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Until the new year, it's very exciting. Joining us now, Dr. Mehmed Oz. He is the Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator. You can follow him on X at Dr.
Oz. That's super easy. Dr. Oz, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the Brian Kilmead Show. Welcome and happy new year.
Happy New Year, Mary. And I'd say dramatic step up to have you hosting instead of Brian. And thank you for taking charge, taking the reins of the show. Wow, thank you. And not only that, but I am cuter than he is.
Everything's better. I hope he's listening. That's it. I'm never going to work on this show again. I hope you're happy.
So, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that. All 50 states are going to receive awards under this rural health transformation program. It's a $50 billion initiative. And the first thing that comes to mind, like, yay, I think this is great because rural health has really been hit hard, especially when you have like a lot of illegals who hit some of these hospitals along the southern border and a lot of them closing, and even as far inland as Colorado. We need to help these rural areas, these rural hospitals.
But then I hear that, like, well, wait a minute, on the heels of all this Somali fraud, we're talking about $50 billion. How are there certain safeguards that are in place to make sure that this money just doesn't disappear? There are safeguards, Mary, and there's a very big difference between Medicare, which takes care of older Americans, and Medicaid, which takes care of folks who are most vulnerable. They both need support, they both need our love. But within the Medicaid program, there's inherently an issue because we don't actually get to make all the decisions.
A lot of decisions are made by the states. They just sort of give us the bill. Even though the federal taxpayer is on the hook, it's not like we have a tremendous amount of insight into how they spend the money. The Rural Health Transformation Fund is a completely different ballgame. It's true that it's coming out of my agency, CMS, but the President and Congress wanted to make sure that we gave it to the governors and then had very tight controls over how the money was spent so that it would represent the largest investment ever in rural health care at a time when rural health care is really suffering.
It also would allow us to, by increasing by 60% the money that these rural areas are getting, it would allow them to transform, to right-size their systems. And that's the aspiration that we all have. And that's what I'm saying. I'm confident will deliver. We just doled the money out yesterday on time, on schedule.
All the judging was done, all the applications to tell us exactly how you're going to spend the money without wasting it. All that now is in the books. This information, most of it's public. I encourage the public to look at it, but there are no Somalians distributing rural health transformation funds. It is directly given to governors.
They are directly liable. And we're not going to have the kind of shenanigans that took place in Minnesota when the governor wasn't watching because we're watching. Hi, everyone. It's Brian Kilmead here. Are you tired of those uncomfortable dress shirts, especially when they bunch up under a sweater?
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Yeah, and tell people about this a little bit about the condition of some of our more rural hospitals, because most of America, believe it or not, is rural once you get off the two coasts. But there's more than 700 rural hospitals that are at risk of closure. And that's a lot. And I realize that they're smaller and they may not have as a big of a service area, but they're still incredibly important. What happened?
How did we get here?
Well, we got to this problem years of abuse and ignoring the problem. If you're a big hospital system located in an urban area, you're pretty good at lobbying to get money spent the way that you think it should be spent in your town. Even if Medicaid is giving the state money, most of it does tend to go to the bigger institutions that have lobbyists and are well connected. The rural parts of the state are at the very bottom of the food chain. They just never quite get heard.
And so this Transformation Fund's desire is to start to take advantage of tips that have worked in other parts of the country in the health care system. As an example, if you're using technology to improve the quality of your health care, if you're using medical records that are electronic, if you have quality control, tools like telemedicine, that all now becomes accessible to rural parts of the country where your zip code determines your life expectancy. Shockingly, you tend to live a lot shorter in rural America because of these problems with things like delivering healthy babies with a Appropriate supervision, access to cancer care, and the like. By forcing rural America to re-envision what health care looks like there, we can take advantage of 21st century solutions. All the states have this problem.
All of them want these issues addressed. None of them had the freedom given by both financial security but also the way this program is designed to actually make these tough decisions.
Now they have. And when I say freedom, we have the ability to call money back if it's not used the way people have promised to use it, which is actually empowering to governors.
Now they can go to the state health commissioner and say, guys, you're not spending the money in the right way because you're not giving pharmacists the ability to function at the height of their licensure. Or you go to the doctors' groups and say, hey, we have a better way to provide health care that requires telemedicine, but you've got to lighten up a little bit on some of the rules that you guys have, the vice script you have on how medicine is practiced. We can give high-quality access care to all people in our state. Those decisions historically have been, they pushed to the side.
Now state legislatures are on the hook. If they don't do snap waivers, if they don't allow for the President's fitness test to be given in schools, they will pay the price. That gives the governor a tool to force change. Yeah, I'm glad we're bringing, on a side note, the president's physical fitness test back because I still have trauma from trying to climb that damn rope and touch the beam at the top of the gym with a one-inch thick mat underneath me should I fall. Honest to goodness, that has come up in every conversation I've had with members of the administration.
All of us survived that. I mean, I didn't live in like heights, but I think we'll have a safer version of it. But you just described very accurately the death-defying five-year-old moves we all had to make. Yeah, and they had like they put a mat under you that was like a quarter of an inch thick in case you to break your fall as you're plummeting to the gym floor. It's a body bag.
That's all it was good for it. It wrapped up the pieces. Exactly.
Somehow our parents were like, well, next time you won't fall. When this money goes to these states, you talk about the state legislature. Are we truly going, though, to give the money? To the hospitals. How is the money going to be allocated?
I really want the physicians and the nurses and the techs to be the ones who decide what they need because they're the ones who deal with it every single day. And having lawyers make that decision to me is just not a good formula. I'm a firm believer in subsidiarity, which is a Catholic term that basically advocates what you're saying. Let the lowest ranking person who's capable of the decision make the choice. You don't want the Pope deciding on some parish issue if the parish priest is just good at just fine at making that choice.
So we want hospitals and health care systems right-sized by the people who work in them. And that starts, by the way, with bringing in more doctors and nurses and pharmacists. We don't have enough in rural parts of the country.
So there's no point me providing more funding for mental health care services if there are literally no psychologists and psychiatrists working anywhere near you. But we could have telemedicine solutions or begin to use AI if these doctors and nurses want it. And by giving them control, and this is the beauty of this plan, we're forcing innovation. By putting this kind of support, structured financial support in the rural health care, when they make smart decisions, they're going to pass those best practices onto the urban areas as well.
So the entire healthcare System is going to get better. And why? Because the President cares about this stuff. Congress is wise in how it crafted the policy. Notice, the law was signed by the President July 4th.
We have already dished out all of the money for the first year. On time, on schedule, high quality. Everyone's up. People can complain about how much money they got, but they can't complain about the process. It was fair.
Yeah. And to having you in charge of it, I I like having more doctors involved. I think we could solve honestly, I think we could solve the health care problem in this country by putting Congress taking away their Cadillac Health Plan, put them on the Obamacare exchanges and within A week, you're going to solve the healthcare problem in this country. We put lawyers in charge of it instead of doctors. And to me, that was the biggest mistake we made concerning health care in this country.
It's ridiculous. Dr. Oz, thank you so much for joining me. It was a pleasure. And best of luck.
Again, I love that there's a doctor involved in this and running the show and saying this is what needs to be done. It's a very welcome change. And all the best in the new year. Lots of blessings to you. God bless you.
Take care, Mary. This is Ainsley Earhart. Thank you for joining me for the 52-episode podcast series, The Life of Jesus. A listening experience that will provide hope, comfort, and understanding of the greatest story ever told. Listen and follow now at FoxNewsPodcasts.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.
