Health Freedom Issues in a New Administration
July 24, 2024
Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer
Co-host: Twila Brase
Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 7/24/24. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.
Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.
Sam Rohrer: Hello and welcome to this Wednesday edition of Stand In the Gap Today, and it’s our monthly focus on health and health freedom with the founder and president of Citizens Council for Health Freedom, Twila Brase. Now, while there are many, many different places that we could go in this area of health and health freedom and health freedom policies and all of that larger area that not only impacts us nationally, but as we zero in here, that which impacts us individually, individual health freedom, it includes a lot of different issues, access, quality, affordability of healthcare, frankly, a whole lot more. They all kind of come together under this broader health landscape. And today we’re going to spend much of the time, though not all on the aspects of healthcare that are being discussed by the respective, I’ll say Republican or democratic candidates for president because this mostly is led on the federal level, what they might do and what we know from what we know, what might be coming forward if they get in. We can’t go into super detail because it’s conjecture, but some things are known. So the title I’ve chosen for today’s program is this, health Freedom Issues in a New Administration. And with that, just welcome in right now, Twila Brace. Twila, thank you so much for being back again with us.
Twila Brase: Thank you so much, Sam. It’s always great to be here.
Sam Rohrer: It’s always good to have you here, Twila. I know our listeners very much respond to it. Appreciate it. So let’s get right into it. So this first issue, I want to talk about Medicare. Medicare, we’ve talked about it before, but next Tuesday, special time, special I guess so to speak, 59 years old. Medicare is next Tuesday, July 30 covers 67 million people at the last count. Costs or the funding anyways for the program is a trillion dollars a year. It is one big deal, but it’s also projected to become insolvent in 12 years or 2036. So it’s got many challenges and it has frankly, for a long time. So you’ve done a great job, and I always compliment you, I try to, because you do a superb job of warning about the problems across the healthcare front. But Medicare, now, Medicare Advantage, we’ve talked about much and why people do not want to be signing up for that. But one of the things you just cited is this, I’m just going to quote you. Say this quote, Medicare is nearly drained dry and expected to be insolvent by 2036, and improper payments are rampant and then overhauls are needed. So let’s just start here. When you say let’s improper payments are rampant, that sounds like it could be contributing to insolvency or potentially, but what do you mean by that?
Twila Brase: Yes. Well, improper payments are wrong payments to a wrong. So in essence, a payment to a wrong doctor or a wrong hospital for the wrong services in the wrong amount. And so this could, according to the centers for Medicare Medicaid, it could include overpayments or underpayments, but really for the most part, we’re talking about overpayments. And the federal government said that in 2023, there was a hundred billion in improper payments from through both Medicare and Medicaid. That was in March of this year. The interesting thing about this is that they said that the Medicare payment errors had decreased by $30 billion to 51.1 billion in 2023. So if you understand, if you just look at that, it was $30 billion more right before. So it’s decreased to just 51.1 billion in 2023.
Sam Rohrer: Well, those are staggering numbers. Alright, I might come back on that, but let’s go to the next part of it as we’re looking at it. And that is this. You talk about overhauls are needed. So you mentioned the rampant overpayments and those are astronomical numbers, but only the federal government can lose tens of billions of dollars and consider it a gain. But what overhauls, when you talk about overhauls are needed, what are you talking about in R for any of these overhauls where they’re needed? Is there any, I won’t say simple but identifiable solution or are we talking about overhauls needed for which There is no answer?
Twila Brase: No, no, no. Oh no, there are definitely answers, but I want to just give one statistic for your listeners to hang on to. In 2022, the federal government paid 905 billion for the Medicare program. And in 2036 they say they will only be able to pay 89% of medical bills. So if in 2022 they were only able to pay 89% of the 905 billion that was spent, it means that 99.55 billion would not have been paid. So that’s what’s going to be happening. Only the numbers are going to be bigger in 2036 because we will be over 70 billion, 70 million people in the Medicare program thinking that Medicare is there for them and going to pay all of their medical bills. So the solutions are one that we are trying really, really hard to get and got an executive order for in 2019, which was derailed by Covid and then rescinded by Biden.
Twila Brase: That was the right of people to voluntarily opt out of Medicare. There were people who wanted to get out of Medicare because they realized that their secondary insurance was a much better deal. It didn’t have all the prior authorization restraints on it. It offered better coverage. They were able to pay for it and they wanted to, and then the courts said, no, you couldn’t do it. So we got an executive order to do it, but then like I said, it was derailed. But we are going to work for that, continue to work for that because that is one of the ways out and in order for people to get out. So we just need to open the door. We need to open the door to people who already have secondary insurance that they prefer. But once we open the door, there’s going to be 80 million people in Medicare.
Twila Brase: Imagine the market that could be created of real insurance. And I’m not talking about health plans because those aren’t real insurance, but that’s the other solution we have to get back to major medical coverage, which only pays for insurable events, catastrophic events, financially catastrophic, which can also be really difficult chronic conditions. But there also should be no taxes on social security and in any state we should end some of the pieces of the, I mean we should end all of Obamacare, but I don’t think we’re going to. But some of the pieces of the Affordable Care Act, which put hospitals in a conflict of interest with patients, it’s called the Shared Savings Program. So if you save money for the government, the hospitals which are accountable care organizations under this law, but the hospitals will get a kickback. And so those are just some of the things that should happen. But more than anything, we have to open the door out of Medicare and that way we will not be stuck in a socialized system, but we will also build a market for real insurance.
Sam Rohrer: Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we will go further on some of that in the balance of the program. But again, a lot of you listening, well, who knows? You may remember insurance when there was really insurance before there was Medicare, but that whole thing has so changed to what we even think insurance is and how we ought to deal with our health that it’s all become very convoluted. But there is an answer and that’s something that we’ll talk about a little bit further here. Stay with us, Twila Brase and I will be right back. Well, if you’re just joining us today, this is our monthly focus. We call it Health Freedom Update, Twila Brase, founder and president of Citizens Council for Health Freedom with their website@cchfreedom.org. CCH Freedom, that’s Citizens Council Health Freedom, that’s what it stands for. CCH freedom.org. You can find a lot of information there at that site.
Sam Rohrer: And we’re talking about health freedom issues in a new administration. Right now, obviously we have an election coming in way. There is going to be a new administration. So we’re just kind of couching some of the things we’re talking about today under that banner. But since the inception of Medicare, it was a federal government entitlement program about 59 years ago. Precise, the federal government’s unconstitutional involvement in healthcare has steadily increased and pushed primarily by modern, I say socialist leaning primarily, but not exclusively. Democrats enabled by many Republicans, not all by any means. And most of all of this on the congressional level, federal level, and I’m going to say because I served for some time on the state level, encouraged, I’m going to say this. Involvement was encouraged by many state governors because it brought a lot of money into the states. A lot of legislative leaders, big business leaders, there were others, many citizens thought the idea of Medicaid and government involvement was a good thing.
Sam Rohrer: But individual health freedom where the patient together with the physician of their choice arrived at the best treatment, determined the price, were assured of the privacy of that patient health data, all of that has really been undercut and nearly destroyed and we’ve spent a lot of time on this program before together talking about that. But the bottom line is there are a range, a myriad I’m going to say, of health care challenges. They are enormous on all fronts, not just the financial, we just talked about a whole lot more than that. So whoever it is that will occupy the White House and direct federal policies in this next administration, the challenges are great. Now that being said, Twila, part of being an honest watchdog, I’m going to put it that way on behalf of God honoring free market healthcare system of which you do, you continue to provide assessments of our needs. I’m going to say quality assessments and I’m going to say honest valuations because you are not serving the interest of somebody else and workable solutions. That’s a pretty good combination. So that being said, could you list the top healthcare challenges as you see them that will face the next administration regardless of who that might be?
Twila Brase: So I think we have a real battle in the issue of healthcare, and ultimately it’s really you need to understand that the mission of medicine has been taken over by the business of healthcare and everybody feels that from the doctors to the patients for the business. They really like it because they’re getting all this money off of this thing that everybody needs and we’re all get sick, we all die, everything. There’s no option to not have medical care. But some of the specific things are the destruction, really the destruction of medicine through DEI through artificial intelligence, through the electronic health record and all the reporting requirements that are taking doctors away from their patients through the bureaucratic processes that are imposed through Medicare, Medicaid, health plans, corporate health plans, and then just burnout. There are lots and lots of doctors that are leaving, they’re leaving earlier, they’re leaving before lots of doctors used to leave, lots of doctors would stay in practice into the seventies even maybe even 80.
Twila Brase: They’d do less, but they would still be there for their patients. Then we have just the push on the left to impose socialized medicine and really they’re trying to infuse DEI at every level. But the other thing happening is just the corporatization or the medical mechanization using artificial intelligence, using non-physicians who don’t have the knowledge base or the clinical skills to maybe know things different who are just following the electronic health record and doing what it says and the fact that the physicians are leaving and that the corporate entities and the governments are pushing non-physicians on all of us. And I think a lot of your listeners are probably, they know times where they wanted a physician and they couldn’t get a physician. And all of these practitioners, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, physicians themselves, all of them have their place. All of them are great, but they all have their place. But that is not where corporate or government wants to go. They want to have the lesser trained individuals in charge of medicine. This can be a real danger for patients.
Sam Rohrer: Well, it has to be a danger as you’re talking about because you will end up having a lower quality because you have less training of the person. That’s what you’re talking about, the provider, the older ones, a lot of them have been burned out. We’ve talked about that before. The whole COVID piece that went through really cleaned out a lot of great people who were told they had to violate their Hippocratic oath and all that. So these are things, and I think people listening understand that let’s move ahead right now. And right now we’ve got a democrat administration, Biden administration, okay, we’ve talked about certain things. Well, he’s not going to be here next time. We know that Who’s going to be there if the Democrats are elected? We don’t know. So let’s go to the Republicans at this point. They have a platform. They left out pretty much anything relative to healthcare and what would be done in this current Republican platform. So there’s not a lot to go off of that. But that being said, if Trump Vance team is elected, what do you know? What don’t we know that may give some indication of how they may address some of these challenges that you’ve just discussed?
Twila Brase: Well, I think if the public health officials try to impose another lockdown, try to fan the flames of a pandemic and fear mongering and all that sort of thing, I have a doubt that they are going to be as successful as they were last time. Trump has certainly learned a lot and JD Vance, he had his own bill to prohibit any mask mandates. And so I don’t think there’ll be lock down if that’s what happens. I don’t think there’ll be vaccine mandates. I do hope that there will be letting people out of Medicare as I talked about. And the interesting thing about Vance is in a paper that he wrote a long time ago in a faraway land, he mentioned that the Republican party is a party of white-haired elderly people. And he said that therefore there’s no way to singly transition or change Medicare. So I think from a fiscal standpoint, he knows this and he wants to do something.
Twila Brase: He’s not, I don’t think he’s correct about what he said about the Republican party, but this was a long, long time ago. But this shows that a long, long time ago, I think he was in college at the time that he or in his master’s or whatever, but he was thinking about the fiscal problems of Medicare, which are myriad. I mean it’s just going to drive everything else that we want to do. The money’s not going to be there because they’re going to keep shifting it to Medicare and social security and the defense of our company can even be at stake at that. But I also think about the fact that Vance is a capital venture capitalist. He’s got his fingers in a lot of different corporations that have to do with healthcare, lots of them pharma technology data, medical devices. And there is something that the country is going to face and is already facing in a major way.
Twila Brase: And that is the whole thing about cybersecurity. The fact that they’ve digitized all of our medical records are putting them into the eHealth Exchange. Your listeners can go to eHealth exchange.org and find out if their own doctors are in there and they’re digitizing everything. They’re centralizing everything. They’re creating portals into all of our private medical records. So everything that you said, everything that’s recorded about you, the president and anybody else is available to all sorts of outsiders, hackers, et cetera. So this is going to be a really huge thing. And I wonder where Vance is on that with all of his investment in all of these kind of companies, will he be in a really good position to help change that or will he not be? And then the Chevron ruling, I will say that I don’t know how they’ll deal with the Chevron ruling, but it means that the judges just can’t assume that the bureaucrats are right in how they interpret a statute.
Twila Brase: And we could have all sorts of regulations that would come out under this, dealing with the Chevron ruling and saying, let’s redo that because this is what the bureaucrat told the judges, but we’re going to change this rule. I think there could be a lot of regulations, the stack of regulations for the Affordable Care Act, when I stood next to it in I think 2012, it was over eight feet tall. It was above the stretch of my hand and it’s just gotten bigger. So I think there’s lots of things that could be done if they want to do them.
Sam Rohrer: Okay. So just clarify what you were saying, this potential Chevron case and the ability to perhaps impact, I couldn’t tell quite what you’re saying. Are you saying that coming out of that under a Trump Vance approach or whatever, could be significantly in that case be significantly less regulations? Or were you innovating significantly more?
Twila Brase: Two things, less regulations, but also going after old regulations where the bureaucrats said in lawsuits that this is how you need to interpret this because the government said this is how the law is interpreted. So I think the bureaucrats have a lot less power now, a lot less power even to sue. And so there could be a significant decrease in regulations. They could just be pulled, lots of things should be pulled including the HIPAA, including the HIPAA rule. And that is certainly something that we would try to get them to do and to give us back the rights of privacy, the rights of patient consent that we don’t have today because of HIPAA.
Sam Rohrer: Alright, that’s great. So basically what you’re saying is that that is good news, generally speaking, Trump Vance would be better, but when it comes to Vance personally, we don’t know. He has his fingers in big business and big pharma, but he has done and written some things that would be good on the fiscal side. Did I say that right?
Twila Brase: That is correct. Although we don’t know how much power he’ll have, he certainly could have lots of influence.
Sam Rohrer: Alright, very good. Ladies and gentlemen, hopefully that was helpful to you as looking ahead from that perspective. When we come back, we’re going to get into an area called 12 facts that help us understand the myths. Well Twila, not long ago you spoke at a standing room only crowd. That’s always a great thing at a convention, a healthcare convention in Las Vegas, and you spoke about, I think you called it 12 facts that expose healthcare myths. And you identified some of those myths. Some of them we’ve talked about before. Actually most of them we probably have talked about, and you’ve even referenced it today, healthcare privacy as example. A lot of people think privacy of their healthcare data is intact when in fact HIPAA does the exact opposite. You already talked about electronic medical records and the access that once they’re put in that depository digitally, a hacker can get them.
Sam Rohrer: So there that goes. And then we’re going to talk about DNA and genetic material ownership in the next segment. We’ve already talked a bit about constitutionality of Medicare of that whole thing, but nonetheless, that being the case, you had a great response, which tells me that the tenders of that conference had a wide understanding about the problems in the challenges it face healthcare. And anybody who can stand up and say, now here’s 12 facts to me, I would’ve gone to hear what you said based on that. Now do this. Can you quickly identify these 12 facts, just list them, go down through and then we’ll pick out some of those things and begin to talk about them a little bit about the myths that they expose.
Twila Brase: And so I encourage listeners to just pick up a pen and write quickly. So because they’ll be wondering about some of them. So let’s start with the first one. So fact number one, there is no such thing as healthcare. Fact number two, a health plan is not health insurance. Fact number three, HIPAA does not protect medical privacy. Fact number four, the electronic health record is not a medical record. Fact number five, you and your DNA are not public property. Fact number six, a physician is not a provider and a non-physician is not a doctor. Fact number seven, employer sponsored coverage is a kind of theft. Fact number eight, Medicare is a Ponzi scheme and it is unconstitutional. Fact number nine, health equity is critical race theory for healthcare. Fact number 10, healthcare quality means physician compliance. Fact number 11, every patient, every patient is vulnerable. And fact number 12, safe and effective too often isn’t.
Sam Rohrer: Alright, those are fantastic and ladies and gentlemen, I even tried to write them down, I couldn’t. Okay, so you’ll need to go to Twila’s website@cchfreedom.org or when this program is posted later today, there will be accessible to it, a transcript that you can take and read down through and it will have all of that on there. So just so you’re aware, if you’re not able to write that fast, I clearly was not, but I think you got the idea. Twila, if I were to ask you of that list of those 12 facts, is there one that you found perhaps in your presentation to say to that group there in Las Vegas that you visually found them to respond or react to more than any other?
Twila Brase: Well, I think fact number one, there is no such thing as healthcare really get some quizzical looks because I’ve introduced it and I’ve said, we’re going to talk about some healthcare issues and then at the end of that description about there’s no such thing as healthcare, I say, so therefore, try not to use those words as much as possible because what you’re really, so I asked them, when you say healthcare, what do you mean? And they’re sitting there thinking, and sometimes when I’ve given this presentation at the end of it, people will start changing their own language in asking me the question. So I say, when you say that you get healthcare at your employer, what do you mean? Are you getting your shots there? Are you getting your leg fixed there? Or what does that mean? Well, okay, so you’re actually talking about coverage.
Twila Brase: And what I tell them is that healthcare, this word, I don’t know exactly where this word is came from. I don’t know exactly who put it together, but the fact is it’s really, I believe a socialist term because it doesn’t mean anything. And people have combined coverage and care into this one term, which is exactly socialized medicine. Socialized medicine, joins the two together, socialized governments provide care and coverage, left this in America, want to provide care and coverage together into a universal healthcare system that’s socialist. And they all call it healthcare, just like I just said, healthcare system. But what we’re really talking about is medical care and medical coverage and as much as possible try to use the terms, although healthcare is vernacular, so people immediately glom onto it, but they glom onto it in a fuzzy way. They like put the two things together in their mind and you have to separate
Sam Rohrer: Them. I think that is excellent, Twila. And if people listening right now, don’t walk away with anything else other than that. It just is a reminder again, ladies and gentlemen that we talk so often here on the program is that you got to define the terms, define the terms, much of the Marxist and socialist effort to undermine our understanding of self-government under God a constitutional form of government as an example. And even in the religious terminology, things have been redefined. If you redefine the terms, then you control the debate. That is an example. So let’s go revisit that again, if nothing else is learned Twila, instead of saying healthcare, divide it into what?
Twila Brase: Medical care and medical coverage. Or you can just say care and coverage. I’m talking about medical care and medical coverage.
Sam Rohrer: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, that makes sense. Alright, we’ll just leave that there. Let’s go to another example here and that is this. We’ve talked about privacy. You’ve already talked about HIPAA, which most people think is the best government effort to absolutely guarantee the privacy of the data and the conversations between the patient and the physician only to find out, as you’ve made very clearly is exactly the opposite. So what do you say about that truth? One of those 10 truths that talk about medical record privacy.
Twila Brase: So yeah, HIPAA does not protect medical privacy. It was never meant to protect medical privacy. In my book, big Brother in the exam room, I actually had an entire section on HIPAA to disabuse people of the error in thinking the deliberate deception that HIPAA has anything to do with privacy except to get rid of it. And so people are still clinging to HIPAA. I guess there’s a video out about somebody being taped or something and somebody says to them, no, no, that’s a violation of my HIPAA. You can’t do that or HIPAA, but you can’t do that. Well people just think that HIPAA protects them and it was the perfect deception by the government. The entire country is under this deception while under underneath everything, all this data is being shared about them to thousands of people that they don’t even know and they have to stand 10 foot behind the pharmacy counter. And that’s just to convince you that you have privacy when you have none.
Sam Rohrer: Alright, privacy, we talked about the whole idea of healthcare. Don’t use those words ladies and gentlemen. Medical care, medical coverage, yes. Not healthcare. Okay, what was another area that really stood out when you were speaking to the people there that connected strongly with them?
Twila Brase: So I think the employer sponsored coverage is a kind of theft. So people look for jobs that offer them coverage, but what they’re really doing is looking for jobs that take part of their compensation and give it to a health plan without their choice. And then the health plan just has the right to say no to the care that they want. And so I actually show a chart from 2023 about the average family cost of coverage. And so the employers put in about $17,000 and the employee puts in about $6,500 and altogether it’s almost $24,000. And I say this is all your money, it’s all your compensation, it’s something that the employer could give to you fully. And what would you do with $24,000 a year? Would you give it to this health plan or would you perhaps do like $6,000 a year for a healthcare sharing or we’re going to bring back real insurance. And real insurance will never cost $24,000 a year because it will have a high deductible and it will be only for insurable events and it will have a low premium on like today, right? It’ll have a high deductible and a low premium. And so then what would you do with $24,000 if you had the choice and had it in your own hand? It is a kind of theft,
Sam Rohrer: Right? That’s excellent. About one minute left. Let’s touch on this constitutionality. When I introduced this segment, I use the word unconstitutional. You have talked about and said unconstitutional. Alright, how in the world does the federal government get involved in doing this when it’s unconstitutional?
Twila Brase: Okay, so in one minute’s time. So I will tell you that Harry Truman was the very first one to propose national insurance. He did not get his way. Then there were unions who brought it forth to Kennedy, JFK and JFK actually stood in Central Park, gave this really big presentation, all the four media covered it, but he had been convinced by a doctor not to do it. And so he wasn’t going to sign it. And anyway, then he gets killed, he gets assassinated, and then President Johnson brings forward Medicare on behalf of the unions in the name of the martyred president. So of course they just violated the constitutional rights. You can’t get into healthcare, right? But there was also deception and lying because obviously the martyred president didn’t want it.
Sam Rohrer: Well ladies and gentlemen think of this again, always. It just happens this way when major changes are made, you got a crisis, never let it go to waste. We know who talks about that. So they took advantage of that assassination and lo and behold, here you come. That’s how so many things that we’re dealing with now got here, unconstitutional and a whole more. We come back, we’re going to talk about DNA and baby DNA. Well before I get back with Twilight and we wrap up and she has a couple more comments here on Medicare. I need to ask her about this coming Sunday for those who may be listening on stations in Eastern Pennsylvania. Dr. Jamie Mitchell and I, he’s our director of church culture and pastoral outreach. He and I will be speaking together the adult Sunday school class in the church service at Faith Church of Warchester, Pennsylvania that’s out close to Norristown. If anybody you’re listening that are in that part of the state that would want to come and see us, we’d love to see you. But that’s at Faith Church of Warchester that’s near Norristown. So I’ll just throw that out there for those who may have interest. Twila. Alright, Medicare. Alright, a couple things you didn’t get in the last segment. What do you want to say here? What needs to be said?
Twila Brase: Yeah, so the thing I want to say is I understand I am looking at lots of what Medicare does to bills. I understand what a welfare program Medicare is, how much Medicare cuts off, they cut off about 60% of the bill and then they pay 80% of the rest. So it’s a real welfare program and then the patient pays the remaining 20%. But the thing that patients and Americans need to understand about welfare is welfare is the elephant in every room, every exam room, every hospital room, every policy room, every insurance, corporate room, everywhere, everything. And because that’s why I say we need to open a door out of Medicare and that Medicare, we just need freedom from Medicare because we don’t have freedom from Medicare. The federal government runs the entire healthcare system through Medicare. And people don’t understand that, but they do. And because if you take a Medicare patient, if you’re a doctor who takes even one Medicare patient, Medicare gets access to all of their medical records. They can ask for any and all medical records in your entire practice from babies to people who are employees to corporate executives, doesn’t matter. Medicare runs everything. And people don’t really understand that, but that’s true.
Sam Rohrer: Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Boy, that is so very, very clear. Thank you for making that clear because ladies and gentlemen, when the federal government, when the government gets involved in any practice, they far more than they ever give. It always sounds good, but it cuts the legs out from under it. And under a constitutional republic, anything that is remotely like socialism is an enemy, a freedom. So anyway, just leave it there. DNA, that was another one of the items you brought up. Who owns the property? Basically when DNA is taken from any person, that genetic material, that knowledge, that data, it’s property, it belongs to the person for whom it came. But is that private property protected? Alright, let’s go there. And then specifically the matter of baby DNA where the government actually takes blood samples of DNA from babies, how is that done? When is that done? And then we’ll ask why is it being done?
Twila Brase: So Montana Senator Daniel Nikkos came to me probably about a year ago with a very specific request of how to change a 23 and me bill into a privacy bill. And so we had four days to make it happen. It did happen. It was signed into law in the summer of 2023. And so it is the strongest United privacy law in the country and it requires consent. And when it requires consent, it really gives property rights. So across the country, nobody has really determined property rights for your DNA. And so when you are at the doctor’s office and you give a sample of blood, who owns the blood? A lot of labs are doing lots of things with that. They might even be selling it or giving it away. You go to 23 and me, they want to own the material that you leave after they’ve given you the results.
Twila Brase: So they’re going around the country getting states to pass laws that are not privacy laws, even though they call them privacy laws. They aren’t privacy laws. And so this is kind of, it’s up in the air across this country, but I think it’s going to become a bigger and bigger issue. And of course with babies. So we discovered the storage of newborn DNA in 2003. There have been five lawsuits so far, four of them successful by parents. And we got a law at the federal level, but it was temporary. And so now they can continue to use these blood spots for research without parental consent. And so if Trump gets in and if the Congress changes, we will go after the law that we got that stopped researchers from being able to access these and we’ll go after it to be done permanently so that they have to always get consent with the parents before they do this.
Twila Brase: And we don’t believe that states should be storing anybody’s DNA. We have a list of how often or how long the different states retain the DNA and we’ve changed our website and I just discovered that that link is not live, but it’s going to be. But so I just looked at it. We have this chart and so in Pennsylvania, I just picked Pennsylvania, they’re keeping it for a year. There’s no reason to keep it for a year. And what are they doing it with it for a year? It’s not even good after six months. New Jersey is keeping it for 23 years. New York’s keeping it for 72 years. Maine is keeping it indefinitely. And so they have claimed the DNA of newborns, newborn citizens who become adults or the government has their DNA is giving it out, using it for different purposes. And so this shouldn’t be.
Twila Brase: And so we as an organization really want to stop this taking it’s to taking, it’s a property taking from newborns and if the government came and tried to take your DNA or any of the DNA listeners, it would be considered a crime against the person. But all of this DNA, which is being kept longer than it should be in the state government, by the way, I should say after newborn screening, this is newborn screening is a government genetic testing program. And then states decided this was valuable property and started keeping it. And so there’s a lot of states that keep it for a longer time, but there are some that keep it for very short time, particularly because of the lawsuits and everything that we have accomplished. So they’ve started to keep it for a longer shorter time.
Sam Rohrer: Alright, now clearly we have an issue of property rights. Ladies and gentlemen, understand that that’s one that you’re talking about and that is a major, major, major one. However, here’s just another question. There’s not much time here, but what makes the collection of DNA so valuable that the government would want to do it? Here is the question. Because a lot of people say, well, you know what? They take my blood and do whatever. That’s just my blood. There’s obviously something valuable about it. What’s the incentive to take baby DNA or even adult DNA and house it in government data banks?
Twila Brase: So a lot of people who really support this, call it a national treasure, 4 million babies born every year, but they like it because they can do what they call public health studies, which means they’re doing research on the American population, starting with babies and babies’. DNA tells a lot about the mother’s DNA. And so then they’re actually doing partial research on the mother as well. But in addition to that, to think about what they could do if they really wanted to decrease healthcare costs, they could say, this child should not marry this child, or this young adult should not marry this young adult because look what could happen if they did. Look how expensive it could be. If you just look at their genetics or just think about if we now knew the genome of Biden and Trump, what could come out about the future of having either one of them as president? What could be used against them? What kind of ways could they shape the news according to what their genome said or even contact them publicly?
Sam Rohrer: Okay, we only have about 30, about E, we only have about 30 seconds left. But I want to ask in a follow up to that, alright, you raise those as potentials. There could be some listening say, oh, come on, that’s just fear mongering. But is there a basis and a legitimacy for you mentioning those things? Because people have already been talking about it.
Twila Brase: It’s because you cannot just sit here and say, well, let’s not look into the future. We already know law enforcement would love to access and have in New Jersey access the DNA of babies, which they use to find criminals. They didn’t ask the parents. And there’s a lawsuit there. We already know that it can be used like this. They already had a federal project to sequence all these babies. It a $25 million project to sequence babies for look into their future.
Sam Rohrer: Alright, ladies and gentlemen, Twila, we’re out of time. Twila Brase. Thank you so much for being with us. Ladies and gentlemen, I know you couldn’t put all of this down and remember it all. Again. Go to our website and you can pick up this transcript, listen to the program again, and then Twila’s site for a whole lot more information. CCH freedom.org.
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