Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. And it's guest time, and our topic this morning is healthcare and I have 2 guest with me. First Rick Slemaker, publisher of Medicine magazine. Rick, welcome to the show.

Rick: Thank you very much, Russ.

Russ: You bet. And also Randy Paris, involved and concerned citizen. Randy, welcome to The BusinessMakers Show.

Randi: Thank you, glad to be here.

Russ: Rick, let's start with you telling us about Medicine Magazine.

Rick: Medicine Magazine came out of an interest that came out of the Texas Medical Center in providing a forum for physicians and surgeons and medical people in general to talk about our great wealth of our Texas Medical Center to our public here and around the county, and it's been a labor of love and a very successful enterprise and I'm proud to be associated with it.

Russ: Okay. And I take it that you and Randy know each other because she is this involved and concerned citizen in what's happening with healthcare today.

Rick: Yes, and I met Randy because she's one of those people that, as you say concerned citizen, that said basically, "I'm mad as hell; I'm not going to take it anymore." And I paid attention. I was invited to a function where I heard her speak and talking about our healthcare situation that we're in right now, and I'm pleased to be on the show with her today. She has a great story.

Russ: Okay. Well, Randy let's hear some of that story. Tell us what got you involved to begin with.

Randi: In January, February I became interested in what the President said he was going to do with our healthcare system. And I suspected that what he wanted to do with the healthcare system I wasn't going to like very much.

Russ: Okay. I assume you must have found out that that's accurate.

Randi: Well the worst thing-when I went to Washington and talked to quite a few people, I found out that patients and ordinary laymen like me are not really represented at these meetings. There were lobbyist, there were politicians, there were representatives of all sorts of groups but not the average person who was going to be affected.

Russ: So what kind of people did you visit with when you were there?

Randi: Well I talked to my senator. I talked to quite a few politicians. I talked to people who run policy groups specializing in healthcare. Those are the people I talked to.

Russ: Okay. Well I think it's probably fair to say here on The BusinessMakers Show we're a little bit concerned about the change-not implying that we have a perfect system as it exists today; but just because you have problems doesn't mean that you go run the bus off of the road, I think. So Rick, what all has your magazine been involved in on this issue?

Rick: Well the first thing, Russ, is I think the general public-and as Randy very aptly put it, the general public doesn't understand. They're getting sound bytes and things from lobbyists and all kinds of people that are working the system. And the point is is that our system is not in crisis. The crisis is being caused by our government, and number 1 is-and this is my feeling as an individual. Tell me 1 thing that's been improved with a government takeover. And you can't. There isn't anything.

Russ: Not that I know of.

Rick: -so-so from my point of view as-as Medicine Magazine and a contemporary publication that goes to people that are interested in medicine whether it be a story about their strange illness that only occurs once in a million or those people that are taken care of-the Alzheimer's patients whatever-we can't have this system that is going to be taken over, in a sense, by a government bureaucrat who would tell these people what to do. The care needs to come from our physician and that's my concern and that's why I'm concerned and here today with Randy because her message is so important.

Russ: Okay. Well Randy. obviously, you're passionate and concerned, so what sort of proactive activity are you involved in?

Randi: Well I want to say also that I've lived in other countries that have government-controlled healthcare. It's not a very pretty picture.

Russ: Okay.

Randi: What I did is I got together with some other people concerned about this. We raised some money. We decided that we needed to educate, so we started off. We went to Americans for Prosperity. We asked could we run a project there-coming from the patient's point of view, the individual's point of view. And we cut a few ads, but mostly we put a huge amount of information on our website, Patients United Now. And we asked people to share their own stories-bad stories with government-controlled care of all kinds and the wonders of our system where we had a lot of choice and innovation in this country. And so we started with that.

Russ: So you could go to patientsunitednow.com and read a lot of these testimonials.

Randi: Right. And-well we have testimonials. We have articles. We have a huge amount of research. We have our first ad there, Shona. We interviewed a Canadian woman who almost died because in Canada she couldn't get an MRI for 6 months as her brain tumor grew. And we found another video we found on YouTube that somebody had put together clips of the President and various democrats and policymakers making very clear that their plan is a single pair government-controlled system in this country as they have in Canada and they have in UK and Europe.

And that all of the things they're doing now are incremental steps in that direction. It is purely a strategy. We even have them saying, "This is our strategy." It's a 2-minute video. I think every American ought to see it. Most Americans think this health reform is about helping the poor. Actually, it is not about helping the poor. They are actually cutting the poor. They're cutting Medicaid and they're cutting Medicare to pay for this reform. So I asked myself, well what is the reform if it isn't about helping the poor?

Russ: Okay. We're going to be back with more with Randy Paris and Rich Slemaker after this. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.

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Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. And continuing on with the topic of healthcare with Rick Slemaker, publisher of Medicine Magazine and Randy Paris, involved and concerned citizen. Well first up, let's talk about this-the uninsured. Randy, what about that? They make the point that there's, what, 50 million or so or 60 million in the U.S. that are uninsured?

Randi: This is one of the things I found out when I went to Washington. I tried to get my handle around all these complicated things about health reform. And I basically came to the conclusion-I realized there's 300 million people in the country; 250 million people have insurance. Half of them have it through the government-Medicare, Medicaid, VA. Half of them have it through private-mostly through their employers. That leaves about 50 million people that don't have insurance. Who are those people? Well the number is very little but you can round it off. About a third of them are illegal immigrants or other people who will not sign up for any program.

They're outside of the system. They do receive care at any hospital. Another one-third also receives care at any hospital, and those are people who make over $50,000 a year and just choose not to purchase insurance. In fact, 7 million of those people make over $75,000 a year. Then you have a group deserves help, have a complicated problem. They have preexisting conditions and they can't afford what insurance costs them. Half of those people are only uncovered for less than a year. They're between jobs.

The other half are underemployed or they're employed somewhere where they can't get insurance or self-employed. I say let's target a solution directly at those people. Let's say that's 9 million people-5% of our population. I say that's a good thing to fix. Medicare is going broke in 2017. Why don't we fix that? The VA does not provide adequate standard care for our veterans. Why don't we fix that? Unfortunately, what they're doing is they're taking over the private care that half of us have and trying to regulate that. You know, they're disrupting the entire health system in American; and worse, they're doing it at the expense of seniors. They're cutting 500 billion dollars from Medicare.

Russ: Well that interesting you say that because I know that's one of the ways that they talk about how they're going to pay for this, and they say they're taking it out of Medicaid and Medicare, right?

Randi: Yes.

Russ: And if they take it out, I mean, what's that mean?

Randi: Well but the President talked about cutting cost. Cutting cost means cutting care and they've actually outlined specifics. One of the things that the President himself said would save 26 billion dollars over 10 years is cutting hospital readmissions for seniors. And most seniors who have that have the congestive heart failure, emphysema or obstructive lung disease. They need to be readmitted. And cutting that is an especially cruel and unethical form of saving money. I think it was to incentivise doctors to take care of their patients better, but that is not a good way, I think, to save money. They've also targeted MRI, cat scans, use of antibiotics and back surgery. If you need back surgery, I'll bet you think it's necessary; but the government is now going to say, "I'm sorry; that cost too much." So that's how they're cutting costs.

Russ: Wow. You know, Rick, I think that one thing that's been good about our system so far is that we've been able to attract some very intelligent people into our medical schools and therefore into the practice itself. I can't help but think and worry a little bit about this new system no longer attracting those types.

Rick: You should be worried, Russ, because that's exactly what's happening. If you look at the admissions to medical schools. They used to be almost a hundred positions for every medical school's chair entry. Now that's shrinking and shrinking, and the reason it is because kids now can go into engineering, they can go into other sciences and make money without all the liability entanglements that they can get in medicine, and they don't have the group think of medicine. The entrepreneurial spirit is being pushed and hurt by our own government by this administration right now and it's a sad thing.

I mean I am bewildered sometimes by the people that I speak to that are some of the-the most wondrous physicians discovers the people who create all this new things in medicine every day from the lasers, the heart surgeries, heart transplants-all these new things-telemedicine. And these all came out of entrepreneurials. Profits provide funding, provide research, provide science. All these kind of things like this that are hugely affected by this and the government can't fund everything. We're printing money too much, and I'm sure that Randy will agree with me and-and her science-matter of fact, she has a personal story she could tell you.

Randi: I was just going to say, 85 percent of all the new drugs, technology and devices in the world are developed in the United States. And that's all the socialized systems in the world use the technology we developed with our profit system.

Russ: Here on The BusinessMakers Show that's what we're about-innovation, entrepreneurship. I will admit, though, that, boy, when it comes to healthcare it's sort of a different, unique sort of service; but at the end of the day, we'd like to know that there's people out there developing new procedures, new drugs that help us in our life, and we certainly would hope that they benefit immensely from those.

Randi: Well one of the big problems is with a government-run system you tend to standardize your care. You come out with regulations. Two of the things that were in the stimulus bill that I don't like-1 is a 15-member comparative effectiveness research council. I call it the rationing board. They're supposed to tell you what treatments and technology is actually best, most effective. However, clinical effectiveness means that, and that's all medical research. This is comparative effectiveness research and it tells you which is the most cost beneficial. They tend to decide that out of 10 different treatments, this is the one you should have. Unfortunately, they're going to be telling anybody in a government-run system, which is going to be all of us in a few years, which treatment you can have.

Randi: That's how you cut out innovation. People aren't allowed to experiment. They aren't allowed to try different things. There's no incentive to do it but now there will be a disincentive. The health information technology system where every single patient's records will be submitted to the federal government, will be in an interactive database, and they will be everywhere. You'll have a single patient record with everything in it.

Aside from the privacy concerns which I think are considerable because that can be-you don't have to give permission for that to go to the federal government. I think Dr. Blumenthal is the guy at HHS who's in charge of this, and his goal is to make that system interactive. So your doctor will have a computer sitting right there in his office, and it will tell him what treatment is best for you, what drug is best for you. And I can see the day when he punches in a prescription and it'll say, "Beep, I'm sorry. This patient's not qualified because of xyz."

Now I want that doctor who knows everything about me and my individual situation to make that choice. And a lot of times the standard choice changes in a year. You know-what medicine says is really the best choice right now, it changes. How does it change? Because individual doctors try different things. They come to a new consensus. So I don't want to cut that out.

Russ: Okay, the topic is healthcare and my guests are Randy Paris, involved and concerned citizen; and Rick Slemaker, publisher, Medicine magazine. And you're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.

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Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. And continuing on down the healthcare path with Rick Slemaker, publisher, Medicine Magazine; and Randy Paris, involved and concerned citizen. Now, I'm one that kind of thinks that our present system is getting much poorer grades than it deserves. Do you guys agree?

Rick: Agree.

Randi: Ah!

Russ: Okay.

Randi: You know, whenever I'm talking to people about this and I say, "Look, if you have a friend who really thinks that a government-controlled system would be better than one-the one that we have-" I say, "I don't want to get into all the statistics, I'll just give you 1. If you want to talk about a 5-year survival after diagnosed with cancer, look at European men. Five years after being diagnosed with cancer, they have a 47 percent chance of being alive. In America, they have a 66 percent chance of being alive. That's with all cancers. And I say, "Which system do you want?"

Russ: Good question.

Rick: A point to pick up on right there is that all the leaders of all those countries, government officials included, come to the United States for care when it's serious. So you can't even think of-of grading any other care outside our country at all. and there-there's no comparison.

Russ: Okay. Well I see and hear that all the time and think that nobody talks about that nearly enough; but my goodness we're talking about it here on The BusinessMakers Show, that's for sure. Well I know, Randy, that you're out there really championing this cause and I know there's even television commercials playing and getting ready to be launched. How are you paying for these?

Randi: We have television commercials going in about 12 states now. We're focusing just on the moderate democratic senators that we think could put a stop to the most radical parts of these plans. And so we're now running them on national TV but we're running them in-in those markets. And we have another website called Join Patients First where people can donate-Lord, I need donations. But there's a petition. There's also a button you can press and that will send a letter to your congressman, to your senator. There's another button you an press that will send a letter to the media. We've got 81 events scheduled over the next month-tea parties, 912-ers, Americans for Prosperity town hall meetings, speakers. I mean we had a lot of activity going on in these target states.

Russ: So the website where all of this actually takes place where they can actually stimulate a letter to their representative is joinpatientsfirst.com.

Randi: Correct. We have a hands off my healthcare petition. I want you to sign it.

Russ: All right. That's real cool. Randy, I really appreciate you coming in here and sharing your passion with us today. And Rick, I really appreciate you being here as well.

Rick: I appreciate you too, and I'm joining with her. And if anyone wants to meet Randy either virtually or in person, please contact the Medicine Magazine office 713-621-7200. We'd love to have them. Thank you very much, Russ, for your time...

Russ: -you bet. You've been listening to Rick Slemaker, publisher, Medicine Magazine; and also Randy Paris, involved and concerned citizen. And this is the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.