All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. The Future of Peacekeeping In Africa The Last Trial of the Fight Against Mountain Valley Pipeline The USA's Impending Telemedicine Cliff King Trump Yells at Congress Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #6 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources/Links: King Trump Yells at Congress https://www.npr.org/2025/03/05/nx-s1-5318104/trump-joint-address-congress-takeawayshttps://www.npr.org/2025/03/04/nx-s1-5318102/trump-joint-session-al-green-protesthttps://www.thepinknews.com/2025/03/05/january-littlejohn-donald-trump/https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/03/05/trump-social-security-fraud-claims/81508815007/ Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #6 https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4086787/pentagon-deploys-stryker-brigade-aviation-battalion-to-southern-border/ https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4086539/dod-statement-on-deployment-of-stryker-brigade-combat-team-to-help-secure-our-s/ https://www.northcom.mil/Newsroom/Press-Releases/Article/4086531/additional-troops-to-enhance-border-security-operations/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-ukraine-minerals-deal-trump-zelenskyy/ https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-china-643086a6dc7ff716d876b3c83e3255b0 https://apnews.com/article/trudeau-trump-canada-tariffs-us-5d5ef8bd41c4567926d543a9526b2e84 https://www.mining.com/web/copper-prices-surge-as-trump-signals-25-tariff-on-imports/ https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/05/trump-tariffs-live-updates-china-says-its-ready-to-fight-any-type-of-war-us-wants-till-the-end.html https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-china-lutnick-2b269614084027a4894aa14f3dc16227 https://www.kob.com/news/top-news/wipp-in-carlsbad-under-doge-cuts/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the focus of the episode on peacekeeping in Africa?
But then you forgot about it in the very long time they took to pick us up.
I completely forgot about it.
And she reveals what she thought when she read the script for Sex and the City the very first time.
He said he wrote this like I was in his head in some way, which I found really interesting.
And does she think Carrie is too good for Mr. Big?
She had inexplicable feelings. It is a human being that can't explain to her friends why somebody that might be beneath her is dictating everything.
You can't miss this. Listen to Are You a Charlotte? on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I have a question for you, and I want you to be honest with me. How are you? It's a really hard question to ask, it's a harder one to answer, but taking care of our mental well-being has never been more important.
All of May is Mental Health Awareness Month and on the Psychology of Your 20s podcast, we are taking a vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about and all the science and psychology behind some of life's hardest moments and transitions.
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Chapter 2: What are the issues surrounding the Mountain Valley Pipeline?
But I'm joined today by Venkatesh Ramnath, who is a practicing pulmonologist, a professor at UC San Diego Health, a medical director of several ITUs in rural and urban settings, and also the author of the sub-stack, Be a Health Architect. Welcome to the show, Venkatesh. Thanks for joining us. Great to be here.
I'm also joined by Dr. Kaveh Hoda, a gastroenterologist and the host of our favorite medical podcast, The House of Pod. Of the many you listen to, I'm sure. Yeah, they might call a super user in the medical podcast space. You listen to more than me. Most importantly, Kaveh is, of course, our friend. That's right. Our resident doctor with a useful doctorate. So what we want to talk about today is...
Medicare, and specifically some of the cuts to Medicare, more broadly, the, I don't know really how to put this, challenges for people working in healthcare in the Trump administration, right? We addressed specifically gender-affirming care in a previous episode, but it doesn't start and end there, right?
That might be the thing that sort of the cultural wars have been focusing on recently, but I want to talk more broadly about the challenges facing healthcare in So first of all, would one of you care to explain Medicare for people who are not familiar? Some listeners might not be living in the United States or they might just not have encountered this yet in their life.
So could one of you explain what this particular type of health insurance is and how it's maybe more vulnerable than other types to federal government changes?
I could take a stab at it. I'm not a health policy wonk, but I am a physician that has to deal with Medicare all the time. So Medicare, in sort of general terms, is a type of health insurance that is provided by the federal government. It is almost exclusively for individuals above the age of 65, as it dates back to the 1960s with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program.
coverage for any individuals above that age such that all their medical services or products you know whatever they need for their health care is actually covered by the government this is the federal government now the interesting thing about medicare is that there are different parts to it there's part a which is primarily for some essential services and includes hospital care but
There's Part B, which includes whatever physicians' fees go into that health care. And then there's Part D, which relates to pharmaceutical prices, so your drug costs. It's not comprehensive in the sense that there's always something more that individuals need, but Medicare... for all intents and purposes, is the sort of standard, and it should cover most of an individual's needs.
Now, that said, the commercial payers, that is the other insurance companies that are not federally government-sponsored, take their lead from Medicare. So a lot of the different payment rates
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Chapter 3: How does telemedicine impact healthcare delivery?
But no, some Dems did not show up in protest. Others were black, kind of like in mourning. Yeah, who cares? Some of the women's caucus were pink. Very cool. Very feminist. Mm hmm. And others were the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Sure. That'll help.
But, you know, Trump just pointed towards the Democrat side of the chamber throughout the night and just referred to them as the radical left lunatics. Like, this was not a across-the-aisle speech.
No, it wasn't.
This was, if anything, emphasizing the divisions within the country.
One of the things that happened before the speech even started was... Like he drove in with Melania and Elon. First lady and first bitch boy.
Yeah. First buddy, Garrison. First buddy is the official term.
First buddy. Yeah. I don't know. But like, you know, Trump starts off the speech with America is back. And like, how far back are we talking? Because you're not wrong.
Yeah, like 1864, I think, is the goal.
I mean, this is the same phrase that Biden opened his first speech with as well. I think Biden was referring to, like, we are back to pre-Trump America. And now Trump is using this phrase to refer to, like, this, like, mythical America, right? Sure. But no, Trump took the stage to USA chants throughout.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Medicare cuts?
Right. Like, we saw, like, the sort of blue and on attempts at election denial, like, after the election. And, like, I don't think that's what they were doing here. Agreed. They gave off this, like, yeah, this very ineffectual kind of half-arsed attempt at booing. And then, aside from Green, they all just sat down and waved their ping pong things.
Yeah. So, Representative Al Green from Texas, old man with cane. It's a good cane.
It's got a gold handle.
Yeah, it's snazzy.
I thought, I mean, it's the sort of cane you normally see a sword coming out of, if I'm honest.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That would have been cooler.
That would have been cooler. But instead, he just waves the cane around, talking about how this mandate doesn't mean that there's a mandate to, like, you know, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare. That was specifically what he was talking about. Television mics did not really pick that up.
No. No. And a lot of reporting didn't either, which was shitty, I thought.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do healthcare professionals face today?
Yeah, this has been their thing for a while, right? Dead people are voting, dead people are getting social security. Yeah.
Yeah. Trump's own social security administrator has like said as much the super old people in the database simply don't have death details logged, but they are not receiving payments. There is improper payments in the social security system, usually around 1%. Mostly that's overpayments or entertainments to people who are actually alive.
And there is a system for resolving those already in place because social security is a pretty old system that we've had for quite a while. And like, I don't know, like Trump skirted by a lot of economy issues. And the way he did so was just by repeatedly claiming that Doge and like cutting this fraud will magically fix the economy. Right. Like this is how he wants to frame this.
Eggs are too much money. All of these things. And he has no actual solution to it. So instead, we're going to fix the economy through Doge. Through finding all this fraud, somehow we will locate this pot of gold hidden somewhere that will magically make our economy better. And this is his solution because he doesn't have any real solution.
Yeah. I should have pointed out that Lincoln scholarships were in fact a Trump. They started in 2019, this round of them. Good job cutting your own fraud, Donald. Do you know what else started in the first Trump era, Garrison?
Advertising. Advertisements. I believe Trump's first executive order, he established the podcasting advertising industry, which supports us to this day.
Today is the backbone of the American economy, yeah. I mean, that's actually, unfortunately, more true than it should be. No, if anyone wants to buy any colloidal silver.
No, no, no.
Okay, we are back. On top of trans issues, the other, I would say, most cited element in this speech was the border. Trump referenced the Lake and Riley Act, which requires DHS to detain illegal immigrants who've admitted to, were charged with, or convicted of theft-related crimes or any crime related to serious bodily injury.
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Chapter 6: How can communities advocate for better healthcare?
Chapter 7: What is the future of peacekeeping missions?
And I think maybe that's, you know, maybe that's the starting point for any of this. We all want cost effectiveness. We all want, you know, transparency. We also want to have choices that make sense to us, but let's not make it an adversarial confrontation. And I think that that goes for both sides.
I would add, though, I agree with you on pretty much all of that. I agree that we need to have those conversations, even if they're difficult. We need to be able to look back objectively about things that worked and didn't work. But a lot of these sort of mea culpa's that have come out about like, you know, this is what we went wrong and why we lost trust.
If I'm being honest, including that one from Ashish Jha, it has a lot of, in my opinion, pick me energy, right? A lot of people who are trying to appeal to the incoming administration and be like, hey, look, I'm cool, too. I'm not always about vaccines. And to me, that's just as bad, too. And I do think we need to have an honest conversation.
And I do think we need to be clear about how we do science, something we need to be able to explain. And you're absolutely right, which we didn't do very well. is, look, we are working with information we have at hand. We're doing everything we can. This information may change. When it changes, our recommendations are going to change too. And that is tough.
That is a tough message to get across because people don't like nuance like that. People don't like the uncertainty of that. People want to know yes or no, absolutely. And sometimes it's hard. It's hard to find good communicators in science to do that. But you're exactly right. It is incumbent upon us
as doctors who have a substack like yours, have a podcast like mine, who are academics, who have a reach to students and beyond to communicate these things. And even though it would be awesome If for the next four years, my podcast was just about farts and poop, I know I have to do a lot of this stuff because I know how important this is now more than ever. So I totally agree.
It's going to start with conversations.
I think that's a big difference between... this is the information we have available and we're doing our best with it. And when we get new information, we'll do something different if that's what that information points to. And these people are acting out of malice to deprive you of your rights, which is sometimes what's been suggested by some people.
And I think a good way to defeat that, as you say, is communicating around it. It is very sad that like when I was doing the research for my PhD dissertation, I wrote about, first I wrote about violence in the anarchist builders union for my master's. And then I wrote about public health and popular sport in the 1930s in Barcelona.
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Chapter 8: How do socio-political factors affect healthcare?
It's so odd because like... Trump spent this speech talking about how, you know, like, we're bringing back merit-based hiring. We have, quote, ended the tyranny of DEI across government, private sector, and military, as he then just did to DEI hires on stage. But, you know, who am I to say? So that's kind of all I have to say on the Trump speech right now.
I will briefly, very briefly, talk about the Democratic response. The Democratic response was done by Senator Slotkin from Michigan, who opened by saying, "'America wants change, but there's a responsible way to make change and an irresponsible way.'"
trying to paint Doge as this very irresponsible and brash way to achieve efficiencies, something that we all obviously want the government to move more towards.
She warned about how Trump's actions may result in a recession, warned about losing Social Security, Medicare, and VA benefits, quoted Musk, who recently called Social Security the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, and attacked Musk and the 20-year-old Doge members for using their own servers to access your sensitive data.
slotkin spent a lot of the rebuttal praising ronald reagan odd for a democrat i would say i don't know why strange don't know why you as the opposition party are continuing to base your politics on praising bush and reagan very cool opposition party bros very fun stuff um she also said i've lived and worked in many countries i've seen democracies flicker out i've seen what life is like when a
Yeah, I bet you have. Former CIA agent. She also mentioned doom scrolling. So that really shows how the Democrats have the finger on the pulse here when doom scrolling is mentioned as something not to do, saying instead you should hold your elected officials, including me, accountable, watch how they're voting, go to town halls, demand they take action. And organize.
Pick up one issue you're passionate about and engage. Doomscrolling doesn't count. Join a group that cares about your issue and act. If you can't find one, start one. And that was the bulk of the 10-minute Democratic response. Oh boy, what a fun day in American politics that was. Any final thoughts, James, Sophie?
Like this speech, this episode is running long. Yeah. So I really don't have any final thoughts other than... Bad. Bad.
Bad. Bad. Bad. The Democrats are unwilling to do anything actually serious. Once again, the attempts at quote unquote fact checking the speech are also incredibly pathetic to look at.
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