Walter Kirn
speaker
1,232 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 24 Nov
Walter Kirn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.
Appearances
Great.
Yeah.
See you then.
Great to be here.
Is this a country of politics or a country of issues? Because in this case, Bernie and Trump agree. And Bernie has been loud on this matter for a long time. He should get his butt over to the White House and show some solidarity on this because they're going to need it against the greatest lobby in American life next to the, I suppose, military industrial complex.
The fact is that drugs like Zempik, and this one in particular, are not that complex. It's a peptide called semaglutide. It can be bought cheaply as the peptide itself. In its patented drug form, it's made more expensive. But the excuse that... The U.S.
has to pay higher prices, vastly higher prices in order to subsidize the research and development of these drugs so that the rest of the world can benefit from lower prices is ridiculous. But it has been the fig leaf, the massive fig leaf that they have used to cover their profiteering for decades.
Really, under Obamacare, there was a real conspicuous omission because the supposed aim of the bill, of the legislation, was to lower prices for American healthcare, but it did not include negotiation with drug companies for lower prices. Everybody noticed that at the time, that carve-out, as it were, and now Trump's ending it, and frankly,
This is a demolition job on mere partisanship because just as you quoted the Young Turks person, if we can't get together on this, then we can't get together on anything.
Megan, you and I both attended the RFK Jr. confirmation hearings, I happen to know. I was only one row away from you. And I think we saw there both Bernie and Elizabeth Warren hectoring. The man who wanted to pressure big pharma and challenge them on all sorts of fronts, from the effectiveness of their drugs to testing drugs like the vaccines and so on and prices.
And they were acting like they were lawyers for Pfizer. Well, everybody's a lawyer for Pfizer if they're getting paid by them. And I'm afraid Bernie, you know, he makes it a little complicated. He gets a lot of money from them. He gets it from their employees, and he claims that he gets it one little bit at a time, and it doesn't represent management contributing to his cause.
But it's a massive set of donations to him and to the Democrats. He can prove his independence, if you'd like, by coming together with Trump. And if they think there are some problems with this executive order, the particular way that it's going to happen, that's fine. But the principle has been agreed on, as you say, by the horseshoe for a while.
So it's time to do something for the American people. And we must transcend TDS in certain cases. I wish we did in most cases or all. But if we can't do it here, I don't know where we're going to start.
Well, it's not only clever, it's absolutely essential in a time of budget cutting, particularly to do something like this, because the biggest client, the biggest patient in the United States, so to speak, is the United States government. It's the taxpayer who pays for these drugs in so many cases, you know, through all kinds of programs.
And it's going to save us collectively a lot of money and individually, but you know, untold amount of money in family budgets. I just think that it was time that Trump really held their feet to the fire on the social issues and the populist programs that they claim to support. And I think it's a masterstroke. I did a little reporting on it last night. They've kept it very close.
We were all taken by surprise. I'm shocked that it didn't leak. And pharma's counterattack is going to be interesting because it will be somewhat deceptive. Already, they're trying to argue that somehow this is a blow against the third world, which will no longer have the benefit of our subsidized drug research.
And I've even seen people say, well, they're trying to solve immigration by killing all the people that would immigrate here. I mean, it's going to be hysterical like you haven't seen before.
Wow. Frankly, I have tears in my eyes, not this moment, but I did, because I'll tell you why. The price of drugs, especially drugs that are for limited or sort of small diseases that don't create a big market, you know, where the cost can't be spread across a lot of patients, can be absolutely ruinous. You say $1,000 a prescription. Let's talk $200,000.
I mean, there are drugs for things like hepatitis and for various cancers and so on that are shocking. There are Rolls Royce. And we're going to change lives here. We're going to prevent families from going into bankruptcy. We're going to cut the budget. And. Lastly, there has been talk about pharma ads on TV. It is not just Congress that pharma controls, Megan.
It's MSNBC and CNN and Fox and the other cable news networks that we're all familiar with through carrying about 70% of the weight with their advertising in some cases. Now, that influence totally deformed our COVID response and maybe guided it to some extent, if you really want to be.
Showing 1001–1020 of 1,232 · page 51 of 62
← Previous
Next →