Budgets & The Federal Government Shutdown:
Health Freedom Considerations
October 20, 2025
Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer
Guest: Twila Brase
Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 10/20/25. 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 Monday edition of Stand In the Gap Today, and it’s also our monthly focus on health freedom with Twila Brase. She’s the president and the co-founder of Citizens Council for Health Freedom and they have a website@cchfreedom.org. And I will give that again throughout the program. Like most weekends, I say it regularly, but some of the biggest events occur over the weekends in the lull and the media cycle generally. This weekend was no exception. For instance, just to mention a few, I’m just going to put it here, we’re not going to deal with these, but I just mentioned like I often do at the first of the week, one of those was the Middle East Peace Plan and I said from the beginning that that plan was written to be broken and effectively it was broken. Over the weekend, Hamas killed dozens of Palestinians.
Actually, that was the release prisoners that Israel had to give up. These guys actually were the ones that went in and killed Palestinians. And the Israeli IDF bombed numerous Hamas locations in Southern Gaza. So there’s that. Now in response to it, president has sent in his son-in-law, Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on an emergency meeting to try to save the plan by them having these guys exerting more pressure on Israel while officially defending Hamas. And the president said it really wasn’t Hamas that killed the Palestinians. Well, I don’t know about that, but we’ll see. A second big event was a phone call between the president and Vladimir Putin and the second meeting between him and Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine where the president now is actually saying the United States will send no further help to Ukraine. So it’s back and forth. The US position remains unclear.
A third event was that there are nearly 2000 No Kings rallies, they called it across the country over the weekend with these events actually receiving very little attention, I would say, although they are not insignificant, there were a lot of people protesting things that they’re thinking is happening out of this administration in the No Kings was the idea of King Trump, and that’s where that came from. But those are happening, and that’s interesting. A fourth event was Speaker Mike Johnson and other administration spokespeople saying that the budget impasse and the federal government shut down is going to continue some saying, and they’re saying with really no end in sight, both sides blaming the other for where they are. So anyways, that’s the point. Now each of these events I just identified will continue into the weeks ahead and we’ll deal more with them as the need arises. Now in this last item of government shutdown in the budget impasse, it’s that we’re going to build off of a bit Twila, and I will in today’s program is kind of a stepping off point of our health freedom focus for today. The title I’ve chosen to frame our conversation is this Budgets and the Federal Shutdown Health Freedom Consideration. So we want to look at those things in light of health freedom and then go beyond that. But with that Twila, welcome back to the program.
Twila Brase:
Always great to be here, Sam. Thank you.
Sam Rohrer:
Thank you for being back and you are a busy one always. And so let’s get right into it. Twila, in the next segment, you’re I going to talk about the budget impasse and its meaning in all of that type of thing. We’ll get into that, but one of the things that keeps coming out, the Democrats are saying, well, the reason that we haven’t voted to continue what it is because the bill increases healthcare costs because of some changes done to the Affordable Care Act. And the Republicans are saying, well, tough luck because we are not going to be spending the amount of money to pay for premiums. And so back and forth they go, would you explain what the bill exactly does and which portions of those healthcare arguments for and against are actually true?
Twila Brase:
Okay, well, not the whole bill. I’m not going to explain the whole bill. And I would, oh, one thing I just wanted to say is you talked about the king, the king, the no king things. So I was looking over the weekend and there’s a lot of white people in a lot of black districts and there’s footage of people being gone after two hours. So it’s pretty much presumed that lots of these people are just paid protestors. So I just wanted to say that one thing for what people should know about the King’s protest regarding the or the No King’s protest regarding the bill when it comes to healthcare. So there’s Medicaid work requirements, there’s the fact that it does not include an extension of the Obamacare premium credit subsidies. Those will expire at the end of 2025. This is a very big sticking point for the Democrats.
Both of those, actually, another thing that’s a very big sticking point for the Democrats is that on the Obamacare exchange healthcare.gov, there would be income verification and you’d actually have to be like Reverified when you want to re-enroll. There’s a provision just giving physicians a very small increase in their Medicare payments. It expands what you can contribute for the health savings accounts. It limits what the PBMs can, how they can profit off of a spread pricing scheme for drugs. And then it prohibits Medicare funding for gender transitioning and Medicaid funding for gender transitioning and for limits how much can be spent on abortion. It cuts Medicaid funds for abortions.
Sam Rohrer:
Okay, let me come back and follow up on that. We have a range of listeners from younger to older, but in reality, the provision that’s being talked about, who is going to be impacted the most? In other words, if you’re not transitioning transgender, then who cares, right? And that kind of thing. But is it just for Medicare people or is it for everybody who will be affected by the premium reductions, the subsidy reduction?
Twila Brase:
So for people to understand this, when COVID happened, the Democrats took the opportunity to expand these tax credit subsidies far into the middle class. And what the Democrats want is they want this made permanent because of course what the Democrats want is that we would have a single payer socialized healthcare system. And so the more people that are actually on a government program, from their perspective, the better. And the A CA or the Affordable Care Act has always been about expanding socialized medicine in this country. And so they’re doing it bit by bit and they do not want to backtrack. They want all of these middle-class people who now have subsidized Obamacare that they want them to be in there permanently. What the Republicans are saying is no, some of the numbers that I got were that if the premium credits are not extended, which is what the Republicans want, they don’t want them extended. They want these people to get on real coverage, that there’d be 2.5 million people in 2026 that would not be covered. Well, it’s not necessarily that they would not be covered. It would not be covered under the Affordable Care Act in the Obamacare exchange.
Sam Rohrer:
Okay. Just hold that just because of time. Just hold that. I want to come back in the next step and just ask you a further question. And that is this, why wasn’t the Affordable Care Act Obamacare actually rescinded completely and is there a really an option for people to pursue if nothing further is done? So I just want to go there first and then we’ll move in, ladies and gentlemen, to the impacts from the budget impasse and the shutdown. Okay, Twila, let’s go back here on this set. I wanted to ask that other question and follow up to the budget impasse. We’re going to get into the impacts of that. But the healthcare part, which is probably one of the leading public arguments that are there, and you made it clear the Democrats are wanting to continue this added expansion ultimately of government controlled healthcare, which they added in during 2020 COVID type days. Alright, and so that’s that. But from your perspective, do you know why wasn’t the entire Obamacare Affordable Care Act, which Republicans have said want to get rid of? Why wasn’t that just eliminated perhaps in this bill? And with the changes that are being made in this bill, are there places that people can actually go without additional legislation or they stuck? In other words, it appears a lot of people are stuck, the bill cuts funding will hurt some people, but they don’t really have a place for them to go. Would you answer that?
Twila Brase:
Yeah, so the question of no repeal, so the Republicans unfortunately, I do not think are all that interested in getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. And you saw that in Trump’s first two years when they argued about these ridiculous bills that were just Obamacare light and McCain puts his thumb down on the one that might’ve done something, but it really wasn’t doing anything. I thought when that happened, I thought, no, then people are going to think the Obamacare is gone and they haven’t gotten rid of it. So I think the reason they aren’t interested in getting rid of it is because the Affordable Care Act according to Bloomberg government publication and the first 10 years was a $1 trillion boon for the health plans. So over just the first 10 years, the health plans in total got a trillion dollars more money. And so who are the biggest funders of campaigns?
They are the health plans, the healthcare industry, the pharmaceutical industry, all these people. These are where the biggest funding comes to keep people in office. And I don’t think that they’re interested in going up against the health plans and giving us what we really need, which is we need real insurance back. The health plans are just the corporate version of socialized medicine. Ted Kennedy is the one who started this. Hillary is the one who wanted to continue it, and Obama actually put it in. And so we don’t have real health insurance, which is the catastrophic medical indemnity policies that are only for catastrophic and insurable events and are very affordable and there’s no interference from outside. Nobody’s making the decision except you and your doctor and you have cash in hand. They’re not interested in getting back to that because they would lose the funding from the health plan.
This is what I believe. And so it does become difficult for people to have somewhere else that’s affordable. But lots of people could go into the healthcare sharing sphere and in some states they have something through the Farm Bureau that anybody you don’t have to be a farmer can join. And those are the health benefit plans. And they’re in I think six states now. And I think Florida is trying to get it passed, but ultimately we have to have pressure to get back to affordable coverage. We can’t just be covering everything with government and moving in the direction that the left wants to take us because we’re too afraid to have people protesting high prices. People have to protest high prices, which causes government to bring back real health insurance. So we do have a bill called Make Health Insurance Real. Again, we had an author, but now he’s looking at a different position in his life. So we’re going to go back at it, but that’s what has to happen. That thing that’s part of Obamacare that says you can’t have real health insurance, we have to get rid of it or just supersede it.
Sam Rohrer:
Thanks. That was a great explanation and ladies and gentlemen, that’s part of the problem that we have is that it’s very difficult to argue fully against either the Republican or you can argue pretty much fully against the Democrat position where they want more government, but it’s difficult to argue against some of what is in the bill because it doesn’t actually fix the problem. And that is what we talk about TWI all the time. You got to go the root cause. But anyway, let’s move into now some of the impacts here because the Speaker Johnson and others in administration, they’ve been interviewed many, many times about why is this dragging out? Why can’t we get this solved? And so Speaker Johnson and Republicans point the finger, the Democrats, the Democrats point the finger at the Republicans and on we go. But the one thing that was said was that it looks like this may go on for a long time now, from your perspective, what are the most significant impacts from the shutdown and the failure to pass the current budget bill, which has a continuing resolution piece of it. We’ve talked about some of that before, but from your perspective, what’s the impact of this?
Twila Brase:
Well, I think it’s a little hard totally from the outside to see and all of the clamor on every side and trying to figure out exactly what the Republicans want. We know what the Democrats want, but what do the Republicans want and what do they really want and what are they willing to do? And Trump, what does he want? And so I think there’s a lot of people who aren’t getting paid, but is that a bad deal? I mean, look, in your own life, look around how many bureaucrats do we need? How many do we need? It’s actually unconstitutional to have bureaucrats. I don’t know if people even understand that, but it’s an improper, unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority to give this whole casting crew of unelected people the right to write rules, write rules, and then have them have the full force and effect of law on all of us.
And so for me, I think for the most part, anything that we need for national security to keep the army going to all this kind of stuff, there’s still money that’s doing this, but there’s a lot of unhappy bureaucrats. Should we be sad about unhappy bureaucrats or should we remember what we need as a constitutional republic to actually keep a constitutional republic, which is not having all of these people who simply wait for the next president to come and then go back to their business of trying to take the entire country to the left, to socialism, to Marxism, to their own agendas. So from my perspective, I’m not all that concerned about the shutdown, and I think is President Trump and company, are they deciding who are they going to get rid of? There’s a lot of people that they should get rid of as soon as possible.
Sam Rohrer:
And what you said, I’m glad you said that because a lot of people don’t know. Yeah, what we call bureaucrats is the staff members of these various executive branch departments. Yes. What you’ve said is exactly correct. A law is passed and then these guys are sitting in these departments adopt these regulations which have the force of law, and you almost can’t change them without some law being changed again, which never happens. And herein is the issue. So thanks for saying that. Okay. Now let’s go ahead here. What is specifically happening already or will happen if the impasse is not fixed? Obviously there are people that are being laid off. Ultimately they may never come back. But when it comes to this matter of health and health freedom that we’re focused on, how’s it impacting departments like health and human services, the CDC, the FDA and others that are focused on health?
Twila Brase:
Well, I know that like I said, there are bureaucrats not getting paid. If there’s something that’s an emergency, I believe that still gets funded. It’s like essential. It’s kind of interesting because like COVID was the essential workers, the Essential workers, which was kind of ridiculous during COVID. But that being said, there are essential workers having to do with the military. They have decided now that they’re actually going to pay doctors for a while, they decided that they weren’t going to pay doctors for, I think it was for Medicare, maybe it was for both Medicare, Medicaid, not certain. This is the problem of being dependent on the government for the functions of the country that should really be in the private sector and would therefore be less expensive. And we wouldn’t have to deal with whatever Congress was doing and whatever shenanigans were happening at Congress, we could have the country go forward because it’s all in the private sector.
But as we expand and expand and expand government, which is what the Democrats want to do here, that’s the whole thing. They want to expand government. And the Republicans have got to hang tough and refuse to expand government. And it’s not like I trust them a lot to do this. We’ve seen them expand government just as much as Democrats. But in this particular thing, saying no to expanding the Obamacare subsidies and particularly making them permanent, that’s what the Democrats want. This is so important. It’s like billions, billions and billions of dollars that they’re saying no to for the long term. It’s not just for a year, right? Long term, the Democrats want this permanent. So this is on our taxpayers. Every dime of this is paid for by taxpayers and the Democrats want that to be made permanent. The expansion, the Democrat payment, I mean the taxpayer payment, everything they want, it made permanent as they march toward a fully socialized healthcare system.
Sam Rohrer:
You made that very, very clear. We don’t have much time left, but the continuing resolution, again, we’ve talked about in other programs I have with other guests, but that is only good for another month or so. So even if they were to go and approve the continuing resolution, Congress is going to be right back at it again pretty soon, right?
Twila Brase:
And for all we know, for all we know, the Republicans have decided, well, we’re not even going to deal with this. We’re just going to let this go on and we’re just going to make sure that certain essential people are paid and they’re going to deal with that. Now, I am forgetting here what’s happening with social security. I think I’m forgetting that. So I don’t actually know what’s happening with social security, whether people are getting payments or not or if there’s delay in payments. I remember that there was some talk about that, but I actually haven’t looked at it, so I can’t say that would be painful to some people. But again, this is all about depending on the government, which that wasn’t what our country was supposed to be, this kind of dependency on Congress.
Sam Rohrer:
No, you’re right. We’re out of time. We’ll have to come back on that. Ladies and gentlemen, TWI bras, my guest today, our theme budgets in the federal government shutdown, health freedom considerations. And we’ll look the next segment to Real ID, which does factor into this as well. If you just tuning into us, we’re halfway through the program right now. My guest is Twila Brase. This is our monthly focus on, we call it Health Freedom. And Twila is the president and the co-founder of Citizens Council for Health Freedom. They have a website@ccfreedom.org. And today we’re just kind of jumping off of what’s happening in Washington, what they call a partial government shutdown. There’s budget empath, we’ve talked about that in the last two programs, and now we’re moving on to another issue that definitely touches upon freedom, health Freedom. Yes. And it’s not directly connected to health, although it is, and we’ve talked about it before and we’re going to give an update on it.
And that is what’s called the Real ID Act. It was past years ago following nine 11. We’ve talked about it much on this program. When I was in the Pennsylvania House, I led the effort to fight against it here in Pennsylvania and slowly but surely continues to move along. But in essence, it was a movement toward the collecting of individual biometrics. That’s when it began supported by congressional action. Not the enough people have resisted it in the past. It’s a shame that Congress, Democrats and Republicans passed the original bill, which brought to us the Patriot Act. I mean, there were other things that happened along as a result of nine 11, but all of it has meant a consolidated and more powerful federal government among other things. But the real ID piece of the equation, it was started with forcing through enticing change of pictures on driver’s licenses from the regular static picture, what it used to be to a carefully structured biometric photograph that would measure identically and precisely each person’s face.
That was one aspect of it. But biometrics we’ve talked about. It’s any individually identifiable trait. It could be your fingerprints, it could be the way you walk, it could be your eyes, all that kind of thing. But the real ID focused on your face and driver’s licenses. Part of the problem was that it actually was a federal ID in practice, though not called a federal id, national ID card because that’s illegal. So we call it something else. We call it a real id. And we say that if you do and go this direction, there will no longer be any terrorism, which is obviously a big lie, but it will also bribe to the states to try and put it into effect so that the states could actually do it and you could escape calling it a national id, but in effect, it’s not because of the way it’s connected.
Now, I just tried to summarize some of that. It’s not a good thing, never was a good thing. And it’s been supported by both sides and presidents on both sides and all of that. Now, that brings us to where we are Twila, because not only are there individual biometric collections occurring here as a result of that, it’s actually happening across the world too. Multiple European countries, as for instance, October 12, are requiring facial scans and fingerprints as a condition of European travel by US citizens in particular, or any other people, not a part of the European Union. And so if you get off in Europe, you’re going to have to give up your face and you’re going to have to give up your fingerprints. So it’s happening worldwide. Would you share what you’ve learned just in a general sense, and then we’ll bear down on some things that are happening to try to oppose this in dc?
Twila Brase:
Yeah, so this is indeed happening, and if you just look at what is happening in countries that used to be more about freedom than they are today, like in England where there are now hundreds of thousands of people in the streets protesting the digital id, because the head of England Starmer, she has said that if you don’t get a digital id, you won’t be able to work. And this is where this country is going. We’re going to slow the surreptitious route through real id, but this is actually where it’s going. And so it is not a surprise to find the European Union deciding that they want to collect all of this information on everybody who passes through their borders because of course, would they really want to have Europeans and people of other countries, some of them have to go through the digital side and some of them don’t.
Nope. So they’re just employing it across the entire sphere. Now, they may have other reasons. They may be in concert with the United States in some way to share this globally because back in 2007, Robert Mney, who I believe was the head of Homeland Security at that time, he gave a presentation and in his presentation he said, we are in the process of FY a growing proportion of the world. So essentially getting all the facial recognition, the facial geometry of everybody in the world. And the only reason you collect facial geometry of people is to have a facial recognition system. That’s what the technology’s for, and it’s to pick you out of a crowd or whatever you’re doing. They’ll know who you are, they’ll know things about you, they’ll know everything about you because that biometric will be also part of more demographic data about you. It might even be places that you’ve been if you have a digital id, it’ll also be places that you have been because every time you pull it out, it pings of the government and tells them where you’re at and may or may not tell them what you’re doing at this moment, but it could.
Sam Rohrer:
Alright, that’s very clear. Let’s move on here now. And that is this. Not very many people in DC in Congress have ever opposed this, which is one of the strangest things. And I have great issue with any congressman who has not raised a voice of opposition against it, but it’s been going on for a long time. But Senator Rand Paul is one of those who have spoken in opposition. He’s introducing some legislation. Tell us about what that is.
Twila Brase:
Yeah, so in 2017 he introduced a bill to repeal Real id. And for the last year when this whole drumbeat has been going on where there this progressive enforcement rule, Christine Noem, secretary of Homeland Security saying, you won’t be able to fly without real id. We haven’t heard hardly a peep, right? And actually I had sort of given up that he was going to do anything even though he’s in this really powerful position as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the Senate. So he’s in a very powerful position and both he and his father have been against any kind of national identification cards. So not hearing anything from his office was just kind of mystifying, right? But we have sent several letters there and we’re so pleased now as of September 11th, and I think that was planned on 911, that he would introduce this bill to repeal the entire Real ID act.
Of course, 911 this year was the day after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. So I think it just got introduced. Nobody really noticed. And then we figured it out a few weeks later. And then now that we’ve further since the assassination, Senator Paul has put out a tweet last week, I think it was a week ago, and then I think on last Thursday or Friday he put out a press release. So I do think that he might actually be moving forward with this. And my hope is that he will do a hearing. And so I’m going to just encourage all of your listeners because if he does a hearing, this will all become very public. Everything that real ID will suddenly become very public and in the news. And so we have a action alert at our site, refuse real id.org, refuse real id.org, and you can use that to do it.
But even more powerful is just call him up, call his office. I’ve sat in his office, I’ve listened to them taking call after call after call. This would be really important to help him move forward toward a hearing of what real ID really is and how it’s moving the entire country to exactly what’s happening in the UK, moving the entire country to a social credit system. And imagine Gavin Newsom with a social credit system infrastructure all set up by the Republicans in the next four years. Imagine how he could keep us in 15 minute cities and charges us for carbon use whenever we went out. I think it’s interesting the story about it’s going to help with illegals or terrorists or this or that just a few days ago, apparently in the news is that in New York, they found an illegal with a real id. And it said in the part where the name was, it said something like Name unknown, no name. No name at all with a real ID in New York. So there are 19 states that give driver’s licenses to illegals. This is not going to stop that, but it is going to put a huge net around all of us. And then they’re going to add central digital currency. And if you have digital id, biometric controls, central digital currency and central databases, you have a country that is not really America anymore.
Sam Rohrer:
And that’s Twila is just again, one of those strange things that are going on. Why is this administration, why is Christie Noem Homeland Security? They didn’t stop it. Other administrations in the past delayed it but was not delayed pushing it hard under what guise, under no circumstance. And as you said, and I’ve said before, it’s a defacto national ID card, which is illegal. And of course being connected to the other digital forms you’re talking about is in fact what AI data centers and those who are putting them together have said they’re all going to link all these things. It’s an incredible thing to me that such deception can be put forward and not have those in positions of authority. Glaze and gentlemen actually raise their voices. We must not be deceived. We must have our eyes open. That’s why we’re doing this program to speak about this issue.
When we come back, we’re going to look at some other impacts that are happening now relative to Medicare. Medicare open enrollment. What’s that mean? It doesn’t affect all of you listening, but affects many of you listening and have Twila explain some of these things that we all need to know. Well as we go into our final segment. Thanks for being with us today. Again, this has been a what we call a health freedom update program. We do this once a month. Twila Brase, she leads the Citizens Council for Health Freedom is with me again today. And we look at this matter of health and health freedom, talk about policy issues from time to time, leading legislative issues from time to time, threats to health, freedom of which there are many, and try to always include resolutions or resolve to these things. So that’s what we’re doing today.
And so if you’re with us, again, thanks for being a part of it. And I would encourage you to again, be aware that programs such as ours that tell us the truth, well they’re limited as you know, and programs that tell the truth and covers the issues of the day, that’s from a truth perspective, that is unusual. And for us as we bring a biblical worldview to those issues, that makes it even more unique and God’s blessing you through this program. Anyway, three things. Pass it along to a friend, let them know. Number two, pray for us. Absolutely. That is so critical. And thirdly, we need your financial participation. It just has to be those needs arise and impacts us all. I mean we all have to live, we all have to buy food, all of that kind of thing. And it costs money to put programs like this on the air and to do the functions that are required.
So if God is blessing you through it, I can just ask that you consider that as a motivation for what you can do. For us, it is more important than, alright, TWI, let’s go back into this. Now I talked about Medicare open enrollment on your website, you talk about this and it’s a big deal. It doesn’t affect everybody if you’re not involved in Medicare, it’s not an issue, but many of our listening audience are. So you’re advising people involved in Medicare about certain decisions including that which is referred to as open enrollment. Alright, what is open enrollment and what are you saying about what people opt to know at this time of open enrollment for Medicare?
Twila Brase:
Well, this is actually, there’s a bunch of enrollment times, I believe it’s called annual enrollment. I think the open enrollment is a little bit people to say it interchangeably. So just in case people are looking up and see the word annual, just know that we’re still talking about the same thing here. So what I’m saying is that October 15th to December 7th is an opportunity to look. If you are already in Medicare, it’s an opportunity to make some changes, but you have to be really careful about if you’re going to make changes, what are you going to lose that you didn’t think about or what is happening in the market that you don’t realize? And you have to get really great advice before you make changes. But on the other hand, some people who are in Medicare Advantage for instance, and they think they’ve got a good deal, they don’t understand how Medicare Advantage has a long history of rationing care and how maybe if they’re healthy.
Now this is great to be in Medicare Advantage to get some free Bennys. They don’t pay as much. Maybe they have zero premium costs, but then what if next year they end up in a terrible situation or a chronic condition or whatever it is and then they can’t make a switch anymore that it’s not even really available to them. Because if they go into original Medicare, they’re going to have to have a supplemental policy to cover things like long hospitalizations for example, or really pricey expenditures. And if they can’t get that supplemental insurance because they waited until they were sick to make the switch, and now the insurance company says, sorry, we don’t have to cover you. We don’t want to pay for all those expenses and this is real insurance and we’re not going to give it to you. And they have those insurance companies for Medigap or supplemental Medicare, they can say no to you.
So now is the time to take a look at people can certainly look at our Medicare how to guide. We had somebody very high up in the Medicare administration who called it essentially a service to the American people, said there’s all sorts of things in there that people aren’t going to find elsewhere, including our 10 traps and our information about Medicare Advantage, facts about Medicare Advantage that most Medicare agents won’t tell you. And so yeah, that’s free on our website, CCH freedom.org. But it’s not only for you who are in Medicare, it’s for you who are thinking about age 65 is coming or I won’t be employed very much longer. I’m 70, I’ve been working, but I never had to get Medicare. But now that I’m going to really retire, I have to make decisions. But it’s also for people who have parents who have to make decisions or know other friends who have to.
So I had one guy tell me he handed it to a neighbor of his guide and she handed it back to him after a few days or a week or whatever and she said, now I know exactly what I have to do. So you want to make the very best Medicare decision because right now in a very classic case of age discrimination, once you hit 65, you don’t have a choice of having real insurance. You are forced onto the Medicare program. We are trying to change that. And we’ve now got a bill that is in the house and the Senate to try and give you the right to opt out and have real health insurance on the outside and still keep your social security benefits. But right now that bill is not yet law.
Sam Rohrer:
Alright, that’s excellent. And I want you to give that again, that booklet name. Just give it one more time right now the name of it. So when people go to the website@cchfreedom.org, they’ll find this booklet, what’s the name of it again?
Twila Brase:
It’s called Medicare How to Guide. And it should be right on our homepage in the thing that flips around. And it’s also up in publications, but anybody can call us if they have trouble. But Medicare, how to guide it should pop up even if you search for Medicare.
Sam Rohrer:
And that’s a very helpful guide. Okay, one of the things Senator Cruz is introducing piece of legislation, is that what you were talking about or is that something else?
Twila Brase:
Yes, it’s called the Retirement Freedom Act, but I kind of prefer to call it the Medicare right to Optout. Bill and Senator Cruz just introduced it on September 16th and Congressman Gary Palmer in Alabama introduced it in April. And we were really waiting to get the Senate author. And now we will go after co-authors and we would really like to get a hearing on this and we would really like to get this to President Trump’s desk to sign. It’ll be voluntary. Voluntary right to opt out. There’s going to be 80 million people. There’s only eight years until the program is insolvent. What is Congress doing? Not figuring out a way to actually take care of people in their senior years without having them have their lives rationed away by a program who’s only there in name, right? It’s crazy. This is a bill that they should all pass and everybody who’s listening should ask their members of Congress to sign on to the Retirement Freedom Act. Retirement Freedom Act, which simply lets people voluntarily opt out of Medicare and without losing their social security benefits.
Sam Rohrer:
All right. And there ought to be no opposition to that. Obviously we know there will be. And whether or not it goes forward or not, I don’t know, but we’re about out of time here wireless, so we can’t really get into another line of thinking. But again, your website, CCH freedom.org, ladies and gentlemen, you can find a lot of things there. And I know that many of you have because you will tell me that you found Twila’s site to be helpful on these issues because really from an organizational perspective, really the best, not necessarily the only, but probably close to that, that has this kind of information with this thrust on it where the focus is health freedom, individuals retaining our choice relative to our health decisions and how to approach these things, not just complaining about them. So with that, Twila, thanks for being with me today. Always a pleasure to have you on. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us today. Join us tomorrow, Jamie, you’ll be here at the program. I’ll be with Dr. Carl Brogue on matters of Middle East and Israel on Wednesday. And David New on matters of Constitution in American history on Thursday. And then we will clean up the week with some kind of an Ask Sam perhaps program on Friday.
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