Rep. Gary Palmer interview transcript

This is the transcript of an interview between Michael McKenna, columnist for The Washington Times, and Rep. Gary Palmer, an Alabama Republican who is chair of the House Republican Policy Committee.

What newspapers do you usually read?

There are only two papers I read, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. This [column in The Times] is a lot like what I wrote a long time ago about the Christmas that saved America. A lot of people think that the key to saving the economy is for people to spend all their money for Christmas, and a lot of business makes their profit (during the season). But you have to look farther back in our history to find the Christmas to save America.

In 1776, Washington had lost New York, Fort Lee, had been forced to divide his army and make a mad dash retreat across New Jersey and get to the Delaware River and on Dec. 1 the enlistment service of 2,000 men had ended and he was down to about 3,000 men in camp, with insufficient tents, supplies, munitions, clothes in the middle of December.

The other half of the army showed up; they had gotten some enlistments and the whole of the army was up to 7,500 men, but only about 6,000 were fit for duty.

Can you imagine what was going through the minds of those men when the order came to gather on the banks of the Delaware River at midnight and then told they were going to cross the river and attack the Hessians at Trenton in the middle of a snowstorm?

How many of those men thought, “I’ve lost friends in battle. I’ve lost friends to diseases”?  How easy it would have been to say, “I’ve done all I can do,” and slip off into the night?

But these were not summer soldiers or sunshine patriots.  When the order came, they got into the boats. Washington deserves the esteem of the nation for that brilliant move, but it was really the men that we should in awe of, after all they had gone through.

America is at her best when facing great adversity. Today we subscribe to this idea that if we just elect the right guy president, all will be well. But that’s not the case. This is one of those times when the question has got to be raised: “Will you get into the boat?

I’ve taken the oath three times myself. The gravity of the moment is always present.

One of my friends is the mayor of Mobile. Before his first run, his wife said she’d be fine with [him running for office] as long as his second wife was fine with it. He’s just been elected to his third term and he’s transforming Mobile and creating a model for racial reconciliation and inclusion.

For those who claim to be Christians, if you read John I, Chapter 3 Verse 2 says that we do not know what we will be, but we know this, we will see him and when we see him, we will see him as it is and we will be like him. Doesn’t say he’ll be Black, White or Hispanic, Asian. I mean we don’t even know what we look like, and we won’t know until we see him. Then we’ll realize, we’re like him, whatever that is.

What is the most destructive thing the Biden administration has done? What is going to be the hardest to reel back in?

Most destructive thing they’ve done all comes down to three points on the same topic.  Security. He has undermined our national security. He has undermined local security, and he has undermined personal security.

Local security?

Safe streets. Safe communities. Safe schools.  

Personal security?

Compromising our privacy. Compromising our health care not only with respect to having the ability to have affordable health care but also in our health care decision-making and our economic security in terms of jobs and the future economy.

On the national security side, failure to secure the border, failure in Afghanistan, and the failure to confront China and begin an effort to detach from China. This administration is focused on the exact wrong things at this moment in our history. They are so focused on climate change, and they consider that the existential threat when the existential threat is immediate in the form of China and in the form of losing control of our border and not knowing who is crossing that border.

Can we talk about climate change for a moment?

If you look at what are the top issues among Republicans and independents and Democrats, and people are surprised by this: About 15% of Republicans would say inflation, about 15% would say economy or jobs, another 15% or so would say border security, immigration, that sort of thing. One percent of Republicans say climate change.  Six percent of independents say climate change.

Fifteen percent of Democrats would say climate change. My guess is that those are the people who never watch anything other than MSNBC or CNN. They don’t read anything beyond Axios or something like that. They’ve bought into this.

I’m not saying that climate change is not an issue; it is. But it is not an existential threat.

It’s partially a religion at this point?

Read Mike Shallenberger’s book. He makes the case that it has become a secular religion.  You’ve got people out there that think the carrying capacity of the earth should be no more than 2 billion people. What are you going to say to the other 6 billion?

What is going to be the most difficult thing to undo?

I think we have to focus on those three security issues, and I think we’ve got to start the process of detachment from China. As President Bush talked about, it has to be a coalition of the willing. Not just a coalition of the willing, it has to be a coalition of the enlightened.

You look at where we were in 2000, in two-thirds of the nations of the world, the United States was the primary trading partner. By 2020, it is completely reversed. Look at South America. Right now, I think there are only two nations on the continent for who we are still the primary trading partner.

We have let it happen. A lot of it has been driven by some of the banks and hedge funds and it’s all about money. We’ve got to form a worldwide coalition that will allow us to procure materials, to find, mine and produce the things that we need from rare earth material. We’ve got to start building our own semiconductors and chips here or somewhere nearby. We’ve got to do the same thing on medicines, and it’s not something that we’re going to do in two years or four years.

We have got to form a coalition of people who understand the long-term ramifications of what’s happening with China. There is not a single product that we get from China that we can’t get from somewhere else if we decide to do that.

It is a decision; it is a choice.

On top of that, we’re still in a cold war with Russia. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has great ambitions, particularly in Eastern Europe, which have ramifications for us as well.

The restarting of the Quad is the most important foreign policy achievement of the Trump administration.

Right. I don’t want a military confrontation with China, we don’t need to have a military confrontation with China. What we need to be doing is first of all securing the Western Hemisphere. There is over a billion people in the Western Hemisphere. All of the Caribbean nations have a vote in the United Nations; Latin America, all of whom have a vote in the United Nations. Canada is not on the [United Nations] Security Council because China worked the vote and a lot of the Caribbean island nations voted against it.

China is forcing these nations to get loans to pay back China. China is so undercapitalized right now, it’s ridiculous. We’re not taking advantage of it. Two years ago, Morgan Stanley International upweighted their investment recommendations from 5% to 20%, and thereby gave China a trillion dollars in equity. Barclays put them in their international bond fund, giving them another $3 trillion.

I talked to [Larry] Kudlow in 2019 about this. I know you can’t call Morgan Stanley or Barclays and tell them “you can’t do this,” but there has to be something done to head this off.

In 1948, George Kennan wrote the Long Telegram where he laid out a strategy to contain and defeat the Russians, and for 40 years we more or less followed that strategy. Have you seen anything like that with respect to China?

Something like that will be coming out very shortly.

You mentioned health care.

I think part of the problem with some Republicans with respect to health care is that they don’t understand all of the issues related to health care. It’s not one big issue. This idea of repealing Obamacare was a bad message. There were certain things about Obamacare that made sense. Not very many, and the overall Obamacare was a disaster.

It was designed to collapse the health care industry so that everyone would be on a government-run health care system. So, the first thing that we need to know is how to talk to people about what nationalized health care looks like.

I was in a hearing with [Rep.] John Yarmuth, before he was chairman of the House Budget Committee, and it was all about government-run health care. They’re calling it Medicare for All, and I said would the gentlemen yield for a question? Could the gentleman recommend a nation that has a nationalized health care system that you would recommend as a model to the American people?

He started talking about Canada. What people need to understand about Canada is that the provinces get a quarterly appropriation and at the end of the quarter when they are running short on money, they start rationing care. From 1993 to 2009, it is estimated that increases in wait times for medical necessary treatments “may be associated with 25,456 to 63,009 deaths among women.” Literally, that many women [in Canada] may have died waiting for medical treatment.

The wait times – this is from a think tank in Canada [the Frasier Institute] – across 12 major medical specialties, the typical wait time rose from 9.3 weeks in 1993 to 18.2 weeks in 2013.

That’s how you respond to nationalized health care. In the U.K., I think there’s 27 cancer drugs that are commonly available in the United States to treat everything from breast cancer to prostate cancer that you can’t get in the U.K. In the U.K., 46% of all physician-referred joint replacements are declined by the National Health System. 

There are certain drugs that you can’t get, and that’s already taking place in the United States. In Oregon, there is a lady who had cancer that went into remission. Then her cancer came back. She was part of the Oregon healthcare system and there was a life-extending drug that she could have gotten, but the Oregon health care plan would not have paid for it. They would, however, pay for the drug for physician-assisted suicide.

There was a young mother in California; with four kids ranging in age from 7 to 14. Same thing: Cancer drug that her health plan wouldn’t pay for, but they would pay for her physician-assisted suicide drug, and the co-pay would have only been $1.60 [for the physician-assisted suicide drug].  

That’s what you need to understand about government-run health care.  At some point, care is going to be rationed and there are going to limits to specialists and to technology.  If you or I go to the doctor and the doctor says we need an MRI, we’ll get it this afternoon or first thing tomorrow. That’s not the case in Canada, not the case in the U.K., and not the case in other places.

The other thing is when Republicans get talking about health care, it’s usually about cost.  The best way to reduce cost is to improve outcomes. We need to break this down into manageable parts, and I think it starts with a major expansion of Health Savings Accounts and how we treat the residual that people don’t spend.

We need to tell people that you have a Health Savings Account that is pretax and what you don’t spend will roll over with no tax consequence, you can earn interest on it. The idea here is for people to invest in themselves; to incentivize people to live healthier lifestyles, although not everyone’s condition is lifestyle related. Sometimes it’s genetic, I understand that. But even there, you want to motivate people to make smarter choices.

With a Health Savings Account, routine health care payments, if you buy a major medical plan with let’s just say a $5,000 deductible, that’s what you’re having in your Health Savings Account. [Medical care] becomes a cash transaction.

I talked to one doctor who is one of the top people in the business of medicine, and he said it would reduce administrative costs by a minimum of 20%.  

You create incentives for people to be smarter about how they use health care and make wiser choices about their lifestyles. That would significantly bring down premium costs for everybody else.

The other thing is to set up a guaranteed benefits pool for people with pre-existing conditions so they can buy health insurance just like everyone else. The state of Maine did this. I showed this to President Trump; I had a bar chart on a sheet of paper in my coat pocket and I said to him that this is what the state of Maine experienced when they set up their guaranteed benefits pool. The high bar is what they were paying in premiums before they set this up. The low bar is what they are paying now for the general population. The middle bar? This is adult, non-smokers in New Hampshire. Same insurance company [Anthem]. The adult, non-smokers rate in New Hampshire is higher than the general population in Maine.  

The key here is, you set up the guaranteed benefits pool, you set up federal dollars where everyone is going to pay four or five extra dollars a month in health insurance premiums to fund this guaranteed benefits fund. The insurance companies sell these people insurance policies in which 90% of the premiums get paid by the fund. You limit the exposure of insurance companies to $7,500 or 10% percent of the next $25,000, so, [the insurers] know their total exposure is a set amount.

I introduced this as an amendment and it passed in 2017. [Inaudible] did an analysis of this and concluded it would lower the premium costs in every age category and would increase the number of people buying insurance by about 2 million.

So, there is a way to change the dynamic here and a way for us to talk about it and to do it in a way where you’re talking to individuals and they understand the benefits to themselves.

We’re not taking away your health insurance. We’re not taking away coverage for pre-existing conditions. What we are doing is going to be of benefit to you.

The beauty of it is over a period time, this younger generation is going to benefit the most from expanded Health Savings Accounts because they generally don’t go to doctors as much, so the accounts will be rolling over and by the time they reach retirement age, they could have several hundred thousand dollars tax free to supplement their Medicare, to pay for long-term care, etc. Whatever they spend on health care, there’s no tax consequence, and no tax consequence on the earnings they’ve gotten on it.  

There’s a smart way to address this.

We did some interesting polling in 2018. My approval rate among suburban women was 54%, which is pretty good. But when we asked about our work on preexisting conditions, that approval went up to 85%. …

The top issues we have to build on is how do we bring down inflation, how do we make our streets and our communities safe again, securing our border, start the process of detaching from China, protect people’s privacy and protect them from government mandates that are so invasive.

I am less focused on vaxx versus don’t vaxx. That’s your call, and it should be between you and your doctor. You shouldn’t go to work one morning and have your employer say if you haven’t been vaccinated, you’re fired.

We’re concerned about national security. We’re concerned about defund the police. We’re concerned about our kids being safe when they go to school; being able to go to a mall and be safe. Now you’ve got your own government attacking your own personal security and your privacy.

These are all issues where, as Republicans, we’ve got a huge advantage if we’re just smart.