s just made it so that instead of you paying a small amount and then bearing the risk of an emergency, you now pay inordinate amounts for medical care you may never use. It’s shifted to the middle class payer, the cost of essentially self-insurance. But medical care is so expensive that middle class people who have homes they cherish, savings, kids and college, would rather pay $10,000 a year to an insurance company than really self-insure because they know that if there’s a catastrophe, they won’t be charged $200,000 or $50,000. They’ll be charged $2 million. So the whole cost structure is completely out of whack.

But wait, there’s more. There’s also the fact which I knew right away when Obamacare started being talked about that a lot of people don’t want insurance. I have a friend who has never been on welfare, but she lives in a world of… she made a life choice, life choices that left her in a world where most of her acquaintances are people who are heavy drug users. Some of them are ex-cons. They have abuse problems. They have all sorts of issues. And what I knew right away was that Obamacare was intended for… it was on the premise that every person in America would be willing to cough up money to have middle class health care. And what I understood all along I that there are a lot of people who don’t want to cough up money. They want an existence where they do minimal work, have basic shelter, get food for free, for SNAP, through food banks, whatever. They work intermittently. And they want drugs. And this was a group of people, and I know because my friend told me, that when they were told that they would get full-coverage, premium, gold-standard middle class health care for $50 a month, said “Are you out of your ever-loving mind? I can go to the emergency room and get it for free.” And that’s exactly what they did, driving up hospital costs more. Because if you have a huge class of people who continue not to want insurance, who are going to ERs for their colds, for their splinters, for their headaches, often going for their drug-seeking behavior and then they’re augmented by 15-20 million illegal aliens who also can’t be turned away at the emergency room, whoo boy! Those costs are going to go up. It’s going to get very expensive.

What we also have in America are lifestyle choices. And I’m going to transition from here to Europe because one of the things we’ve always heard is that Americans have much poorer health outcomes than they do in Europe. For decades, Europe had homogenous populations that had developed over the years very healthy lifestyles. They walked more. They ate less processed food. Everybody knew about the French women who never technically dieted but always had those svelte, soigné figures, lived healthier lifestyles. They also had, which always helps, more straightforward genetic lineage. They weren’t having Tay-Sachs disease. They weren’t having sickle-cell anemia. One of the things that became very clear with the whole SNAP thing is people started uploading onto TikTok the videos of their shopping carts, what they bought despite SNAP or before SNAP or now that SNAP’s back. There’s a huge cohort of people who live on garbage. Processed food. Fatty food. Junky food. Food deserts arise in part because there are communities where crime is rampant because leftist prosecutors won’t do anything about crime. But they also arise because supply and demand. They exist in communities where people don’t want to buy healthy food. They want to buy, as a picture I have on the screen shows, Lay’s potato chips and crackers and King’s Hawaiian rolls- which are delicious and incredibly bad for you and I adore them and never put them in front of me- and cheese and cracker crunchies and super salty fatty hot dogs. That’s all in one cart that someone bought with SNAP. When you have people who don’t exercise enough and who eat diets that are just a dead certainty for morbid obesity, diabetes, heart disease and kidney failure, well, that’s going to drive up costs, too. And there’s no incentive for them to change because they go to the ER and get free medical care. And again, they’re not middle class. Middle class people want to live to be 110 and see their great-grandchildren and go jogging in their cute little jogging suits in their nice neighborhoods. Different people have different values and different cultures have different expectations about lifestyle and food.

Gets me to Europe. I grew up in a European household. My parents were both from Europe. All their friends had European origins. They had visitor from Europe all the time. And what I always heard about was the fantastic cradle-to-grave health care of Europe’s so wonderful, Europe’s socialized medicine, Europe blah-blah-blah. It was only when I got older that I realized that Europe was so wonderful because America was paying for it. During the Pax Americana, after World War II when Europe was struggling, and then also as part of the Cold War, that whole NATO thing, America paid Europe all of Europe’s defense costs. Well, if someone is paying your defense costs, you don’t need to use that money for bullets. You can use it for hospital beds. So for a long time, yeah, Europe had great cradle-to-grave health care. It was wonderful and it was fantastic. We paid for it. They didn’t want to hear that from me. So it wasn’t socialized medicine. Or it was socialized only to the extent that someone else was paying for it. If you wanted real socialized medicine, you went to Cuba or the Soviet Union where people had to bring their own bedding to the hospital and had to have a relative there to care for them because there was no medical staff and they were in wards of twenty people and they got medieval health care. Unless they were among the elite, in which case they boasted about how fantastic their socialized medicine was.

The other thing about socialized medicine again, is a matter of supply and demand. If the government is barely paying doctors, people don’t want to become doctors. There’s nothing in it for them. And if everybody can get health care and there’s no cost to them and the system isn’t making money, the system breaks down. I made a cartoon on the screen that shows a man sitting in a room; a doctor’s office in England and it’s obviously half-filled with recent immigrants who haven’t paid into the system and there’s an old man in a wheelchair and the cheerful receptionist… I think the AI made the receptionist more cheerful than I would have, said “I was able to schedule your hip replacement for just one year from today”. That’s actually based on a true story. I did my junior year abroad in England in 1981-82. That was still- that was during Thatcher’s years and I was too stupid to appreciate what Margaret Thatcher was trying to do. Also what Ronald Reagan was trying to do. I was still a Democrat then. My dad… by that time, my dad had his new hip for seven years. He got it in 1974 when his old hip, a product of malnutrition from being raised in an orphanage, a Jewish orphanage in Nazi Germany, and then hard labor in a kibbutz, starting a kibbutz, and then hard labor during World War II. His bones were shot. He could barely move. Hip replacements were a thing and he got one something like three weeks, he was scheduled for surgery after it was diagnosed. It wasn’t very successful because the surgery was in its infancy. Now it’s amazing what they do. But anyway, he got that replacement immediately. My friend, her mother was a lovely lady. Very old-fashioned British lady. Just lovely, lovely lady. And she was already complaining about her hip then. She was scheduled for a sugery. The surgery was scheduled for a year out. They kept changing it. She died a few years later never having had the surgery. That’s how rationing works in socialized medicine. There’s always going to be rationing. Socialized medicine has no innovation and no profit incentive to do anything better or differently. So if you have a bad hip, you die in your wheelchair. And if you have a huge influx of millions of people who haven’t paid into a system that was intended for people who had paid into it, to get their stuff back, and was also set up at a time where people lived to be about 58 so much people weren’t old and getting medical care, socialized medicine worked.

Another problem with socialized medicine is that when you have people who have much longer life spans than it was instituted, and when the government is running out of money, eventually you stop providing care. In England, they had the Liverpool care pathway when patients over 75, they starved and dehydrated them to death. In Canada, they have medically assisted suicides. And I have on the screen a chart showing that when they first implemented it in 2016, there were a thousand medically assisted suicides that year. By 2022, and this is an older chart, it was projected to be 13,500. I forget what the number is now, but is it the fifth major cause of death in Canada? Because the system has no incentives to do better, to do cheaper, to treat more people because it’s socialized medicine. They’re simply telling people to off themselves, but they promise it’ll be comfortable, it’ll be painless, it’ll be loving, you’ll be happy. You’ll die. They’ve expanded it to depressed people, to people who can’t get their wheelchairs. They’re now trying to push it to minors. Minors who really understand what death is. Because every 12-year-old understands death. That’s inevitable with socialized medicine. Eventually, you run out of money. And you run out of incentive and you’ve still got the patients.

But I want to get to the real point which is why medicine will never be cheap again. When England’s socialized National Health Service came into being after World War II, the exciting new medicine, the cure-all, was penicillin, which did an enormous… was able to do an enormous number of things that had never been treated before. There was basic surgery for things like appendicitis and broken bones and stuff like that. But mostly, medicine was… oh, and there were x-rays. Medicine was what it had always been. The doctor showed up at your house or you went to his clinic and he had his little black bag and he listened to your heart and he had a scalpel and he had a few bottles of pills, including that amazing penicillin. But there was not that much medicine. And most people died in their fifties anyway, maybe their sixties. Expectations were very low because the product was very low.

Fast forward to the modern era. Medicine is un-friggin’-believable now. Nuclear medicine, chemotherapy, radiation, MRI. Dialysis. Unbelievable surgery where they replace hearts and lungs and kidneys and livers. Medicines that do everything, a lot of it very scary and incidentally, apropos Europe, we’ve been subsidizing that because European countries are doing bulk-buying because they buy so much and any costs that the pharmacy or the pharmaceutical companies lose, they make on a profit by charging more in America, where we essentially pay cash. Medicine simply isn’t what it used to be. Unless you want to go back to the doctor with his black bag, his few bottles of pills and his scalpel, and his primitive x-ray machine in the office that would show if you had a broken bone in your foot, you cannot turn back time. And so much of this equipment, this huge infrastructure equipment, the nuclear medicine, the dialysis machines, the MRI, the heart… the things that measure your heart and everything. Again, there’s no way to unscramble that egg. I suspect that even if the marketplace forces are allowed to return to medicine, you simply can’t go back from how complicated and scientific and expensive it is. And again, that’s one of the reasons American medicine is more expensive because what you discover is lies, damn lies and statistics, when people point out how great European health care is, very different kind of health care. People have access but they get less care. It’s less scientific. It is more palliative care, which may work in any number of cases. A lot of the care we get is driven by doctors being afraid of malpractice insurance, so we get a lot of over-treatment, not necessary treatment. There’s definitely less of that in Europe. But our care is simply more sophisticated, and again, our population is infinitely more diverse and has many poorer lifestyle choices. And we’re also getting a huge influx of people who come from countries where they come in with bizarre diseases because we’re seeing the measles outbreaks and the tuberculosis outbreaks and people suddenly having diphtheria and whooping cough. That’s coming because of unvetted people over the border. I would be very interested in seeing whether Europe’s lifespan and vaunted medical treatments are doing as well since they’ve opened their borders and I actually haven’t seen any studies on that. All of which is to say, everybody wants cheaper medicine. There are myriad factors why we’re not getting cheaper medicine. It’s not all the fault of the insurance companies, no matter how much the Left likes to say that. Insurance companies have changed their business model but both because they were forced by the marketplace and the government. In many ways they are doing the best they can in a completely unstable and abnormal marketplace. There are no incentives for compensation. There are a bazillion people who have different expectations for medicine and want just whatever care they can get for free that gets passed on to us. And ultimately, medicine is different than it was ever been in the history of humankind. And if they can roll back the prices, great. I don’t see that happening any time soon.

With that, I have reached the end of this podcast. As always, I greatly appreciate your listening. If you like the podcast, please share it on social medias, emails, talking to friends. We are trying to bring American Thinker into the third decade of the 21^st century. That does not mean it will all be podcasts. We will always be a written-word site. Don’t worry. Podcasts are in addition to, not instead, of our existing content. But it is the third decade of the 21^st century and we do have to move with the times. And speaking of which, expect big and wonderful changes in the look of American Thinker. It will not change your content. You will recognize it. You will find it easier to navigate. And for those of you who hate the plethora of very necessary ads, we can’t function with them unless everyone becomes a subscriber, the ads will still be there. And we… feel free to visit our advertisers, but they won’t be as intrusive on your reading experience. So thank you very much again for listening and I’ll be back whenever I have the energy and the time to come back again.