Caritas in Veritate

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:29:27
Speaker 1
Welcome to conversation, the Belmont Abbey College podcast. This podcast aims to form and transform our community so that each of us can reflect God’s image. I’m Professor Michael Watson, director of philosophy, politics and economics, and assistant professor of economics at Belmont Abbey College, and I’m your host for today’s episode. Today I’m joined by professor and Doctor Matthew Siebert, associate professor and chair of philosophy at Belmont Abbey College.

00:00:30:00 – 00:00:43:08
Speaker 1
We’re excited to talk about health care, economics and ethics. Matthew and I both taught a class together on this very topic, and that’s why we’re having this conversation. So, Doctor Siebert, can you introduce yourself?

00:00:43:10 – 00:01:24:17
Speaker 2
Sure. I’m the chair of the philosophy department, and, I guess, I’ve been teaching at Belmont Abbey for a little bit more than seven years now, and, my my background, I guess, in health care. I’m the philosopher, so I’m a bit the poorer one of the two here. And so I have a bit more experience. I’m Canadian, so I have some experience with the Canadian system, but also here, because my daughter’s had a chronic health conditions, then I’ve had a bit of experience with the Medicaid, with Obamacare, and also with our employer health insurance and so on.

00:01:25:11 – 00:01:45:29
Speaker 1
So the reason why I was interested in health care economics is because my mother’s a doctor, she’s an allergist, an immunologist, and my sister, practice is family medicine. So I’ve been around it my whole life. My uncle’s a veterinarian. That’s not human health care, but it’s health care as well. And, it’s different because it’s mostly cash in veterinary medicine.

00:01:46:00 – 00:02:11:02
Speaker 1
We’re in health, health care for humans. We have health insurance. That’s the the the general rule. And so that’s what that that’s where my interest comes from. I think, by the way, Professor Siebert and I, we’re both, we hope we’ve co-founded the PPE major philosophy, politics and economics. And, maybe we should comment on the goal of that.

00:02:11:02 – 00:02:33:28
Speaker 1
And because that really formed and how we approach the question of health care economics. So, the way I’ve, I’ve envisioned it, we’ve envisioned it is we have philosophy, politics, economics. The philosophy is heavily informed by Thomas ethics. I consider myself a Thomas as much as I can be as an economist. So I’m, you know, I’m not a I don’t have a PhD in philosophy.

00:02:33:28 – 00:02:50:20
Speaker 1
I try to be a Thomas. Then we have politics and economics. Politics is, public policy craft, you know, where we get into statesmanship. Also at our at Belmont, I because there’s a heavy focus on constitutional law and in the politics of.

00:02:50:20 – 00:02:51:21
Speaker 2
Our legal framework.

00:02:51:21 – 00:03:16:12
Speaker 1
Yes. The label, the legal framework, the Constitution. Then we have economics. And when what we’re trying to do in economics is get the economic way of thinking and part of to our students so that they can use the tools of economics to understand cause and effect relationships and the different, the cost and, but the cost benefit analysis of which policies are best, should we use more government intervention.

00:03:16:12 – 00:03:27:19
Speaker 1
So we let the market do it. Do we need something in between? Etc.. And we have philosophy economics. And that kind of merges together the politics. So anything you like to add to that?

00:03:28:09 – 00:03:53:22
Speaker 2
Just the overall goal is kind of policymaking or statecraft or thinking through these difficult problems, practical problems that our society faces and, trying to come up with a solution that is not just, most efficient, but also most ethical and will work in our legal and with our American heritage and so on.

00:03:53:24 – 00:04:19:20
Speaker 1
Yeah. So, the way we approach the class, so, so in this major, we have, a final seminar class. It’s a different topic every year. Last year we taught health care economics, and we tend to approach. We’ve always approached our classes when we’ve taught them together. We start with the philosophy and the ethics. And so, how do we think ethically about health care?

00:04:19:22 – 00:04:44:21
Speaker 2
Yeah. Great. So I mean, I don’t I think we have a big problem that we often tend to appeal to sort of modern philosophy ideas of that we are this, these free and equal atoms that citizens are like free and equal atoms that are just interacting and that the rules, are just meant to make each of those do as well as possible as individuals.

00:04:44:21 – 00:05:11:02
Speaker 2
But, I think that this is kind of a distraction from how from what, what makes us flourish as well as possible. Because just focusing on material equality actually distracts us from helping those who are in need. We just care about our own equality and just focusing on a kind of well, and it also can lead to pushing for a kind of forced equality that you get in a Marxist system or something.

00:05:11:12 – 00:05:40:23
Speaker 2
And then I also worry about just looking at negative freedom, like freedom to do whatever you want, that this can lead to us neglecting our community and living together well, flourishing as humans together. So I think the Catholic social teaching has has much better alternatives to these, to equality and freedom. That. Instead, we think as Christians that we what we care about is solidarity.

00:05:40:26 – 00:06:15:09
Speaker 2
So solidarity, is kind of a fancy word for, a virtue of loving the common good, of caring about what’s good for us all as a community together. And so trying to meet people’s needs, kind of like, as our Lord told us, you know, you did it for me, right? The the goal is to, one of the goals that we should all be thinking about ethically is that we help the people who are most in need.

00:06:15:09 – 00:06:50:28
Speaker 2
And so how this relates to health care is that health is one of our most basic needs. It’s maybe our most basic physical need. It is to be taken care of to take care of our health. I guess there’s a a more basic spiritual need of spiritual health, but, physical health is also a very basic need. So we want to take care of that, but then we also want to do it through the other principle, Catholic social teaching principle, which is subsidiarity, which is a kind of weird fancy word for helpfulness.

00:06:51:01 – 00:07:11:18
Speaker 2
We want to help. If you think of the people who are primarily responsible for their own health, are the individuals who need to be healthy, but then they might not be able to fully take care of their health by themselves. So they need help from others. And this is obvious in a family, in an organic unit, like a family where the family works together for everyone’s health.

00:07:12:02 – 00:07:45:24
Speaker 2
Not necessarily. Treating each member of the family is just an atom that’s trying to get equal resources from the family or something, but taking care of each other, but then also only stepping in when the lower level, when the individual can’t help himself, not taking away that responsibility. And similarly, if you go up like the, the county, the state, the nation should have less take on, less responsibility for the individual, but should be willing to help the lower level when necessary.

00:07:45:26 – 00:07:52:19
Speaker 2
That’s how the I think of the principle of, subsidiarity. Right.

00:07:52:21 – 00:07:58:18
Speaker 1
So when we talk about the American health care system, how are we doing from.

00:07:58:21 – 00:08:22:10
Speaker 2
That point of view? So it seems to me like among all the OECD, the countries, all the developed kind of countries, the US system is maybe the worst, just in that we spend the most and get the least for what we spend. It’s it’s not very efficient. The, the I think about 50% of federal spending is on health care.

00:08:22:10 – 00:08:50:28
Speaker 2
If you include like a quarter of Social Security is spent on health care and Veterans affairs and, and then that’s not even including the tax exemption, the $1.3 trillion tax exemption for employers. So it’s kind of a weird, messed up system because there’s not a unified, approach to it. So I think, like, an obvious way that it could have gone.

00:08:51:01 – 00:09:27:03
Speaker 2
Would it be follow something like gene testing was on us? Pope Saint John Paul the second would have said, use, use subsidiarity in conformity with subsidiarity, use free markets. The government makes free markets for health insurance. But then, in conformity with solidarity, the the government or charities should step in to help, especially the poor or especially help people when they have catastrophic have some kind of catastrophic insurance or for chronic conditions.

00:09:27:06 – 00:09:46:13
Speaker 2
And then beyond that, just help the poor by maybe like tax credits for helping them pay for premiums and deductibles. But as I understand it, in the economics, it doesn’t. It’s not quite as simple as that because of adverse selection, and things like that.

00:09:46:15 – 00:10:16:26
Speaker 1
You know, so as an economist, if I’m just being an economist qua economist, as we say, I am I want the philosopher or the ethicist to give me the ends of which we’re trying to achieve and then judge the means of which we’re trying to achieve them. So I think one of the ends in Catholic social thought or is not particularly maybe in some places it is explicit, other places it’s implicit that we want some type of universal coverage.

00:10:16:28 – 00:10:36:12
Speaker 1
I didn’t say socialized coverage. I didn’t say government is doing it. I said some type of universal coverage, whether that’s completely voluntary or completely state driven, maybe, I mean, depending on the, you know, when when the state is super involved. We have this question of subsidiarity, whether it’s being trampled on or not, or something in between.

00:10:36:15 – 00:10:41:17
Speaker 2
Or like in Switzerland, where you have the it’s private insurance, but it’s state required that you get.

00:10:41:17 – 00:10:42:19
Speaker 1
Insurance and.

00:10:42:19 – 00:10:45:13
Speaker 2
The state regulates it so that the insurances are all treated.

00:10:45:13 – 00:11:11:21
Speaker 1
Equally. Yeah. And and everyone gets a tax credit to buy health insurance. And they have 99.1% coverage last I checked which was several years ago. But they have gotten universal coverage 100% private insurance. The American health care system between the VA. So that’s Veteran Affairs, Indian Health Service, Medicare, Medicaid, and all the other little programs, Chip and all these other programs out there.

00:11:11:24 – 00:11:35:03
Speaker 1
50% of government, 50% of health care spending comes from the government. So we could say that 50% of our health care market is socialized, at the VA and Indian health care system is most approximately going to look like what the UK has with the NHS. That is, the government owns. It runs it, etc. so if you want UK style health care system, we have that in VA.

00:11:36:00 – 00:11:36:23
Speaker 1
So yeah.

00:11:36:24 – 00:11:37:21
Speaker 2
Medicaid is like that.

00:11:37:21 – 00:11:59:22
Speaker 1
Too. Well Medicaid is insurance I guess so. But Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare, Medicaid and Medicare is more like Canada in the sense that you have universal health insurance or you have government health insurance. And then we have the other half the market, which is more market oriented but heavily, heavily regulated and not regulated in a very good way.

00:11:59:22 – 00:12:26:01
Speaker 1
If I could, if I could, express my opinion, then you have a small sliver, which is, what we would call, the closest thing we have to a free market, and we’ll talk about all those different things. So, couple things, right? America is probably one of the most unhealthy countries in the world. We are, we have an obese problem, and obesity leads to all sorts of things with cardiac problems and metabolic issues.

00:12:27:05 – 00:12:46:11
Speaker 1
We don’t get enough exercise, etc., so we are already very unhealthy. And that also is, related to why we spend so much on health care. We are the best country in the world when it comes to, er, medicine. If you get shot, if you’re in a car accident, something traumatic of that nature, you want to be in the United States, right?

00:12:46:11 – 00:13:03:19
Speaker 1
We are the best in that. But when it comes to everything else, when you look at how much we spend in the outcomes we’re getting, yes, we are, we are very, very inefficient and we don’t have universal coverage. There’s lots of people who fall through the cracks. Obamacare didn’t do it. Medicare, Medicaid, of course, in into it.

00:13:03:21 – 00:13:24:01
Speaker 1
And one thing that Medicare and Medicaid did is that they eliminated the charity hospital. So before Medicare, Medicaid, we actually had charity hospitals that gave subsidized the free health care to the poor and the elderly. But when Medicare Medicaid came about, those hospitals ceased to be charity hospitals, Shriners. It’s still an example of that, giving free health care to children.

00:13:24:05 – 00:13:30:00
Speaker 1
So that’s one of the few examples left. But, so,

00:13:30:02 – 00:13:53:28
Speaker 2
Where do we go on? I did want to mention, I remember, I remember, we wanted to point out that, the ethics, the there’s a, there can be a tendency to ignore the economics. Yes. Because people think that, you know, just let’s just there’s this moral rule. We should take care of everybody. So just make a law that says, take care of everybody, and then it will happen.

00:13:53:28 – 00:14:22:27
Speaker 2
And it’s a very simplistic way of thinking. And I you pointed me to this quote from Pope Benedict when he was Cardinal Ratzinger. He says, a morality that believes itself able to dispense with the technical knowledge of economic laws is not morality, but moralism as such as it is the antithesis of morality, a scientific approach that believes itself capable of managing without an ethos misunderstands the reality of man.

00:14:22:29 – 00:14:46:20
Speaker 2
Therefore, it is not scientific. Today we need a maximum of specialized economic understanding, but also a maximum of ethos, so that specialized economic understanding may enter the service of the right goals, and only in this way will its knowledge be both politically practicable and socially tolerable. So I think of this beautiful quote that summarizes the the goal of the philosophy politics in economics.

00:14:46:22 – 00:15:16:16
Speaker 1
And when folks don’t pay attention to that and we go into moralism, as economists, we tend to have very ruffled feathers because, it seems that we’re I think the way we put is they’re lacking prudential prudence and, or they’re thinking about how to solve issues and they’re ignoring the things that we’re saying. Now, we economists also have the tendency to fall into utilitarianism, which is not Catholic philosophy philosophies that, Thomas philosophy and, I think that’s where economists sometimes can go awry.

00:15:17:01 – 00:15:23:05
Speaker 1
But yeah, it’s I think that’s an excellent quote. It’s kind of says what I’m trying to do, what we’re trying to do in our classes.

00:15:23:12 – 00:15:45:09
Speaker 2
You can you can read them in theories by, Pope John the 23rd. And he says, there’s a there are rights to all of these things, but he’s not telling you exactly how to bring those about, and economics will tell you often that the way that you thought was the simple, obvious way to bring it about has unintended consequences that wind up undermining the goal.

00:15:45:11 – 00:15:46:10
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah.

00:15:46:12 – 00:16:05:05
Speaker 1
So, I think we should talk a little bit about the American health care system, then look at the other options. Sure. Because we’re not going to get into technical technical analysis here. We, I’ll need a whiteboard. So, I when when we look at the American health care system, there are some, problems. We don’t have universal coverage.

00:16:05:05 – 00:16:31:10
Speaker 1
We have a lot of people falling through the cracks. We’ve got massively high prices. Many parts of rural and poor America cannot get adequate health care. And, the economist, when I approach these topics, there are many things that stand out. So let’s talk about, medicine, a medical doctors America has a few medical doctors per capita of any OECD country except for Singapore.

00:16:31:10 – 00:16:53:06
Speaker 1
But Singapore is the healthiest country on Earth, so they don’t need as many doctors. Switzerland has 60% more doctors per capita. We’ve, the closest country last I checked was New Zealand, and they had 17% more doctors than we have. So we have this shortage of doctors and everyone talks about it. Why? Well, it’s the American Medical Association, right?

00:16:53:06 – 00:17:19:02
Speaker 1
The American Medical Association represents doctors, and they act as a cartel trying to limit the number of doctors in the United States to keep salaries high. For doctors. They don’t say this, of course. But that is effectively what they’re doing. They started doing this very aggressively in the 20s and 30s when they shut down half the medical schools in this country, those medical schools that were shut down, they weren’t the Harvards of the world, but they produced doctors for rural areas and for the urban poor.

00:17:19:04 – 00:17:43:15
Speaker 1
And ever since we shut those down, they haven’t had the medical doctors. One of the reasons why we have nurse practitioners and physician assistants is this shortage of medical doctors. So, so the AMA, through its government privilege to license medical schools or to, regulate that and be involved in that was able to shut down half of them, reduce the number of doctors, create that shortage.

00:17:43:15 – 00:18:06:20
Speaker 1
And the response was, well, we have a shortage of doctors. How do we deal with this? Let’s create something like the nurse practitioner and the physician assistant. If this was Switzerland, all those PPAs and NPS, they’d be MDS. So that’s something that is, very troublesome. And when we do see, like a university, like Southern Illinois University, they have much lower standards than most universities for medical school.

00:18:06:23 – 00:18:39:15
Speaker 1
Why? Because their their mission is to produce doctors for rural. Rural and, yeah, just rural areas. And so they, except for folks with much lower GPAs and they still produce good doctors. So we do have an artificial shortage created. Another thing that is occurring is that Medicaid aid, if I remember correctly, Medicaid funds, most residences vast the vast majority of residencies in this country from 1999 or 2000 to 2020, there was no increase in the funding of residencies.

00:18:39:17 – 00:19:02:11
Speaker 1
And if we don’t increase the funding of residencies, we don’t get more doctors. And, that created a scenario where actually in the late 2000, many American graduated American graduates, MDS and doctors were unable to find residencies and foreign medical graduates were, completely lost. And, it’s still like that where I know a lot of I’m my background’s polish.

00:19:02:11 – 00:19:20:07
Speaker 1
I know a lot of, Americans and Polish Americans, they go back to Poland to get their MD there. It’s all certified. Accredited by the United States. They come back here, they pass their exams, and they can’t find a residency for years. And some of them just give up and become pharmaceutical reps. We’re going to research. So we we do have this shortage of doctors.

00:19:20:13 – 00:19:45:02
Speaker 1
And so there are also other things different states, will regulate and create artificial shortages, like in Illinois back in the early 20 tens, if you wanted to hire, build a new hospital, you need a permission from a board made up of other hospitals that is your future competitors, so that if there’s a definition of a cartel, it’s kind of like that.

00:19:45:02 – 00:19:56:20
Speaker 1
So you had this scenario in Illinois where they weren’t building larger hospitals, but you’d see these other hospitals just expand in size double, triple, quadruple in size. And that’s because demand was increasing. Another thing we.

00:19:56:20 – 00:19:58:08
Speaker 2
Thought was why people have to travel farther.

00:19:58:15 – 00:19:58:19
Speaker 1
To.

00:19:58:19 – 00:19:59:09
Speaker 2
Hospitals as.

00:19:59:09 – 00:20:18:04
Speaker 1
Well. Yeah, I remember hearing and so don’t cite me on this, but I remember hearing when I was involved in that kind of research at Illinois Policy Institute in my youth, that there were parts of Illinois where, you know, suburban Illinois, where it was a long drive, 40 minutes even, to get to the nearest hospital, but which is absurd.

00:20:20:07 – 00:20:42:10
Speaker 1
So, yeah, we we have these restrictions on the supply side and then with Obamacare that did expand coverage, but then we get a demand curve shift. And when the demand goes up, prices should go up. Quantity should increase as well. But we have, heavy restriction on the number of medical doctors, etc.. We don’t want prices to go up.

00:20:42:13 – 00:21:03:10
Speaker 1
And so how do we deal with, an increase in demand? We don’t want prices go up. Well, you have to sacrifice quality and I don’t if we’re going to increase demand, if we’re going to allow demand to increase for health care, we have to think about how to supply going to match that. And as the as people become older, the baby boomers are getting older, they’re going to be demanding a lot more health care.

00:21:03:13 – 00:21:10:22
Speaker 1
So that’s those are concerns that we are, as Americans should have about the future of health care.

00:21:10:24 – 00:21:19:12
Speaker 2
So if if you could ideally make the system a certain way, would you rather the US be more like a Singapore or like a Switzerland?

00:21:19:15 – 00:21:33:02
Speaker 1
Well, I’ll tell you or I don’t want it to be like the NHS in the UK or the Canadian system. No offense to the Canadian here. I do remember reading how in Canada, a bunch of doctors, you have to wait often to get an MRI.

00:21:33:05 – 00:21:38:28
Speaker 2
And. Yeah, that’s the price of that’s the price of it being free is that you have to wait longer.

00:21:39:04 – 00:21:57:04
Speaker 1
And that’s a good point. There are two ways to run an economy or any market. You either rationed goods or you let prices adjust to determine who’s good. The willingness to pay. And, prices do a thing where they signal to entrepreneurs, hey, we need more resources going here. We need less resources over here. So it’s an automatic adjusting system.

00:21:57:09 – 00:22:35:12
Speaker 1
With rationing. It comes down to central planning to some extent. And I know in, Canada they do, a bunch of doctors or realized if we open up a warehouse and put MRI machines in it, we can make a lot of money and charge a really low cash price. They did that, and the Canadian government shut them down because they didn’t like the idea that people could pay to skip the line, the queue, the rash, the the effect of rationing is to create shortages and queuing or waiting or in a line and just, example in this, in Poland they have socialized medicine and my cousin went to for her annual and, she

00:22:35:12 – 00:22:49:17
Speaker 1
took off a day from work, which to me like a whole day. And then she had to wait. They didn’t have room for her that day. So she came back the following day. And then finally the third day, they were able to see her. So she took three days off from work, sitting in a doctor’s office, which for an American, it’s like, that’s a lot of waste of time.

00:22:49:19 – 00:22:51:09
Speaker 1
I’d go cuckoo. Yeah.

00:22:51:12 – 00:23:20:15
Speaker 2
So yeah, the the American advantages, sort of the entrepreneurial spirit. And so these things like doctors who are just on call that you, you have a doctor that you, you don’t get through insurance, but you just pay a monthly fee. And that sort of thing does seem like things that could be, could be really beneficial. It could be a free market solution for a lot of things that other countries just get the government to tax everybody and, and give doctors a chunk of cash to do.

00:23:22:02 – 00:23:42:10
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. So when you asked, which system would I choose? I really like Switzerland. That seems to be a, pretty good compromise. You give everyone money to buy health insurance. Everyone at 99.1% of people have coverage. Everyone is pretty much required by law to have it. You don’t have to worry about the poor not getting it because they’re getting money to buy it.

00:23:43:21 – 00:24:05:06
Speaker 1
Every, you know, they do have a quite a bit of regulation in this that everyone has kind of the same health insurance policy from different companies they can choose from. They’re actually mimicking something what economists call perfect competition as much as possible. And then, if you want more, then you’re going to have to pay more. But I like Singapore the most.

00:24:05:06 – 00:24:26:00
Speaker 1
And, Singapore, there’s certain things we can’t do. We can’t do urban planning like Singapore does, where everyone walks in super healthy. But what Singapore does is they, have everyone who has catastrophic health insurance. It’s private. Every it is the law of the land in Singapore that every price has to be posted. So online somewhere, it’s posted.

00:24:26:00 – 00:24:45:06
Speaker 1
And also you have to have your, malpractice rate, something like that posted. And you see there’s a correlation between price and malpractice, which is what we expect price to be correlated with the quality. And so something like that. I think the Singapore it’s in Singapore also, every single Singaporean had is forced to save into a health savings account.

00:24:45:08 – 00:25:03:18
Speaker 1
And if you spend all your HSA funds like and you get Parkinson’s, you spend all your HSA funds, then the government will come in and help you with the rest. But you’ve done your duty to save. The problem with all of this, of course, and I really like the Singaporean system, but, we have free prices. Prices can move.

00:25:03:20 – 00:25:22:29
Speaker 1
Everyone has, coverage. One of the problems, though, is sometimes when the even with Singapore, you have the regulations that are in place on the health care system and they’re they’re smart, but you can still have them that prevent new innovations. And remember, we in our class, we had this one doctor who has a cash only surgical center.

00:25:23:02 – 00:25:42:26
Speaker 1
He’s also president of the Free Market Medical Association and founder and that’s a fascinating story I tell you. Go look into his story about the legal battles. He had to just have a surgical center for cash because nobody wanted that. His prices are 10th to a half of the hospitals on the street. Same doctors I know with me.

00:25:42:26 – 00:26:00:13
Speaker 1
I needed a nose procedure to breathe better. And, before health insurance was $2,000 cash. Two weeks later, when health insurance are covering, it went to $20,000 billed by the health by my EMT, and the insurance ended up paying $8,000. We have no price transparency.

00:26:00:19 – 00:26:15:13
Speaker 2
That’s one of the things that drove me crazy. As a Canadian coming to the US, it’s like no one can tell you what the price of anything is. Note the doctors, the secretaries, the insurance, nobody, nobody knows except for the people who are making millions off of it.

00:26:15:13 – 00:26:34:04
Speaker 1
I got exactly. And so this, this, this doctor, this, this anesthesiologist who started the surgical center, he has his prices posted. You know exactly what you’re paying for. There’s only one price. It covers everything. And it’s there’s no hidden prices, nothing like that. He’s so cheap that you’re starting to see a lot of a larger companies looking at, say, health insurance.

00:26:34:04 – 00:27:01:27
Speaker 1
Outlandishly expensive. How do we save money? This is what we really like about America is that they can, you know, that creative, innovative spirit. And they said, well, I forgetting the term, but you’ll have these, these, specialists who look around the country and look for the cheapest, place to get a surgery. And his place is so cheap that is cheaper to fly their employees there, get the surgery, get pay for the PT everything, and then fly them back, then to get them health insurance.

00:27:01:27 – 00:27:21:28
Speaker 1
And so the a lot of these companies are self insuring or using other ways to insure, to cover up, to get coverage for their employees. And there’s so there’s that little sliver that’s truly free market. Now, the problem with the truly free market system is you don’t always get universal coverage. And so trying to find that balance, I think Singapore found that pounds I think we could they could probably be me more a little more innovative.

00:27:22:00 – 00:27:45:19
Speaker 1
But there is a way we we could take just for example, when I did the math, if we took Medicare, Medicaid, all those different health care programs that the government spends on, and we took it and we gave it to a subsidy for every single American, it’s about $5,600. So we could give every single American, a tax credit to buy health insurance and solve it that way.

00:27:46:09 – 00:27:50:15
Speaker 1
At least. So those would be my solutions, right?

00:27:50:17 – 00:27:51:17
Speaker 2
Sounds good to me.

00:27:51:20 – 00:28:01:06
Speaker 1
And, is there any last comments, Matthew, on this? I mean, I think we got universal coverage, which is. Yes. So so it wants,

00:28:01:08 – 00:28:24:06
Speaker 2
And the basic principles of solidarity that we should be taking care of the poor and helping those who are in need. But in a subsidiarity way, in a way where you, not just top down trying to do everything for everyone, but trying to let those people look for ways to get help and then helping them when necessary.

00:28:24:09 – 00:28:24:24
Speaker 2
Good.

00:28:24:27 – 00:28:47:02
Speaker 1
So as we conclude, thank you to our audience for joining us. Thank you to Doctor Siebert for joining us and for this wonderful conversation. If you have enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and tell your friends that converse also is available on Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts. Until next time, God bless you.