Some More News - Some More News: Healthcare of the Rich and Famous

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Hi. Healthcare sucks in the U.S. We all know that. But did you know that rich people get a secret, better form of healthcare that somehow makes all of ours worse? Get the world's news at http...s://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link.Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by Ella YurmanAdditional Material by Cody JohnstonProduced by Jonathan HarrisEdited by Gregg MellerPost-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellYou’re going to love Hungryroot as much as we do. Take advantage of this exclusive offer: For a limited time get 40% off your first box PLUS get a free item in every box for life. Go to https://hungryroot.com/smn and use code smn. That’s https://hungryroot.com/smn, code smn to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life.Check out at https://shopify.com/morenews ALL LOWERCASE and learn how to create the best retail experiences without complexity.PATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comYOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvlj0IzjSnNoduQF0l3VGng/joinSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Ah! Hi, here's some news in the form of a series of questions. Do you ever think about how expensive it is to go to the doctor? Does that ever make you mad? And does that anger ever make you want to do something, something drastic? Like you might want to track down whoever is responsible for making it so expensive and take them out. Just take them right out of their shells with a good jump on the head. Except you can't because maybe their shells are too slick
Starting point is 00:00:29 and you slip and twist your ankle. Now you can't jump on anything and you have to go to the doctor. And the healthcare industry is incredibly dense and complicated and that's by design. Sort of like how the financial industry created its own impossibly complicated jargon to describe comparatively simple concepts so that every conversation with an investment banker sounds
Starting point is 00:00:48 like Wharf put the rules for Quidditch through Google Translate. But being rich is like having a decoder ring for all of that. When you're rich, you don't have to understand any of it. You have people who do that for you. Some of them won't even want to, but they will. That's what being rich means. It's just like that movie In Time starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. No?
Starting point is 00:01:12 But everybody loved it. I loved it. Most of it. On an airplane. The point is, in that movie, your life is your currency, and the poor are doomed to work themselves into a very, very hot early grave. So it's exactly like real life. Especially the hot part.
Starting point is 00:01:29 But that sly musical hunk, Justin Timberlake, figures out how to break free of the system. All you need to do is get biblically wealthy overnight! So I guess it didn't really matter what the currency was. It's a deaf a definitely loud metaphor. Every character should be wearing one of those political cartoon labels. And there are no old people in that future because everyone agreed old people are gross.
Starting point is 00:01:53 But in real life, what does healthcare for the super rich look like? Perhaps something like the also extremely obvious messenger, Elysium. Why did we talk about in time instead of Elysium? We may never know. But to address my question about what healthcare for the super rich looks like,
Starting point is 00:02:11 we have known about private doctors and in-home appointments ever since the first physician was arrested for involuntary manslaughter at someone else's mansion. But that's nouveau riche. That's Big B basic riche. Actual riche is a whole other Faustian subscription tier. (*beeping*)
Starting point is 00:02:36 Healthcare for the super riche looks nothing like yours. Remember that mechanical Christ of a medical bed that resurrects Charles Tocqueville's face in Elysium after he shaves with a grenade? Man, I hated that movie. I remember why I didn't bring it up earlier. I also saw it on a plane. I especially hated the wanton beard violence. Through a hive mind? So when one bleeds, the others feel it. But call that protest, my beard! There's no time! We can't waste time, because time is money in In Time.
Starting point is 00:03:06 I bring up the inferior Plane film, because rich people kind of already have that bed. At the very least, Jeff Bezos is feeding souls into a basement prototype as we speak. And they kind of already have Elysium. They get access to all kinds of treatments, technology, and facilities that the rest of us still think is just a cardboard set on Star Trek. First of all, when the super rich get sick, they don't go to the hospital. The hospital comes to them.
Starting point is 00:03:31 Private medical offices can charge their ultra wealthy clients anywhere from 40,000 to $80,000 a year for personalized care. There's a whole industry around it called concierge care. And the marketplace for that industry is expected to hit $11 billion by 2032. That is enough to make several quantumanias, and as we've learned, no one can be trusted with that kind of power. One of the major companies in this industry is called Private Medical because the super-rich
Starting point is 00:04:00 have no imagination. Go ahead, I dare you to ask David Zaslav to describe a dream he had. Private Medical serves over 1,000 wealthy families across the country, and works to manage those families' entire health portfolio. The head of Private Medical, Dr. Jordan Schlane, likes to compare what he does to asset management. It's a little creepy to use the same words we use to refer to finances to refer to health and wellness, almost as though human life is measurable in increments of time that are forever being brokered by powerful forces beyond our control. You know, if you think about it, time is almost like a currency.
Starting point is 00:04:41 We're forced to trade away as we work ourselves into early graves, while the wealthy get to hoard it and cling to life's sweet bosom nigh eternally. But these medical concierges don't just provide personalized care and attention. They can also buy their patients easy access to the very best doctors and specialists, something a regular Joe might have to wait weeks or months for. A 2022 survey found it takes 26 days on average to secure an appointment with a family care physician. And that's just a regular physician.
Starting point is 00:05:13 Imagine trying to see a specialist. I bet you can't, Zazlav, because of the wealth, you don't need to imagine it, but also you have no imagination. You know how the extremely wealthy can always manage to buy a tiger? I think you can just throw a fistful of cash into the air like birdseed, and a guy dressed in a members-only jacket and several pairs of sunglasses will appear to sell you an exotic
Starting point is 00:05:33 animal. Health care for the wealthy, or wealth care as I've just decided it's called right now, is basically the same idea. Concierge services like private medical are able to skip long waiting periods for their buckaroos by paying these elite doctors and specialists just so much goddamn money. Way more than they'd get waiting around to treat the poor as you see. A practitioner at Private Medical can rake in $500,000 to $700,000 a year. Not only that, but Private Medical caps doctors' clients at 50 families, ensuring a much higher level of attention afforded to patients than
Starting point is 00:06:11 you can receive at a regular doctor's office, where the number of patients per doctor typically range between 1,200 and 1,900. They don't even ask Pokemon trainers to keep track of that many names. Turn your head and coughing. It's a Pokemon. Coughing is the name of a Pokemon. Point is, sometimes shit happens. Your chauffeur fails his most recent eye exam because the liquid cocaine dried out his retinas and he steers into the curb
Starting point is 00:06:37 with the entire weight of his body on the gas pedal and you guys do a bitch and corkscrew jump that unfortunately lands you in the hospital. Or your Harrison Ford on something with wings. What I mean is rich people do have to go to the hospital from time to time. And even at the hospital, wealthy patients often receive preferential treatment.
Starting point is 00:06:57 A survey found that physicians who reported caring for VIP patients often felt pressure from the patients or hospital executives to frivolously run unnecessary tests and other diagnostics that are completely out of reach for anyone of modest means. VIP patients frequently also get to just fast pass to the front of the line. Investigative journalist Rex Weiner There's no time, there's no time, there's no time, time is money in time. Rex Weiner looked into the UCLA Medical Center and discovered a network of donors who were
Starting point is 00:07:32 granted access to special treatment and priority at the hospital. UCLA is a publicly funded hospital, which means that taxpayers are subsidizing that special treatment. At NYU Langone, 33 different medical workers reported being pressured to prioritize donors and trustees over anyone else. And while NYU Langone is a private hospital, they claim non-profit status, which means they avoid over $250 million a year in taxes by promising to benefit the community and opening their emergency room to everyone.
Starting point is 00:08:05 But not only was the hospital providing different care to VIP patients, it was prioritizing wealthy patients in the ER. So not only can the rich afford to buy their own private exclusive care, they also get to walk through the emergency room like Macklemore getting bottle service the Kids' Choice Awards. The New York Times piece details multiple examples of doctors being reprimanded if they didn't prioritize VIP patients, patients being diverted from NYU and dropped off at a public hospital nearby, and overall indifferent treatment of unhoused patients and others who couldn't pay anything for treatment. The rules and protocols are fundamentally different if the patient has
Starting point is 00:08:45 enough money. Or time. Time is money and in time. More like just in time, or like? Not more like, exactly like. Another thing money will get you other than tigers and personal watercraft is access to medicine. Have you ever heard of the presidential candy man? And no, I'm not talking about the guy who brings Trump his Laffy Taffy, although it is worth mentioning, because when you're rich enough, you can have a weird little freak
Starting point is 00:09:10 follow you around with candy and everyone will politely ignore it like a fart in an elevator. That's real. He really has a Laffy Taffy guy. I'm talking about Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician for both Obama and Trump, who regularly provided their staff members with Ambien,
Starting point is 00:09:27 which is like speed, but for sleeping, and Provigil, which is like heroin for being awake. When that story broke, various White House officials tried to defend Jackson by arguing that casual prescription drug abuse is just a fact of life for the highest echelons of government. But listen, pal, we've all tried that one before.
Starting point is 00:09:45 The rest of us just go to jail. Regular people are allowed to casually do pills. When we do that, it's considered a life-ruining addiction and moral failure. We are treated with harsh sentences and bloated law enforcement budgets, which do nothing to address addiction. The only thing those things do is send a whole lot
Starting point is 00:10:03 of struggling people to prison. And it's not just government officials who get this narcotics hall pass. Thanks to VH1, most people know that celebrities also have a wildly different level of access to drugs than the rest of us, because who doesn't wanna get high with Gabriel Byrne? In fact, you could say that fame is almost a currency,
Starting point is 00:10:22 like how time is money and in time. But the only currency that really matters is that sweet, sweet Johnny Cash. Fame is completely optional. The New York Times found that prescriptions for serious conditions were disproportionately filled in wealthy neighborhoods. And that's not even considering
Starting point is 00:10:40 other intersectional factors. For example, there's evidence that doctors on average prescribe less medication to black patients than white patients. There's exactly one explanation for that and it sucks pretty hard. Pills and priority treatment are only the beginning when you've got money to burn. Just like minutes and hours are only the beginning
Starting point is 00:11:00 when you've got a hundred years to burn on your glowing green arm clock and gorgeous Timecop Killian Murphy is hot on your trail. If it looks good Killian. Wellness has become a major buzzword over the past decade. And while Gwyneth Paltrow and her many goop imitators target the 40 year old white woman demographic, an entirely separate industry has emerged
Starting point is 00:11:20 around targeting the Gwyneth Paltrow demographic, which is to say Mooney rich people. At the heart of the medical wellness industry are luxury hotels, gyms, clubs, and other residences, all of which seek to bring expensive, luxury medical care out of the doctor's office and into everyday life. These organizations have invested millions of dollars into providing IV drips, MRIs, cryotherapy, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy to their clients. That sounds like a shipping invoice for future Dracula,
Starting point is 00:11:51 who probably also has a Laffy Taffy guy. And maybe you could have a Laffy Taffy guy too. We're not talking tigers here, so maybe Laffy Taffy guy seems affordable. Some of these ads may even be for a Laffy Taffy, and there's literally no way for me to know. But the important thing is the ads are coming, they're on their way, maybe they're Laffy Taffy. And there's literally no way for me to know. But the important thing is the ads are coming. They're on their way.
Starting point is 00:12:06 Maybe they're Laffy Taffy, maybe they're not. I can't see the future. I'm not a Dracula. Ten hot! At ease, soldier. No, wait, sorry. I need you to ten hot again. Do it!
Starting point is 00:12:16 Ah! Look, you can't be at ease when I'm telling you about Ground News, which you can visit via the QR code on the screen. Ground News is a sponsor we reached out to that's both a well-designed app and a well-designed website. It gathers news from across the political spectrum and compares coverage so that you can be at ease, soldier,
Starting point is 00:12:35 while reading the news, like the news that Donald Trump is planning a big military parade in Washington, D.C. on what will just happen to be his 79th birthday. My goodness. On ground news, I can see that right-leaning sources are more likely to lean into the 250th birthday of the army angle, while other sources point out that it's a big military birthday bash for Trump
Starting point is 00:12:59 and that it will cost a breezy $92 million. That news does not put me at ease. Seems like a bit of a Charlie Fox trot, if you know what I'm saying. So cut through the Charlie at ground.news slash SMN. With that link, you can get 40% off unlimited access, a factuality chart, and a blind spot feature that highlights which outlets are pulling covert ops with certain stories.
Starting point is 00:13:27 That's ground.news slash smn to get 40% off unlimited access for yourself or someone you know. The link is in the description, and you can be at ease finally......now. Wait, no! Just kidding. It's spring, which means I am BUSY. I've got so much going on, I barely have time to post fake Saturday Night Live host musical guest pairings on the public cork board down at City Hall. But that's not a problem anymore thanks to Hungry Root, which makes it easy to eat delicious meals using high quality ingredients that fit any nutrition plan. All of Hungry Root's nutritious recipes can be made in 15 minutes or less, so you can spend more time fantasizing about an SNL episode
Starting point is 00:14:26 with host Steve Gutenberg and musical guest TV on the radio. Wow. Gosh, that would be so fun, right? If only. Anyway, Hungry Root also has smoothies, kid snacks, salad kits, and dessert treats. You can keep your whole family fed and healthy with plenty of time left over to sneak a bunch of note cards into City Hall
Starting point is 00:14:51 and post all kinds of weird SNL pairings on the corkboard. What about, let's see, ooh, Hillary Duff and local natives, huh? Remember them? It's okay, it's okay, that would never happen. It's just all in your mind. Anyway, thank goodness for Hungry Root is the point people. I love Hungry Root. Take advantage of this exclusive offer. For a limited time, get 40% off your first box plus get a free item in every box for life of the subscription.
Starting point is 00:15:25 Once you cancel the subscription, presumably that ends. Anyway, go to hungryroot.com slash smn and use code smn. That's hungryroot.com slash smn code smn to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life of your subscription. HungryRoot.com slash SMN, code SMN. Hmm, let's see, what else? Alan Alda and Skrillex, huh? Now, that is what I call two people.
Starting point is 00:16:04 Welcome back. We are still not a Dracula, vink, vink. We were talking about healthcare and how, like, regardless of an individual's excessive wealth, what if we all had a good one of it? Some companies, like The Well, have integrated wellness into living spaces and health clubs as part of a new real estate trend. At The Well, you can spend $1.25 million to live 24-7 in a fully immersive wellness experience, complete with built-in aromatherapy air filters, lymphatic drainage showers, skincare refrigerators,
Starting point is 00:16:41 travertine sinks, and built-in therapeutic LED panels. It's like an escape room for Patrick Bateman. The wellness real estate market is approaching a trillion dollars, which is such a large amount of money for something that does not exist for 99.9% of the entire world. And it's not a coincidence that these elite industries are all connected to vital resources that
Starting point is 00:17:05 are quickly becoming more and more scarce for anyone who isn't uber wealthy. Air purifiers and spring water countertops? That's clean air and fresh water to you and me, baby! And it's hard not to think of a future where these amenities are only accessible if you have enough money. As the world gets more polluted, less livable, and generally more hostile, there will be more and more people willing to spend more and more money on wellness, by which I and they mean livable conditions. For instance, the Love Life Gym in LA
Starting point is 00:17:37 currently offers a top dollar concierge membership tier worth $50,000, which is nearing that imaginary number-for-most-people territory again. That price point gets you unlimited doctor visits and intensive medical testing, including optional blood lab panels and bone mineral density scans. I'm telling you, future Dracula! Now, of course, not all of these treatments and tests and bone massages are actually good for you. I don't think I could guess what a bone mineral density scan is for, even if you paid
Starting point is 00:18:10 me $50,000. But I could venture a guess for 50,000 years. Not all of these exclusive treatments are even necessarily good. One of the staple services provided by wealth spas is on-demand IV drips, but there's very little evidence that they're any more beneficial than drinking a glass of water like a regular jabroni. Plus, there's some evidence that it might actually be bad for you. Kendall Jenner was hospitalized in 2018 after a bad reaction to an IV, and in 2023, a woman died after receiving IV drip therapy at a spa in Texas. IVs can
Starting point is 00:18:47 be actively dangerous to patients with pre-existing conditions like kidney disease or hypertension. But proponents of the treatment market it like a juiced-up vitamin gummy. Nothing to worry about, it improves your sleep and brightens your skin with the luminous green glow of ten more years added to your arm clock. But despite the questionable efficacy of bougie treatments and expensive tests, the sheer amount of available amenities has become a status symbol within hyper-wealthy wellness communities, and as the rich people who make up these communities continue to perpetuate this glowing arms race, the disparity between the haves and have-nots will continue to widen.
Starting point is 00:19:26 The point is this. All of these exclusive offerings, from VIP treatment at hospitals to bone scans to on-demand military-grade opiates, are forms of specialized preventative health care. Preventative care focuses on spending money to stay healthy rather than spending on medical bills once you're already sick. Something, again, that would be good for everybody. And it's a rapidly growing trend among those who can afford it. And that's because all of the services, and all of the other services, are ultimately focused on one thing. Longevity. Rich people don't want to die.
Starting point is 00:20:03 I mean, most people don't want to die, but rich people really don't want to die. They have too much money to spend, after all. According to a 2023 survey, almost half of Americans earning over $250,000 a year said they would spend the majority of their discretionary income on their health and longevity. If you just asked, what the hell is discretionary income? It's the money you or I would spend on something like a movie ticket to see just off the top of my head,
Starting point is 00:20:33 the motion picture in time. But when you're pulling in over a quarter million dollars a year, discretionary income is the money you spend trying to cure death. But not everyone's death, just your own, of course. And since we're talking about rich nerds who are obsessed with owning death so hard he comes back to play bass in your band,
Starting point is 00:20:53 we might as well talk about the king of death escaping rich nerds, Brian Johnson. No, not the singer for ACTC, the guy who monitors his son's erections. No, not Mike Johnson, the other guy who monitors his son's erections. No, not Mike Johnson, the other guy who monitors his son's erections, Brian Johnson with a Y. Johnson is a venture capitalist
Starting point is 00:21:12 who made his fortune buying Venmo and then immediately selling it to PayPal. Because money is stupid. Recently, he's begun turning himself into a human guinea pig for cutting edge longevity treatments. He has an on-call staff of at least 30 doctors led by regenerative physician Oliver Zollman, which sounds like the name and title of a pervert wizard.
Starting point is 00:21:35 Though to that wizard's credit, he left Johnson's longevity startup blueprint due to concerns that its health supplements were bullshit. Concernicus ethicus! Together, these boner necromancers obsessively read scientific literature on longevity and aging, and then use Johnson's body as a testing ground for new treatments.
Starting point is 00:21:57 To make this work, he spent millions of dollars and built an entire medical suite in his own home. But to guys like this, it's worth it to chase the dream of immortality. To quote this Bloomberg article, Johnson wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis, and rectum of an 18-year-old.
Starting point is 00:22:21 That's why he's obsessed with his son's blood and boners. If he can match his son girth for girth, he'll know he's one more step ahead of death. Talk about a bone scan. Johnson has essentially gamified his own health and in doing so amassed a following of weird little online freaks who love watching a weird little wealthy freak
Starting point is 00:22:43 turn life into an Xbox achievement list. Sort of like turning it into a glowing green health meter visible on your forearm at all times. He's even started a leaderboard program for people who want to try to play along at home. He calls it Rejuvenation Olympics, and it costs $1,000 a year to participate. He even has a supplement company
Starting point is 00:23:02 because all of these guys are legally required to have one. But Johnson is probably most famous for using his teenage son as a Mad Max-style blood bag, hoping that transfusing younger plasma into his body would improve his metabolism and cognitive functions. He's basing that hope off of a study where scientists literally stitched mice together until they shared one circulatory system, which is ironically exactly what it looks like is going on in this picture. I can't decide what's more cruel,
Starting point is 00:23:32 sewing living animals together or naming your son Talmage, naming the animals Talmage. Brian and T-Maj might be the most popular examples, but they're just following in the footsteps of a long line of biohackers who are sort of the natural conclusion of the wealthy's obsession with longevity. One of the first tech biohackers to gain media attention was Eric Matzner, who takes over
Starting point is 00:23:56 40 supplements a day and claims to have the biological profile of someone in their 20s, despite being in his 30s and looking like a man in his 30s. Dude, at least spend your millions on something fun like a roller coaster. Tim Garner, a rich guy, most famous for telling millennials that they're poor because of avocado toast, spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to conduct full body MRIs, brain scans,
Starting point is 00:24:24 and monthly blood testing, and then synthesizes that information into a specialized regimen of over 50 pills a day. No idea if any of that works, but it sounds pretty cool, and we might get a better idea of the actual effectiveness of any of these treatments if they were accessible to everyone rather than just the 12 wealthiest future Draculas in history.
Starting point is 00:24:46 Future Dracula! I want to suck my sons! No! No! Absolutely not! I was going to say blood! Sure, sure you were. See you on season 4 of the White Lotus, you freak.
Starting point is 00:25:00 So even though the elite are spending multiple fortunes each year to roll back the glowing green odometer on their forearms, researchers have found that healthcare itself accounts for only 10-20% of the factors that contribute to a population's overall health. The majority of factors are environmental and social conditions, such as your access to basic things like food, shelter, and a good zip code. You keen-eyed showedies might have noticed that all of those factors are directly tied to wealth. And there may not be any hard data on this, but it sure seems like that might be a big
Starting point is 00:25:37 reason why goofballs like this goddamn future Dracula think the wild nonsense they're subjecting themselves to is actually working. But you know what you can count on? The fine sponsors of this program, almost none of which are future Dracula's. Let's run through a few things that are purple, shall we? Eggplant, amethysts, grimace, and that little shop pay button you see at checkout on many popular online stores. Well folks, that's Shopify. And there is a reason so
Starting point is 00:26:16 many businesses sell with it. Because Shopify makes it incredibly easy to start and run your business. Purple Nerple! Shopify is behind 10% of all e-commerce in the US from big companies like Mattel to smaller vendors just getting started. And if that's you, they can help out with visibly pleasing, ready to go templates to express your brand style and forget about the code. Plus, all your tasks will be in one place, and Shopify also comes with built-in
Starting point is 00:26:50 marketing tools to expand your user base. And did I mention purple? It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout. That purple button reminds people of grape soda and wonka bars. If you want to see fewer online carts being abandoned, well, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash more news. Go to Shopify.com slash more news. Go to Shopify.com slash more news. One more time for Twilight Sparkle. Shopify.com slash more news.
Starting point is 00:27:36 Hi, didn't see you there. How did those ads treat you? Hopefully none of them were for jade eggs that go inside you. And before you ask, yes, you can swallow it, but either way, it's not going to do anything for your sleep rhythm. The more health and wellness continues to mutate into a boutique industry, the more difficult healthcare is going to be for everyone else to access. Even basic stuff like access to physicians and specialists, and even to equal treatment in freaking emergency rooms. But even ignoring that, if we only look at what is currently considered healthcare by most people, poor people obviously have it worse.
Starting point is 00:28:15 There are a disproportionate number of ERs in wealthy areas, because as we've covered on this show before, hospitals are mostly privately owned and may be incentivized, even if they technically have non-profit status, to put up shop in richer neighborhoods, making the ones that do exist in lower-income neighborhoods extremely crowded, understaffed, and poorly maintained. And this isn't just a problem with emergency rooms. Even if you get in the door and see a primary care physician, odds are that your finances will determine the quality of care you receive. As we said earlier, more affluent people
Starting point is 00:28:48 are more likely to get prescriptions filled for serious conditions, but low-income patients are more likely to receive inadequate treatments and get tossed riskier medications like opioids. Of course, as we also mentioned earlier, unless you're black, because apparently some doctors think that black people just tolerate pain more.
Starting point is 00:29:06 But the point is, those opioids often lead to addiction, which only fuels the perception that people with less money are somehow more prone to addiction despite empirically having less access to drugs and to the means with which to pay for them. Even addiction recovery is treated drastically differently depending on how much money you have. I'm not even talking about the luxury rehab clinic cliché, although those are absolutely worth mentioning. For example, methadone clinics are often the only way for people with little to no income to access effective treatment for opioid addiction, and those clinics can be
Starting point is 00:29:39 extremely hard on people trying to manage their addiction. But if you're rich, you can just whip out the ol' fast pass again and skip that step altogether. In 2002, the FDA approved buprenorphine as an effective treatment for opiate addiction, but the certification process to prescribe buprenorphine is messy and complicated. So for a long time, many doctors just didn't bother prescribing it, and those that did charged a premium for it. But wealthy folks with addiction problems can just use one of those concierge services to go straight to an S-tier doctor willing to prescribe anything they want.
Starting point is 00:30:16 In 2022, Mulligan President Joseph Robespierre Biden actually signed legislation that eliminated a lot of those complications, leaving it up to doctors to decide how to treat their patients with addiction. The problem is, addiction treatment is highly stigmatized, due in no insignificant part to the fact that the wealthy get to receive comfortable, effective treatment in privacy, while everyone else gets over-prescribed addictive medications and left with inadequate and often punitive treatment to manage their all but inevitable addiction.
Starting point is 00:30:48 And private equity groups now own one third of methadone clinics in the United States, which means the wealthy are hoarding healthcare and making a profit off of our lack of access. In other words, you could say they're hoarding time on their arm-dometers and selling their rollover minutes for hours. The goal of a good analogy, you see, is clarity.
Starting point is 00:31:11 And I think that one was a slam dunk. Time is money, you see, you basketball. Let's take a big ol' step back now, though. If you're watching this video and aren't a good friend of the show who still hasn't given me money yet for some reason, Mark Cuban, you're probably not mega rich. If you are mega rich, you can go to patreon.com slash some more news and click the highest tier available and also add thousands and thousands of dollars,
Starting point is 00:31:32 maybe even a million dollars. Oh my gosh, what if it was a million dollars? But let's assume for the sake of time, which is money, that you're not mega rich. Does your healthcare look anything like what's available to these people? Do the numbers on your all arm clock look anything like the numbers these doofuses are putting up to cocoon themselves in their son's blood?
Starting point is 00:31:52 The growing gap of wealth inequality is directly related to a growing gap of health inequities. A 2019 study found that income, along with race and gender, actually play a larger role in health outcomes than they did 30 years ago in the 1990s. And that's not because any of these future Dracula spells actually work. According to Frederick Zimmerman, the study's lead author, the health of wealthy people has pretty much plateaued, while the overall health of people with the lowest income has been sharply declining, like a spiraling countdown on a digital arm clock.
Starting point is 00:32:26 See, yes, time is money. But an idea we've been circling a bit is, more importantly, money is time. If you're rich, you have more time. You can buy it. More time for leisure, more time for pleasure, more time for spa weeks, more time to watch in time a few more times.
Starting point is 00:32:47 If you have less money, you can buy less time. Less time means more stress. More stress means worse health outcomes. Worse health outcomes could mean more medical debt and thus less money and thus less time to watch in time a few more times. Despite the cause of this disparity being blindingly obvious to everyone else,
Starting point is 00:33:08 like the metaphor of your life as a currency that is traded by the wealthy, it's been used to justify the diet eugenicist belief that poor people just don't care about their health as much and therefore don't have the same right to live. If they cared, they'd simply be rich. It belies the core belief underneath that they are better than you because they're rich
Starting point is 00:33:31 and that they're rich because they're better than you. It's why history's wealthiest partial Beetlejuice transformation, Elon Musk spends so much time calling people NPCs or non-playable characters in a video game. The people you ram off the sidewalk with your trans am and Grand Theft Auto V. Musk certainly doesn't use the term
Starting point is 00:33:51 because he's good at video games. It's because he thinks of himself as the main character of life. And the rest of us simply do not exist. Oh, sure, we theoretically do in the way that a trillion dollars is theoretically real to you or me. But pre-Lawn Musk thinks of us
Starting point is 00:34:09 as barely sentient computer programs at his disposal who don't deserve the same privileges that he does. And he is definitely not the only one. It's a hive of future Draculas, and their arm clocks don't count as sunlight. For example, Brian Johnson isn't the only.1%-er obsessed with living forever. Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Hulk Mania slayer Peter Thiel have all made massive investments
Starting point is 00:34:38 into anti-aging technology, cryonics, and immortality research. The drive these men have to pour endless piles of money into what sounds to most people like a fairy tale ultimately comes from the same place as Musk's NPC worldview. The belief that their genes, their lineage, or even their individual brains and bodies are uniquely better and more deserving of ongoing life. So maybe not diet eugenics, this is smoking the whole pack of eugenics, because at the end of the day, these Time Lords aren't offering their immortality chambers to the general public.
Starting point is 00:35:16 They might claim their researches for the greater good of humanity, but that's exactly what a Dracula would say. Every one of these treatments that again again have apparently led to a glorious plateau for the upper upper class, still costs thousands to millions of dollars. And here we are again in the land of sums that technically exist.
Starting point is 00:35:37 Look, I get it. Nobody wants to die. Dying is scary and all of my guitars are here. We're not less healthy because we care less about our health.'re not less healthy because we care less about our health. We're less healthy because we barely have the resources to simply exist, let alone the unlimited discretionary income to prioritize vacuum sealing our bodies in a most veratoo tomb of our son's blood and dick measurements. Most of us have to get
Starting point is 00:36:02 jobs, as in more than one, just burning through the numbers on our health bars. I'd love to sit around messing around with future Dracula shit like the Juggalos and Chronicles of Riddick, but I don't have the time or the money or the time money. But shouldn't that not matter? Maybe everyone doesn't deserve cryo chambers or bags of sunblood, but everyone deserves to be healthy. Certainly in a society that rewards a guy like Brian Johnson with enough discretionary income to build an immortality machine that electrocutes your penis.
Starting point is 00:36:36 There's this technology, you have a wand and you sit in a chair and then the technician uses the wand and basically shocks your penis through the acoustic technology. And it's like it does the same thing as workouts doing where you're creating micro injuries so then it rebuilds. Okay, so maybe he deserves the penis machine, but the rest of us just want to have the same access to quality care that's being gate kept bypt by future Draculas in their Castlevanias. There shouldn't be tiers of healthcare separated according
Starting point is 00:37:11 to how many numbers are in your bank account. There should just be healthcare. We want our general population to be healthy. Right? We're not striving for 1% of the population to be a plateaued amount of really healthy while everybody else suffers and struggles. Right? Bed Christ knows there's enough wealth generated in this country every moment to make it available to everyone. We shouldn't have to stumble gorgeousness first into some weird lonely billionaire's fortune just to get some time added back to the clock.
Starting point is 00:37:44 Now if you'll excuse me, I may have the discretionary income to TaskRabbit a Laffy Taffy guy. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Got like a piece of broccoli. Could we get some broccoli in here, please? You know what? Cause I do. Which is, now you know that I'm thanking you for watching and asking you to like the video
Starting point is 00:38:32 and subscribe to the channel and tell that helicopter to quit it. Quit your business, loud helicopter. So what did I say? Like the video, subscribe to the channel. That'd be amazing. Leave a comment about how great this is going for me. And we've got a podcast called Even More News. You can listen to it where you listen to all your podcasts or you can watch it and listen to it.
Starting point is 00:38:55 Or you watch this show just now on YouTube and this show you can listen to as a podcast if you'd prefer to do that instead. But I, I, I wish, I hope that you look at my face while I say the words instead of the podcast version or whatever. I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do. I support all your decisions. So listen to it if you want, watch it if you want. You know what else? It's going even better than I originally thought. Merch.
Starting point is 00:39:27 We got a merch store. We've got the URL for that merch store is on the screen. Got it. I'm gonna go to you website and I'm gonna get all the things that have stuff on them. Oh my gosh. I am looking at them and I can't wait to go to the website. So make sure to subscribe to the channel and like the video and leave a comment about how
Starting point is 00:40:01 well this went. How fast and efficiently I got the information out to you. Tell me what a great job specifically this part was done by me for it. Cut.

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