Episode 398 Scott Adams: Reframing Healthcare as a Question of Systems Versus Goals

Date: 2019-02-01 | Duration: 8:01

Topics

Walls are necessary, for Capitalism to exist You can’t have Capitalism without protecting wealth You need wealth in order to have more healthcare Whiteboard Discussion Achieving Healthcare via Capitalism

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> [!note] Rough Transcript
> 
> This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

## Transcript

[0:04]

all right let's try this again now with the third microphone because my microphones keep breaking for some reason uh but I hope you can hear me this is going to be a single topic um single topic uh Periscope and it's going to be on the topic of looking at healthc care and maybe a little bit about the wall in terms of systems versus goals now if you have read my book had to fail at almost everything and still wind big you know that I talk about the limitation of having goals one of the problems is you don't know exactly what you want all the time sometimes there might be multiple things that make you happy and it might limit your your uh let's say your imagination for different solutions that could be even better than what your goal was so let me show you what this looks like in terms of healthc care let's go to the Whiteboard all right all right so here's a system for getting more Health Care

[1:04]

a system for getting more Health Care the system is that you build walls and you improve competition which the uh the administration is doing now why do you need walls to have capitalism and of course if you have capitalism that makes you money and that creates you know wealth that can buy you Healthcare as well as other things so the question is why do you need walls for capitalism to work well here's a little economics lesson capitalism can only work if you can protect wealth period if you can't protect wealth you can't have capitalism so there's a reason that banks have walls and that vaults exist and that you have to show you know your your uh ID when you're using your credit card Etc uh the entire capitalist system depends on being able to protect any wealth that gets created until it can be used by the

[2:06]

gets created until it can be used by the people who created it if you create wealth and then other people can have it if they want it then you can't really have H capitalism for very long so I would argue that the border security is part of the system of protecting your assets because there is no other way to have capitalism it's not the only thing you're protecting you also have banks with walls you have buildings and offices that have security but in all cases you can't have capitalism unless you also protect the assets and right now if people can walk across the border in huge Caravans and potentially take advantage of other people's assets directly or indirectly then you're chipping away at capitalism so capitalism we know works and we saw today that uh secretary uh Azar if I'm pronouncing it right Health and Human Services has announced some new uh changes and regulations that would allow you to get uh your

[3:08]

would allow you to get uh your pharmaceutical meds cheaper and it's just a a tweak with the law and with transparency and with Kickbacks but there's also a broader set of uh plans that they have that I haven't looked at in great detail but they're actually doing a lot of work in terms of uh making sure that the market is more competitive so if you'd like to dig into that there's a there's a press release from uh Health and Human Services today that tells you all the things are doing to maximize competition right so you could say this isn't as good as you would like it and you'd be on safe ground but all I'm going to say is that it's a system in which you can understand all the moving parts and they're all well understood there's nothing controversial about this the alternative to this system and again I'm overgeneralizing is goals where you have Medicare for all but you don't really

[4:08]

Medicare for all but you don't really know how to get there because even as you've seen Howard Schultz and um Mike Bloomberg both Democrats and they both said yeah but we don't know how to get there so there's no system to get to the goal they they're also goals of being kind and caring that's great I love that goal I like I even like uh health care for everybody I love that as a goal and I like fairness if we could all agree what it was which is impossible but in in concept I'd like a fair world where everybody is kind and everybody has health care but I don't know how to get there except this way so if anybody can come up with a system that can that can deliver these three things you know a system that would give me kindness to the people who deserve it uh Medicare for all or some version of universal healthcare and fairness if I could get that I'm all over it all right I would

[5:09]

that I'm all over it all right I would support that in the heartbeat but I need to know what the system is how can you get there because raising taxes obviously won't do it so the thing that I wanted to add to this is the notion that if you're looking at the wall in isolation it's easy to get caught up in gosh is this just us being mean and not letting people over who have Desperate problems and are just trying to make a better life Etc and you can have great empathy for for uh the people who are coming across illegally and and I do but that doesn't make it a system it it's still just sort of Getting By and uh and not really building a system now one of the things that uh I'm amused by the news is that apparently there was some gigantic fenel bust and it was it happened when they checked the truck that was coming through one of the legal ports of entry and so some folks who are anti-wall said

[6:12]

and so some folks who are anti-wall said well here you go it's the biggest bus yet and they weren't trying to go through some border area with no wall they went right through the the main the main uh place and then they got caught to which I say there's probably a good reason that they went that way and that good reason is they had a big truck and you can't really take a truck over a rocky mountain or through a stream or over a wall they went where they went because we doing a pretty good job of systematically closing off the other places now it's sort of a infinite whack-a-mole problem but just be because you found some people going through the easiest place doesn't mean you shouldn't close off the other places that they could go if they don't like that place so you want to make it as hard as possible in as many ways as possible so you can catch as many people as possible and
and uh and that's your best solution all right um so you can still be against

[7:16]

right um so you can still be against walls and all that but it helps to keep a framework that one of these plans for at least for healthcare involves a system that we know works and it involves walls walls around Banks to protect assets walls around homes to protect assets and walls around countries to protect assets if you're not protecting your assets you can't have capitalism so you're seeing some of the Democrats try to have it both ways they're they're they're trying to have it that they like capitalism but they don't like protecting assets can't have it both ways um and that's all I wanted to add for now and I'll talk to you later