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Welcome in Wednesday Edition Clay Travis Buck Sexton Show. I hope all of you are having fabulous weeks so far. We are here hopefully to make that a bit better than it otherwise would be. The government is shut down. What is the impact we will discuss. Buck is not shut down, but he is in Taiwan right now and he is continuing to to travel around over there. He'll be back Monday on the program, just FYI. So you have got me as you have on Monday and Tuesday, solo. For the rest of this week we will take your calls, we will take your talk backs. We will dive into a variety of different pertinent subjects. We're going to be joined by Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett. He was listening to our discussion about why congressional stock trading is is not banned and he has some strong thoughts on that. I'm sure. We'll talk about the shutdown as well. And then at 2 o' clock our friend Tutor Dixon, I just saw her last week speaking when I was speaking up in Michigan. She will join us. She's part of the Clay and Buck Podcast network. We had a really good time hanging out up at Mackinac island where the Michigan Republican Party was having their by annual event at the Grand Hotel up there. So that was a lot of fun. And I was there last week. I think I was there last week. Everything runs together, but I guess it was two weeks ago. We will dive into a lot of topics, but off the top, the shutdown is underway. And I got to be honest with y', all, you know, and I think Buck and I have talked about this quite a bit on the program. We are not of the opinion that the shutdown is ultimately that big of a story because eventually it will get resolved and we'll just add on more debt. But I do want to give you some historical analogy of where we are. Since 1976, the US government has shut down 20 times. So if you are out there and you're thinking this just feels like the same plot over and over again, Groundhog Day. In many ways it is. There were no shutdowns between 1995 and 2013, but three have occurred in the 12 year since. The longest one was in Trump 1.0 and that lasted 34 days back in 2018. Really the essence of this shutdown, just so you know, is a battle over whether there should be an extension of COVID healthcare policies which were put in place by Democrats as part of their massive blockbuster out of control spending bills that they forced through in the COVID era. And the reason why this spending cost is up now is because they pegged it for a relatively short period of time so that it did not continue to cost money going forward. Now, this is me, and you have heard me go off on this quite a lot. The healthcare system in the United States is broken. Every single one of you listening to me right now is nodding along because it is just a broken marketplace. It makes no sense the way we have designed it. It is the most inefficient and the least effective part of, I would argue, the American economic system. It is anti capitalistic in many ways. It is profoundly broken. This spending package that the Democrats are insisting on continuing would add up over the next decade, according to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, to around $450 billion. And much of it is a subsidy to that is in a large extent unnecessary. And so this, let me give you a little bit of a background of exactly what's going on. Try to simplify this for you. So we begin with the foundational point that the health care system in this country is broken. And anybody who's ever had to get on the phone with their insurance provider knows exactly what I'm talking about. Studies suggest that one reason our healthcare system is broken, probably the primary one, is nobody has any idea what anything costs. And so you can't make a rational decision in your life about whether or not you need an MRI or whether you need a need to go to the hospital or not, because a lot of times you don't have the information as you, you're not a doctor as, as necessary. And what has happened is doctors wildly overprescribe because much of this is paid for by insurance. And patients to a large extent are not making choices that are rational. I'll give you an example that that happened recently in my family. I think it was a few years ago. My wife was in a car accident. She was fine. She was able to get to the hospital and make sure everything was okay without needing an ambulance. But the ambulance, the police officer told her, hey, the ambulance can take you, but it will end up costing you thousands and thousands of dollars. Or you can take yourself to the, to the hospital on your own. How many people actually make that choice? How many people actually in much of your life? And I've talked about this in my own life, when it came to having our kids. We went to go tour the hospitals. Nobody could tell me what a delivery cost. Went to all these different hospitals. They're competing to see who has the fastest wi fi. They're Competing to see who has bamboo floors, who has the best flat screen televisions in the delivery area, what sort of security there is to make sure that your babies are safe. All those things are fine. They don't compete on price. I just said to each of them, hey, what's this going to cost me? None of them could tell me. I mentioned to you, I think, last week, because I think it's a really instructive analogy, that I went and took one of our kids when he had strep throat. My wife took the other one. She was on the ball, knew where our healthcare card was, knew exactly who our healthcare provider was, turned it over when we checked in. When she checked in, I didn't have any idea where the healthcare card was. Somehow I couldn't find it in my wallet. I think we had switched. And my incompetence meant that we were billed as not having health care. And we paid a fraction of what my wife paid for the exact same medical treatment because we had health insurance. It's all broken. All of it is broken. And I, I could get on a, a pedestal and talk about this forever. The fact that we run health care as someone who has owned a business and has had to pay for healthcare, the fact that healthcare is connected to employment is crazy. Uh, I have been a freelancer who was not an employee. Um, and the fact that I had to go out into the healthcare marketplace and figure out what policy was the right one for me was incredibly complicated, too. Insurance is the only thing all of us have to pay for that we hope to never use. And the entire insurance industry is totally broken in conjunction with health care. We spend way more than any country in the world and we do not get the best results. And the data reflects that. You could eliminate half of all medical treatments and there wouldn't be any change in life expectancy in this country. So my general proposition is I don't want to take anything. I know Tylenol was in the news. I get made fun of. I don't want to take any drugs. I don't want to take anything. I feel fortunate. I've been pretty healthy in the grand scheme of things. And I think that they wildly overprescribe and over medicate us as a whole. And yet, simultaneously, the people who actually do need health care, the people who are actually sick, the people who are in desperate need of health care, cannot get it, and the people who don't need it don't feel like we're getting any kind of rational health care that makes common sense. Ok, so that's where we really are. And in essence, much like our tax code, because I would say, number one, broken system in America's healthcare, number two is tax code. They're both so fundamentally broken that you would actually do better if you just tore them both down and built a functional, rational health care system and tax policy. Instead, we have just continued to add layer upon layer of a broken foundation. And as a result, if you want to use sort of a building metaphor, we have constantly shifting in the winds, tall buildings with no structural stability, and they'll fall over all the time, and they make absolutely no sense. So, God. Hey, happy optimistic Wednesday, everybody. We've got two hugely broken systems that threaten the very fabric of our democratic republic. Because as we have an aging population, the cost that we're going to have to put out for healthcare is going to be borne increasingly by a dwindling number of young people in America. And the budget and the math just doesn't add up. So all of that is the foundational issue that is in play here. And one of the real unfortunate aspects of, of of our democratic republic is once something is created, once the government creates a project, it almost never leaves. It just goes on the ledger as a cost long into the future. And Democrats want to provide health care for as many people as possible, including many different illegal immigrants. And ultimately, this is paid for by all of you out there that are working hard. Every single day, they're reaching into your pocket, they're taking your money out, and they're giving it to someone very often who is not even an American citizen. But this is all part and parcel of a broken health care system. Obamacare is collapsing, by the way, because it's predicated on giving insurance companies more money. And the entire concept of insurance is they have to get tons of people who are never going to need it in order to pay for the people that actually do need it. And young, healthy people, a lot of them just say, I don't need health insurance. And as a result, the insurance companies don't get that money. And as we have an aging society, the profit margins of insurance companies going down in the future. But I just come back to that analogy. I would be paying far less for healthcare if I had no insurance at all. So would most of you. That is a broken system. And my analogy there of walking in with a kid who has strep throat one day after we got insurance for the kid who did have a strep throat, I paid. My wife knows the exact dollars because she's still fed up about it because my incompetence actually benefited the family because we had to pay less money, but we paid a fraction as uninsured walking into a clinic patients of what a health care insured family would pay. So it's not only that the system is broken, it's that people who are actually trying to do the right thing are getting gouged and people who have no interest whatsoever in buying in at all. They're essentially getting free health care. You pay a lot. Many people pay virtually nothing at all. Okay, so that is the essence of why we have a government shutdown. Because Democrats want to give more people who do not pay taxes free health care. And Republicans are saying, wait, that was a Covid era policy that we put in place. It should expire. Thankfully, now that Covid is over. So that is the essence of what is going on and we will see exactly how long it takes for this to be resolved. I suspect that many of you out there will be like me and there will be absolutely no impact to your life whatsoever by the fact that the government has shut down. In fact, a lot of you are saying, I wouldn't mind the government shutting down for a long time. First time I heard the stat, it didn't make a lot of sense. But when you dig into the details, unfortunately it's very true. Across our country, a home burglary happens every 30 seconds on average. 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