Senator Marshall: No One Has Fought Harder for American Families & Farmers Than President Trump
Senator Marshall Joins Pete Mundo on KCMO
Washington – On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D. (R-Kansas), joined Pete Mundo on Mundo in the Morning on KCMO radio to discuss day 22 of the Schumer shutdown, Republicans’ real solutions to the health care crisis, and the state of cattle trade.
Click HERE to listen to the Senator’s full interview.
On the Senate Republican luncheon at the White House:
“Pete, well, good morning. I think it’s number one. You know, just envision Andy Reid and their team when they’ve got a losing record to start the year, saying to stay together, you know. So, Coach Trump was saying, Look, we need to stay together on this one, that we need to work towards a balanced budget. And the Democrats are asking to add one and a half trillion dollars to our debt right now, and not to do it. So it was, stick together. We’re focused. We’ve had a lot of successes, the most successful first nine months of any presidency, so we’ve got a lot to be proud of, but let’s stick together here. And the Democrats need to come to their senses, come across the aisle, and open the government, and then if you want to talk about fixing health care, we’re very glad to do that.”
On current shutdown discussions:
“Yeah, well Pete, I’m getting ready to have our bipartisan prayer breakfast, which I lead. There’ll be 15 or 20 of us in that here in a second. And, you know, there’s just not much chatter back and forth about it, and we just seem to be stuck. As you know, I think President Trump is one of the greater negotiators in the world. He’s waiting for the right timing. And you heard earlier, I’m sure that Chuck Schumer is almost begging, to meet with him. So, I think that Trump has him almost where he wants him, but not quite. This thing has kind of turned on itself, turned back on the Democrats. And I think Senator Schumer realizes this isn’t playing out well for them. When they voted against funding the military last week, I think you could really see the tide turn against the Democrats. It’s not playing well back home. So, we’ll see what where the President is. I would just add he’s very focused on things overseas right now, really working hard to make this peace agreement in Hamas stick, and then trying to figure out some type of path to end all the killing in Ukraine and get those 20,000 kidnapped children back home as well.”
On President Trump’s negotiation skills:
“Yeah, I’m trying to think, you know, we talked for an hour. I don’t recall him specifically mentioning Russia, but just as you hear all of his press conferences, I certainly do see that he’s pretty locked in on things on an international basis across the world, and understands that we’re stuck right now. So, I think he’s sitting there waiting. We’ll see if he wants to meet with Schumer before the end of the week. But like he said, why would you negotiate when they have a hostage? Just imagine this, Pete: look at it like the Democrats have taken the federal government hostage. The ransom is one and a half trillion dollars. Do you pay the kidnappers the one and a half trillion dollars, and that just reinforces them to do it more and more? So, I think we’re stuck right now. Look, I want to fix health care, but not until after they open the government.”
On Democrats’ failed health care policies:
“Well, I think the first thing is Democrats need to own this, the ACA. This is the ACA policies, the Obamacare policies. And there’s one thing we learned about Obamacare, or the ACA, that’s not so affordable. I’ve said all along, and I didn’t wake up thinking about this yesterday. I’ve been thinking about this for eight years, and even longer, you go back to my private practice, there’s three things the Democrats need to be willing to address after they open the government. Number one is the fraud. There’s $25 billion of fraud right now in the people on the ACA program, 24 million people on it. It’s costing the federal government $150 billion a year. There’s at least $25 billion of fraud. Next is the deductible. The average deductible on these plans is $5,000 a year. If you’re a family making $80,000 a year, and you have a $5,000 deductible, that’s not access to health care. And then finally, there is the cost of this. They have to be willing to address the problems with their plan. With this ACA plan, again, they own it. This is their problem. This is their plan. This is exactly what we said the ACA would do. It would drive up the cost of health care. Indeed, it is. So, they have to be willing to address all three of those before I’m even willing to sit down and try to work out the mechanics of it. This is something. And President Trump is texting me about, you know, wanting you know what my input on it, and we’ll be ready to roll after they open the government back up. They shouldn’t have waited till two weeks before the government shutdown, before the deadline for the government funding, to say, Oh, this is the hostage we’re taking. I cannot fix this in two weeks of negotiations. Pete, I know what to do. I know what the goals are, but it’s going to take a little bit of time for me to work through this with Democrats, because they don’t understand business. They never signed the front side of a paycheck. They’ve never had to purchase health care, that they have no idea what the real world is really like.”
On Republicans’ solutions to the health care crisis:
“Yeah, I think to address the fraud is number one. We have to have some type of identity, author identification. Imagine, you know, just like going to vote, or, you know, you’re signing up for Medicare. You don’t have to prove who you are. So, there’s people out there. Of those, 24 million people, 38% of them, are not using their health care plan. So, these are ghost people. They don’t even know they’re on it. So, there’s honest insurance agents out there signing up people that don’t even know they’re being signed up for it. All you need is your name and a phone number. They’re signing you up, and the federal government is paying 100% of the premium for a lot of these people. So, you have to have identity verification. Next, people must pay something into it. You can’t make it totally free. I don’t care if it’s $10 a week, $10 a month, but people have to have a monthly payment to verify that they’re in it. So that’ll take care of the fraud. Next, what we want is transparency. So, price tag bill, we’re going to get that through Congress this year. That makes hospitals, imaging centers, and doctors have to post their prices before you go have your procedure done, and the next and last thing is to turn people into consumers again. We want a special HSA healthcare savings account that you could use for these and maybe it’s even partially funded by the federal government. I could go on and on; there’s something called Silver Loading Pete. I’ll come back and talk to you about someday, what the insurance companies have done that’s really just corporate welfare.”
On the current state of cattle trade:
“Well, Pete, you’re right. There’ll be a big announcement out of the USDA today, kind of addressing some of these particular issues. I met yesterday with Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, and was immediately talking to the White House about some of the President’s comments there. So, I would say this number one, you know, the president ran on really three things, secure the border, lower the price of gasses, and lower the price of groceries. Look, he secured the border. Gas prices back home this weekend, I saw some places at two and a half dollars a gallon. But groceries are a little sticky. They’re still up 2.7%. That’s a far better situation than under Joe Biden’s 22% cumulative increase in groceries. But the President is still concerned about the price of groceries, and beef is kind of leading the situation there. Now your listeners need to know that I worked in this industry growing up. I lost a lot of money in this industry over the last 20 years. I know the industry forward, backwards, and sideways. This Argentina beef is just a blip on the screen. Yeah, we could increase the Argentina beef imports times eight, and it would not replace the amount of beef we’re losing from Mexico because of the screw worm. And then the other thing people need to understand, and this is complicated, but in America, we grow fat beef. It’s steaks. It’s, you know, when the American farmer makes money, is when we turn corn into that great KC strip steak that you get down at one of those fine restaurants, or maybe you go to the grocery store and get it as well. We don’t have enough hamburgers. Where I’m going with this is we don’t have enough lean beef in this country to satisfy the needs for hamburger. You know whether that’s for tacos or spaghetti or whatever you use hamburger for, we have to import some hamburger, because our beef is so much more valuable, it’s much more profitable to take that to turn our corn into steaks and ship it to Japan and South Korea. So, we have to import some hamburgers from somewhere. The real problem with the cost of beef is the supply piece, the supply of cattle. This is the smallest cattle herd we’ve had in my lifetime. Why did the cattle herd get so small? Well, really, seven of the last 10 years we’ve had drought. So, you’re that rancher. You’re deciding whether to keep your female calves or not or sell them. Those are called heifers; it’s not good if you don’t have any grass for them, you’ve got to sell them. Well, guess what? We’ve had some rain. The Flint Hills just look incredible. Cattle from all over the country come here to graze, to the Flint Hills, where I was born and raised. So it’s looking like the supply is going to come back, but unlike chickens, it’ll take three years to grow this herd back. But you have to have water in the ponds, and you have to have hay to feed them, so that’s coming back. We got the screw worm issue in Mexico, and happy to come back and talk about that someday. But we don’t want to be importing cattle, live cattle from Mexico right now, because of this true one, it could run our entire industry. Got a lot of balls up in the air here, okay, got my eye on all of them.”
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Contact: Payton Fuller
