Sam Rohrer: Well, yesterday as we all know now, President Trump made history. He fulfilled another major promise when he removed the United States from the Iran Nuclear Deal. In just a moment, I’m going to play a short clip of a portion of his approximately 12-minute address where he laid that out. Since that announcement, Iranian lawmakers are burning United States flags. They are shouting “death to America,” which is what they have been shouting before but are now doing it even more. Iranian leadership have now said that they as a result are committed to spending vastly increased sums of money to do what? Greatly expand their production of missiles. No surprise. We know, if nothing else, by these actions that the president in fact did the right thing.
Sam Rohrer: Now, for the balance of the program though, we’re going to focus on health care. It’s been a while since we’ve talked about health care on the program, but that issue was a leading issue during the campaign, it’s a leading issue now, and we’re going to get an update from Twila Brase. She’s the president and co-founder of Citizens Counsel for Health Freedom. She’s been with us before, but she is probably one of the best authorities in what’s actually happening in the field of health care from a constitutional and right perspective.
Sam Rohrer: Now, our theme today I’m putting in this category, rising prices and DNA splices. Now, it’s a little play on word, but we’re going to start with rising prices and we’re going to go to DNA in the last segment. We’re going to talk about the rising health care price insurance costs generally, increasing drug prices specifically, and then we’re going to talk about DNA being connected from babies and from adults. Is there a scientific concern? Is there a moral concern? Well, all of this today on Stand in the Gap Today.
Sam Rohrer: With that introduction, I’d like to welcome you to the program. I’m Sam Rohrer, and I’m going to be joined by evangelist Dave Kistler, who today is joining us from where he’s been preaching this entire week, in West Virginia, and Dr. Gary Dull is from his studio as he normally does at his church there in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
Sam Rohrer: Well, men, the president said that he would make a decision on the Iran Nuclear Deal by May the 12th, which is Saturday. We’re sitting here on Wednesday, so he made the decision early on May the 8th. The world is reacting in a lot of diverse ways. After detailing Iranian violations and confirming their involvement in terrorism, the president said this yesterday. This is just a portion of what he said. Listen to this clip please.
President Trump: Iran’s bloody ambitions have grown only more brazen. In light of these glaring flaws, I announced last October that the Iran deal must either be renegotiated or terminated. Three months later, on January 12th, I repeated these conditions. I made clear that if the deal could not be fixed the United States would no longer be a party to the agreement. Over the past few months, we have engaged extensively with our allies and partners around the world including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We have also consulted with our friends from across the Middle East. We are unified in our understanding of the threat and in our conviction that Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon.
President Trump: After these consultations, it is clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement. The Iran Deal is defective at its core. If we do nothing, we know exactly what will happen. In just a short period of time, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror will be on the cusp of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons. Therefore, I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran Nuclear Deal.
Sam Rohrer: Well, that was the president yesterday. He said a lot more words than what you heard right there, but you got the context of what the president was saying.
Sam Rohrer: Dave, I want to go to you here, right off here in the first response. The statement by the president in this speech and his comments last Thursday that we shared yesterday on the program, the Day of Prayer, and things that he said, to me, they’re literally astounding. I just want to ask you this question here, from your perspective what characteristic in particular of presidential leadership stands out in that comment yesterday about the Iran deal and the comment last Thursday and what we’ve been seeing recently from the president? What characteristic stands out to you most?
Dave Kistler: Sam, let me mention three things very quickly. Number one, what he did yesterday was a promise he had made going way back in the campaign. He talked about how this deal was a terrible deal, it needed to be overturned. He didn’t just talk about it, he did it, so it was a promise made and a promise kept. That means there’s character involved there. If you listen to him outline the egregious violations on the part of Iran of the deal and what they have been involved in as far as terrorism and the promotion of it, he spoke with great conviction. So, not just character, conviction. And then the decisive nature, Sam, of this president. When he knows something is the right thing to do, he doesn’t wait, he doesn’t hedge, he’s not the least bit hesitate, he’s very decisive. All three of those, character, conviction, decisiveness, those are things we have been missing for a long time in presidential leadership. Thankfully, we have it now.
Sam Rohrer: Well, Dave, I agree with you. The contrast between what we saw the last administration, which was appeasement at the very least, a whole lot more perhaps, but clearly distinctive.
Sam Rohrer: Gary, I want to go to you because right after that, last night, actually this morning [inaudible 00:06:20] fully announced that three U.S. prisoners that were held there in North Korean prison camps, where Barack Obama did nothing to seek or gain their release, have been released. They’re on their way back. The president’s going to meet with them today at 2:00 at the White House. Mike Pompeo in one of his first efforts as the secretary of state is bringing them back. Gary, what does that tell you?
Gary Dull: Well, certainly, it shows leadership. I think that one of the reasons why we are seeing Donald Trump getting things done is because he speaks truth to the power that is. When you bring truth to the point of power or you speak truth to power, things happen. We are seeing that not only in Korea but in other certain circumstances across the nation as well as around the world. This is the kind of leadership that we should see in the president and I’m glad that he’s showing it on a regular basis.
Sam Rohrer: Well, I am too, Gary. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve talked on the program before about tough talk, which the president has done. We’ve talked about that, comparing that to appeasement, which we have seen and does not work very, very clearly. Tough talk without making the right choices becomes bad action. Fortunately, up to this point, we can be glad that we’ve had tough talk going in the right direction.
Sam Rohrer: Well, when President Trump was running for office, he and many other Republicans as we all remember spoke out against the unfairness and the high cost of Obamacare. The president said that he’d repeal Obamacare, but as we remember the Republican and Democrat leadership couldn’t do what needed to be done and bring themselves to actually repealing it, so they tampered with it and removed the mandate and a few other provisions. While that, I think, well, provides some help, President Trump and the administration is going to need to do more because the prices continue to rise as a result of the built-in, it’s what I call it the Obamacare destroy the competitive system ingredients.
Sam Rohrer: The truth about rising health care costs and who’s responsible for it it’s going to be the subject in this next segment. As I mentioned in the last segment, our special guest is Twila Brase. She’s president and co-founder of the Citizens Counsel for Health Freedom. She’s a certified public health care nurse. They have their own website which you can find at cchfreedom, that’s Citizens Counsel for Health Freedom, cchfreedom.com, I believe. Well, anyways, Twila you can clarify that if that’s not correct, but glad to have you with us here today.
Twila Brase: Thanks so much, and, yes, it’s dot org. Cch …
Sam Rohrer: Okay.
Twila Brase: … freedom.org.
Sam Rohrer: Okay. Very good. Thanks for clarifying. I wasn’t quite sure when I was looking and I should have had that straightened away. It’s dot org and we’ll have you give that again.
Sam Rohrer: Twila, you’ve been apart of this whole health care fight for a long time. Many people thought that with the repeal of the Obamacare mandate specifically that it would cut the heart out of the Obamacare plan and would lead us quickly back to the restoration of a free market, competitive health care system, yet it appears that it’s not happening, at least not yet. What are the facts about some of these double-digit increases in health care insurance costs that we’re hearing about? Who’s involved in doing that? Are the costs at all remotely justifiable?
Twila Brase: It was, just to be clear, taking away the mandate to purpose health insurance, and by the way it’s not repealed, the only thing that happened is that the penalty has been zeroed out. The mandate is still there, but you don’t have to pay a penalty if you don’t get health insurance. Nothing’s been repealed, just the penalty went down to zero and could be lifted, raised back up if Democrats got in charge. So, anyway, but that freedom, the freedom not to buy health insurance because you won’t be penalized is a half-baked freedom because the other part of freedom that needed to be added was the freedom to buy a catastrophic health insurance policy, a true health insurance policy, something that is there only for the catastrophes, only for the major medical conditions.
Twila Brase: Those are the affordable policies. They have high deductibles because you’re going to pay for everything else in cash and you’re only going to pull out that true insurance policy when you have a catastrophe because at the end of the day that’s why people buy insurance. They don’t buy it for the sinus infection. They don’t buy it for the little broken toe that only is going to need to be looked at and then used paper tape to splint. They don’t buy it for that. They buy it for the catastrophe that will wipe out their income, their bank account, and their ability to even work.
Twila Brase: Still, the Affordable Care Act says that true insurance, catastrophic coverage is prohibited. We have got a half-baked freedom here, and because we still don’t have access to affordable policies because the Affordable Care Act prohibits them, the health plans are raising their prices because they know that at least four million people, less people are going to purpose coverage and perhaps even more than that. There’s at least eight million people in Medicaid today that are only there because of the mandate and are likely not to go back in as soon as they have freedom from it. Since you have to apply every year, they just won’t, right? That’s one of the reasons is because it’s just, it’s half-baked freedom and it needed to be the whole thing.
Gary Dull: Well, it’s not only half-baked, but I’ve often said, Twila, that it’s not too affordable, you know?
Twila Brase: Yes.
Gary Dull: The phrase Affordable Care Act I think needs to be reworked. Going on, unless there’s some major change to the remains of what we call Obamacare, the system is just going to continue to break down. My question to you is do you see the possibility of some states stepping up to help their citizens and therefore within those states diminish the role of the federal government as it relates to insurance and health care?
Twila Brase: Yes. The interesting thing about one thing I should just add about another reason the prices have gone up is because this is the way the health plans put pressure on the politicians to give them bailouts. The higher they raise people’s premiums, the more people scream at their members, and so the more incentive the members have to give the health plans bailouts. But just this morning, or maybe it was last night and just reported this morning, Senator Lamar Alexander, who is really the head of health care in the U.S. Senate, apparently has written a letter where he says that basically he’s given up on repealing the Affordable Care Act and now it’s up to the states and up to the Trump administration. And indeed, that has been our contention for several years now, that it’s really about the states taking back their Tenth Amendment rights and it’s about the Trump administration doing everything possible at the regulatory level to free the American people from the Affordable Care Act.
Twila Brase: Now, for your listeners to understand, not one scrap of the Affordable Care Act has been repealed except some very little things very early, long ago, 2010, 2011, but nothing’s been repealed. It’s all sitting there, basically all 2,700 pages of it still in law. What states can do and what states have been doing now is they’re looking, they’re remembering their Tenth Amendment rights, and Idaho was the first. Idaho’s governor issued an executive order, based it on the Tenth Amendment, and said we’re going to tell the insurance companies that have health plans in our state to offer policies that do not comply with the Affordable Care Act, and issued that executive order. Now, the Trump administration sympathized with them but said as the Trump administration they’re still supposed to be following the law, and so now they are in negotiations with Idaho to try to do something that’s halfway there but still keeps part of the Affordable Care Act and still gives some freedom and affordability to the people of Idaho.
Twila Brase: Even better than that is what Iowa did. What Iowa did was the legislature there created a new product. I think it’s called something like the Health Premium Product or something like that. It is going to be issued out of the Farmers Bureau and it’s going to be in concert with Blue Cross Blue Shield. What the legislature did was they said this particular product, which looks an awful lot like a catastrophic coverage plan, shall be deemed not to be health insurance. They specifically said it cannot be called health insurance and therefore it cannot be under the Affordable Care Act or any of the laws that have to do with health insurance at a federal level, and so …
Sam Rohrer: Twila.
Twila Brase: … now …
Sam Rohrer: Twila
Twila Brase: .. in Iowa …
Sam Rohrer: Twila.
Twila Brase: … they’re going to offer this. Yes.
Sam Rohrer: That’s a fantastic idea. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you understand what Twila’s saying there. That ability for the states to step in and to creatively say that offering what is in effect a catastrophic plan, which is exactly …
Twila Brase: Yeah.
Sam Rohrer: … what needs to be done …
Twila Brase: Yeah.
Sam Rohrer: … but just don’t call it insurance gets around the provisions of Obamacare in a legal and justified way. Twila, I’m glad that you brought that up because that is more than significant I think. You think other states are going to follow up with that …
Twila Brase: Yes, I just …
Sam Rohrer: … to copy it?
Twila Brase: … saw a, I just saw a news article that North Dakota now is looking into what their options are, and I believe that every state should do this as opposed to New Jersey which has decided to impose a state mandate. Since the federal one is not going to be imposed because there’s not penalties, now New Jersey has decided that they will impose it for the people in New Jersey. Of course, if I were somebody in New Jersey and I had a job in New Jersey, I would be thinking about moving to a border state and getting out of New Jersey because that is a huge tax on whoever has to pay that. People don’t think about that, but the mandate with the penalty, that penalty is a huge tax on their income.
Dave Kistler: Twila, let me quickly ask you this, was this entire Obamacare health care bill, was it designed to fail from the get-go in order to force the American people into a single-payer system, in other words socialized medicine like in Canada and England? And then a second question if I can very quickly, do you see the Trump administration doing something in addition to what they’ve already done? I mean, really taking the bull by the horns and trying to move us toward a more free market type approach to health care?
Twila Brase: I will say that I don’t know that it was intended to fail per se. I think it was intended to create a government-run health care system managed by the health plans because that’s even what Hillary was planning to do. It was that the managed care health plans, who aren’t, they are not insurance. The health plan you have in your hand, that is not insurance. It’s just a third party payer mechanism that’s really expensive. I think that was, it’s sort of like the American-style version of socialized medicine where we’re all under the same federal laws and we all got this thing called the health plan that runs it.
Sam Rohrer: Now, we’re going to go back here. We talked about rising health care insurance prices and we just talked about that in the last segment, but drug prices, pharmaceutical prices have also been substantially increasing. We talked about Obamacare. Twila, in the last segment, said she wasn’t sure that the Obamacare plan was in fact intended to fail. I think I’d agree with you, Twila, on that, but it was intended to put into place a single-payer socialistic form of federal, not even health insurance, it wouldn’t be fair to call it that, health maintenance or a socialized health plan. That was the goal, and unfortunately the Obamacare plan is still in effect.
Sam Rohrer: I want to move now to the issue of drug prices. Twila, the increases in drug or pharmaceutical costs are going through the roof just like the insurance prices are. You recently made a statement and I think in your, one of your newsletters, which I think if you want to comment on it could be available to our listeners if they’d want to get on your website, you said this, “The FDA, Food and Drug Administration, calls this is a rigged payment system.” You went on I think to say, “In response, one health care plan will pass some sort of a rebate back to the patients to lower drug costs. Congress should repeal the law that allows these kinds of kickbacks.” Okay, so, I’m just going to ask you this, expand upon what you say is a rigged system, Twila. Is that why the prices of drugs are going up?
Twila Brase: That is a major reason why the prices of drugs are going up. There’s a federal law that says there can’t be any kickbacks. However, group purchasing organizations were excepted from this law, and so now what’s happening is the pharmaceutical companies and the group purchasing organizations essentially purchase services and supplies for hospitals. It has been found that if hospitals purchase them on their own, directly, they can get much better prices, but oftentimes they have one of these group purchasing organizations do it. What pharmaceutical companies are doing is they are paying the group purchasing organizations, or GPOs. They’re paying these organizations to put their drugs in the hands of the hospitals.
Twila Brase: The other thing that’s happening is the pharmaceutical companies are giving rebates on these drugs to pharmaceutical benefit managers which are called PBMs and in an attempt to get their drugs on the formularies, or the list of approved drugs, and the health plans are getting the same kind of rebates for having certain drugs on their list of approved drugs.
Sam Rohrer: Hey, Twila. Twila, let me interject if I can here right now. This is a complicated subject. I don’t want our listeners to get totally lost. You know exactly what you’re talking about. We know a lot of what you’re talking about, but maybe not quite as exact. Let me ask you …
Twila Brase: Okay.
Sam Rohrer: … a clarifying question. You are basically saying that the pharmaceutical companies, those who manufacture the drugs, are basically giving you say a rebate, could be an incentive, some would call it just plain old marketing dollars, for their customers to buy their particular drugs. Now, that under a normal setting is nothing wrong with that. That happens across business always. Are you saying that that procedure, offering a rebate or incentive by a pharmaceutical company for someone to buy their particular brand of drug rather than another pharmaceutical company, are you saying that is wrong and are you calling that a kickback?
Twila Brase: Usually, the contracts are exclusionary or they’re single source, so as long as you just use their medication you can get the rebate or the kickback, right? These are exclusionary contracts to make sure that their competitions medications do not get in the hands of the hospital. This is one of the reasons why there are significant shortages.
Twila Brase: It was interesting, I was in Washington, D.C. and somebody asked this group of physicians, more than 100 physicians, how many of them had experienced drug shortages and almost every hand was raised. I asked at the end, I said, “Will everybody do that again because I want a picture?” I got a picture of all of these hands raised because this is what patients don’t understand, there are actually drug shortages. In this United States of America, there are drug shortages at the hospitals and in the clinics and part of the reason for that is because of these exclusionary contracts.
Twila Brase: The other thing that happens … and these single source contracts. There are these smaller companies, drug companies who can’t pay these kickbacks, they can’t pay these rebates, so they can’t get their perhaps better drug, cheaper drug, newer drug into the hands of patients and doctors because they’re not in the supply chain and they’re not allowed into the supply chain. All of that money from the middlemen, the GPO takes their cut, this purchasing organization they take their cut, the hospital gets part of the cut, and all of these cuts of money are taken and that increases the cost of every medication.
Dave Kistler: Twila, let me ask you this, it sounds like there should be some government entity or maybe some government agency that should be overseeing this to make sure these kind of things are not taking place, these drug shortages are not resulting from this. Is there an agency that’s failing to do it’s job, and if so what is that agency?
Twila Brase: Well, the FDA is already calling it a rigged payment system. What the problem is that Congress gave these group purchasing organizations an exception from the Anti-Kickback law. All Congress has to do is say “You know what? You guys are no longer exempt, and so there can be no kickbacks here.” As a practice is Medicare. They had this huge Medicare program, and it only increases prices for Medicare, right? It should be part of the Medicare program in the regulations that say that any hospital that receives kickbacks or any hospital with exclusionary contracts for medications shall be excluded from the Medicare program. Well, that’d shut it down before you could blink because that’s where hospitals get a lot of their money is from the Medicare program. Actually, all sorts of people get lots of money from the Medicare program, which is why …
Gary Dull: Sure.
Twila Brase: … Medicare is running out of money.
Gary Dull: Sure. You know, Twila, you had mentioned middlemen here a bit ago, and of course I think the Wall Street Journal actually mentioned the same thing recently. The question that I have for you, is there a place for middlemen in the drug process or is that just a part of the corrupted financial leech that does nothing more than suck the blood from the patient? You know, the patient seems to be the one who gets the bad end of the deal here.
Twila Brase: The patient always gets the bad end of the deal because the patient is last on the food chain as it were even though the patient should be the first and foremost in the eyes of absolutely everyone. But there are all these entities leeching off of the patient-doctor relationship, and illness, they’re really taking advantage of illness.
Twila Brase: The third party payer system and this middlemen, these are all middlemen. There’s just a ton of middlemen. Imagine if you put middlemen in the way or in between you and the grocery store or in between you and buying your car. They would require a chunk of dough in order to do that, and if they could get the car dealer to raise the price of the car even farther, they’d get a bigger chunk of dough. They do not have an incentive to keep the cost down. They have an incentive to keep the cost high because the greater the cost, the greater chunk that they get.
Sam Rohrer: All right.
Twila Brase: And that’s all the patient’s money.
Sam Rohrer: Twila, let me go back and say all right, now, the changes we talked about Iowa, what they’re doing, you mentioned Idaho as states perhaps getting into this to lower the overall cost of health care. If that action happens on a more broad scale with many states, will that be a mechanism to force down the middleman squeeze, the middleman so to speak in here, and force down the price of drugs too?
Twila Brase: Maybe. Because if hospitals found it more difficult to readily get access to cash from these health plans, which seems a bit of a collusive thing to us, and they had more traditional health insurance polices, then the patients would look at every price and there are some things that the patients would choose not to do and if the doctor or the hospital thought they wanted it done they’d have to find a cheaper way. According to the Government Accountability Office, hospitals can get lower prices when they go directly to the source, when they go directly to the pharmacy company or the pharmaceutical company, for instance.
Sam Rohrer: Well, while I’m thankful, as I know we are all are, for the many advances in medicine and health care treatment because it’s made our lives a whole lot more fulfilling and enjoyable, it really has, the scientific advancements I’m going to put out there might have just now scaled the protective moral and ethical boundary wall. With the identification of DNA many years ago and the attempts to now map the human genome and the DNA, components of the human body, the potential for great gains in the prevention of disease also presents the potential to play around with what God has designed with the goal of creating disease. Yeah, you heard it right, creating disease or creating the perfect man.
Sam Rohrer: As we started the health care focus today on the theme of rising prices, I wanted to end this program today with a play on words, DNA splices. Our guest today is Twila Brase of Citizens Counsel for Health Freedom. You can find their website at cchfreedom, that’s Citizens Counsel for Health Care, cchfreedom.org. Twila, this area we could spend a whole program on, so it’s going to be real tough to narrow this down, but California’s in the news again, this time with babies and a DNA testing. Under federal authorization [inaudible 00:28:49] newborn genetic screening effort, that test was required or imposed upon all 50 states as far as I can determine. While babies born after 1983 have been having their heels pricked and blood samples drawn, this DNA testing it appears has not always been shared with many or most parents and they certainly don’t know what’s being done with it. It’s potentially problematic.
Sam Rohrer: Twila, I just want to start with you. Why is, if you want to call it this way, baby DNA, why is it being collected? How’s it being justified and/or sold to the public?
Twila Brase: It’s being collected at the time of newborn screening, which we call newborn genetic testing done by the government. It is a government program. Most states have it as a requirement in state law, although there are religious exemptions to it, and it tests the newborn’s blood for a variety of mostly newborn-acquired conditions, so conditions that would happen in the first few years of life, although increasingly they are doing some screening for things that are childhood conditions, which is much more controversial.
Twila Brase: Yes, California started storing the DNA, I believe, in 1983 and this is when the child’s heel is pricked. It usually happens within 24 to 48 hours of the birth of the child. A lot of parents don’t even realize it happens. The nurse comes gets the child, the child comes back with a bandaid on it’s heel, and nothing more is sent because the doctor doesn’t have to talk about it because it’s just law, and so a lot of parents don’t even know it happened.
Twila Brase: What happens there is that blood is dripped onto a special card which usually has four or five pieces of filter paper on it which creates spots, and then that card with those blood spots is sent to the state public health lab and they do this screen. In the mid-80s and for some states in the mid-90s, the states started looking at these cards and decided they were valuable, valuable genetic information on every child born in their state, and they started storing them. For the most part, they did it without any law, any rule. They just did it. California has been storing them since 1983, and the news article says that they have more than 9.5 million cards just since 2000, so that doesn’t count …
Gary Dull: Wow.
Twila Brase: … the 17 years before that. There are about 18 states that keep newborn DNA, or as we call it baby DNA, for 10 years to indefinitely. Michigan keeps it for 100 years in what they call the biobank or the biotrust, and parents have no, they’re not asked. There’s no consent here about storing, and in many states there’s no consent about the sale, the use, the analysis, the sharing of it either.
Dave Kistler: Twila, let me ask you this, it appears that this collecting of DNA and the mapping of it is all part of the National Institute of Health. They are overseeing this. Why is it the NIH that is part of the leading of this effort?
Twila Brase: These are two things, and I understand completely why you might think this. There is a program out of NIH called All of Us and they are trying to get one million people to hand over their DNA to the federal government to be fully sequenced. In other words, every part of the DNA, every gene, every pair, base pair, everything just laid out in a record. They’re trying that, but that is voluntary. So far, they’ve got about 25,000 people who have done it and they’re looking for a million. Whereas this program, the newborn screening and the DNA warehousing of baby DNA, that is being done, it’s not actually a federal program, but it receives a lot federal funding. Every individual state has their own individual state law, but they receive a lot of funding from the federal government and advice from the federal government. It’s semi-coordinated at the federal level, but they each have their own laws. It’s under state control and states can change its law.
Sam Rohrer: Okay, Twila, I got to go right into this before we run out of time here. I have raised the question about whether or not this is a morally good thing to do or a bad thing to do. I mentioned that there are other concerns. Chinese government for instance has been collecting DNA for a long time and I know, I’ve read things specifically that they’ve been working on producing a superior breed of Chinese. Well, just recently, last month The Pentagon raised a concern and what I’m reading for here says “Pentagon lab worries about CRISPR biotech (that’s a name of this whole splicing part of it or clipping) biotech as China seeks genome lead.” We’re talking about DNA, and they are concerned about what China is doing and collecting DNA and doing their work with producing a bacteria or a disease that can be used as biological warfare. Should we be concerned about DNA for the good reasons it’s happening or should we be more concerned about the bad things that can be happening and evidently are happening?
Twila Brase: I think everybody should be concerned about CRISPR and the gene editing and this idea that as long as you find out what someone’s genome is, what they’re genetic blueprint is and all of the pieces of it that you can prevent disease. It’s like “Okay, how are you going to prevent disease?” Are you going to prevent certain parents from procreating together? Are you going to splice the genes with the idea that we’ll get rid of this one gene and then the two of you can get married and have a child together because otherwise you’re going to give us a very expensive child that we, the state have to pay for. That’s where it’s going, from our perspective, is a eugenics. It’s like a new version of eugenics where they want to make perfect children and non-diseased children and individuals who don’t have weaknesses.
Twila Brase: What are they going to create particularly with gene editing? They won’t know what they’ll create, and it might take a generation or two or three to figure out what has happened here when they have messed in the DNA and created something that God didn’t devise from the beginning and then they can’t stop it because all of these people have been born.
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