Solidarity HealthShare President and Co-Founder Chris Faddis joins Chris DeSimone of Wake Up Tucson to talk about the alarming future of healthcare.

Chris DeSimone (00:00):

Let’s go to co-founder and El Presidente of Solidarity HealthShare, solidarityhealthshare.org. Chris Faddis has made a triumphant return to the show after impressing us with Dr. Oertle.

Chris Faddis (00:17):

Yeah, now the bar is set really high.

Chris DeSimone (00:20):

Christopher, welcome back.

Chris Faddis (00:24):

Replace good health with bad health and good humor. So what are you going to do?

Chris DeSimone (00:27):

I need to talk to you after talking about the Mean Girl tactics in Pima County Constable Races. It’s wild and wacky as we like to say.

Chris Faddis (00:36):

I don’t, I don’t know. I mean we, everyone’s so friendly up here in the northern part of Arizona, so I dunno what’s going on down there. There’s nothing, there’s no dirty tactics. No one’s calling each other a philander or challenging them for stepping out on their wife or any of that kind of stuff

Chris DeSimone (00:51):

Or shooting out windows of rival’s offices or –

Chris Faddis (00:55):

Yeah, yeah. No, none of that.

Chris DeSimone (00:57):

We do have a buttload of fentanyl down here. I want to let you know that. So just in case you’re wondering heard, let’s get to 6% spike in health share costs coming up for next year. I’m in shock ( Not in health share.) Sorry, not in health sharing. Sorry. That’s why we’re here today. That’s why Chris is here. I just fell off my chair that healthcare costs, health insurance costs for employers are expected to jump 6% next year. Just wonderful. Wonderful.

Chris Faddis (01:38):

Yeah. Pretty wild, huh?

Chris DeSimone (01:41):

So Chris, I mean this is always going to be part of the mess that is traditional health insurance, right? It’s all the worst players doing all the worst things, right? Between insurance companies, hospital systems, oh, and God, the federal government.

Chris Faddis (02:03):

Everything they’ve done so far has been so helpful. Chris, what’s the problem?

Chris DeSimone (02:06):

I mean, watching those three work together is like watching a Pima County Constable race. See what it did right there. Zinger. So talk, we’re talking about some of the largest health increases in over a decade. So other than of course, solidarityhealthshare.org explain what’s going on in the mess that’s traditional health insurance right now.

Chris Faddis (02:35):

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s more of the same that we’ve talked about, of course, that the continued lack of price transparency, continued meddling in healthcare is just continued to increase the price. And the reality is when you have an exchange system through the Affordable Care Act slash Obamacare that allows insurance companies to rack up their rates and then get subsidies from the government to pay for it, then of course they’re going to rack up their rates across the board and it’s going to infect employer plans. It’s now affecting federal health plans for federal employees. So a 6% increase is across the board, but that’s in the middle, Chris. There’s people who are getting 15% increases this year and their employer plans, but again, it’s playing the same game of the discount off of bill charges. The hospitals keep racking up their charge masters. We still have the same issue of the price transparency.

(03:30):

We still have the same issue of consolidated consolidation of healthcare. It’s just getting worse. They’re buying more and more systems and it’s becoming more and more of a problem. So I think we’re seeing 50% of employees plan to employers and plan to implement cost control changes, which sounds like a bad thing. That could be a good thing if they move to a price transparency model like we have. But for most of ’em, what it means is they’re going to reduce what they cover, they’re going to increase the employee participation and what’s paid for and other measures to control the costs.

Chris DeSimone (04:09):

In all our conversations about this, I haven’t asked you this question yet. Let’s say the federal government goes to Chris Fadi and says, give us the plan to fix paying for healthcare in America. I’ll use my bad Trump impression. Make a great, big, beautiful plan. What does the Faddis Healthcare Reform Act look like?

(04:41):

We call it the other feca, the Faddis healthcare reform. The fca. fca.

Chris Faddis (04:48):

The fca,

Chris DeSimone (04:49):

Yes.

Chris Faddis (04:51):

That’s better than where I thought you were going to go with that.

Chris DeSimone (04:53):

Thank you. Yeah, I would say family show.

Chris Faddis (04:57):

Look, I think at the end of the day, it’s patient choice. It’s price transparency. And when I talk about price transparency, and we’ve talked about this before, but there’s been a lot of talk about price controls lately. I’m not talking about price controls. I’m talking about enforcing the normal behavior of every other marketplace in the world, and especially in this country, which is, I go to Chris and I ask him for a radio ad and he tells me how much it’s going to cost upfront. And I go to the next radio host that has a DriveTime show in Tucson and he tells me the cost. It’s going to be upfront. I don’t find out six months later what my cost was. I go to a mechanic, I go to any other place, I go buy a steak. I know my cost. That should just be happening, but it’s not happening.

(05:42):

And so the one area that the government needs to get involved is to enforce price transparency that providers of healthcare must provide pricing upfront in a clear and present way, and that will enforce competition. And then when you say, Hey, you get to choose your doctor, you get to choose your surgeon, you get to choose your imaging center and you incentivize that to say your health plan will be more or less based on what you choose and you can incentivize it. In many ways that’s happening in employer plans and people who use models like ours that’s happening in our program. I could have gotten my cardiac CT last week at any imaging center. I could have gone to the hospital and Solidarity would’ve had to share a $2,000 bill. No, I went and found the cheapest 180 bucks. It was all prearranged of Solidarity. It was done in 10 minutes.

(06:31):

And by the way, my heart’s good, but good job. That’s what we need to do. And it is not that hard. It doesn’t even require that much regulation. We have some form of it with the No Surprises Act, which is signed into law. One of the last things that Trump signed into law in 2020, bipartisan bill, unfortunately they’re not enforcing it and hospitals are not really complying. I think it’s like 65% of hospitals are not complying, but those that are, it’s helping because they have to publish some pricing in those areas where they’re forced to publish pricing and they give Good Faith Estimates and that the ones that are following through on it, it is helping consumers make good decisions.

Chris DeSimone (07:08):

So what about pegging prices off of Medicare? Right? Is this a good thing?

Chris Faddis (07:14):

Yeah, well look, it’s what we do because we don’t have anything else to peg it off of, right?

Chris DeSimone (07:19):

Right?

Chris Faddis (07:21):

You want to look for a benchmark. The only benchmark that’s consistent across the country because it’s by zip code and by locale is the Medicare pricing. I don’t think it’s the best thing. In fact, I think if people were publishing pricing, I think we would find a much better barometer for pricing that we could peg it off of. But the beauty of doing that is to say the reality is hospitals are not losing money off of Medicare. There might be a few services here and there. Sometimes the vaccines have a really stupid price. It’s less than what the cost of the medication is for the vaccine, that kind of stuff. But by and large hospitals could live off of the Medicare dollar. So if you take that and you add a plus to that, which is what we do, you say it’s 130% of Medicare or 150% of Medicare, whatever it is, you can get to a price that is fair and they can more than live off of it.

(08:14):

If they’re able to do it with the government and I’m paying them more, then of course they can do it and it’s a fair and just price, but that’s not the be all and end all. What we need is actual prices that are published and that would then give us the barometer to use to say, well, Dr A charges $500 more, but Dr. A has a better rating. He does this and that. He’s got a better bedside manner. I’ll pay extra for Dr. A. Those kinds of decisions can actually be made by people. Or Dr. A is no different than the other guy and he’s 500 more. I’m going to go to the other guy and that’s going to lower cost. And what we’ve found is consumers, when they get closer to the cost of the care like ours do, they do make better decisions because they’re associated to the program. The doctors also charge better rates when they have to talk to their patient about the cost of care because they’re not hiding behind a bunch of bureaucracy.

Chris DeSimone (09:02):

Gotcha. Alright, hold on thought for a sec. We’re going to go visit some great sponsors. We’re hanging out with Chris Faddis solidarityhealthshare.org. If you’re not looking into this on how to pay for your healthcare costs in a better, smarter, more reasonable way, you’re hurting yourself at your cashflow and your family. So go to solidarityhealthshare.org. We come back. A listener wants me to ask Chris about the campaign boast of the Biden Harris team capping diabetes insulin. So let’s talk about that too when we come back. Grant Krueger’s coming up about 20 minutes with supervisor Steve Christie. All right. Steve Howe from, yes, in Asia, picking a little intersection blues that’s called, we have a lot of intersection blues in Tucson, Arizona, 8 51 in the morning. We’re hanging out with our friend Chris Faddis, Co-Founder and president of Solidarity HealthShare solidarityhealthshare.org. Christopher, welcome back. Thanks for holding.

Chris Faddis (10:03):

Thanks for having me. How low is the speed limit down there now? It’s down to like 15.

Chris DeSimone (10:06):

They’re getting there. That’s their answer. We have no cops, but they’re going to try to make everyone go 23 miles an hour, so it’s just fine. It’ll all work out in the end. It’s fine. It’s fine. Listener had a question about, we keep hearing the campaign ads about the Harris Biden administration has lowered the cost of your insulin. So can you kind of explain what that means and then also talk about, well over the last few years, maybe insulin did go down, but everyone else’s crap went up on other stuff,

Chris Faddis (10:39):

Right?

Chris DeSimone (10:40):

Can you walk us through that

Chris Faddis (10:41):

Essentially. Yeah. Their big plan to reign in pharmacy, the out control pharmacy costs, pharmaceutical costs was well, we’ll help the seniors with the insulin. That’s the one thing we can do. Everyone can agree that seniors shouldn’t have to pay a lot of money for their insulin. So they did. That’s come about. They’ve been able to do that. It took them, I don’t know, three years to do it, essentially. So our one price control in pharmaceuticals is for insulin. For seniors that are on Medicare, they are now saying that’s going to expand to all Americans. That’s all great. I mean, fine could do that. Let’s keep doing that. But here’s the thing. I could go right now and I could get an order of insulin from Canada and I’m still going to pay less than I’m paying in the new fixed cost, and I can pay that cash and not have my insurance pay for it, right?

(11:32):

The reality is the FDA continues to try to do things that benefit the pharmaceutical companies. Why do American pharmaceutical companies that make drugs in America and in other countries, why do they charge less in England, in Australia, in India, in Italy, in France, in Spain, than they do in their own country for pharmaceutical drugs? That’s the problem, and it’s such a huge problem. So yeah, they did it. That’s great. But of course, other prices go up, they fix their costs other places. And the reality is we act like it’s no big deal because the insurance companies are paying for it, but our premiums go up on insurance every time those things happen. So that’s a big issue. Again, I’m not a big fan of price controls, but when you have runaway greed in an industry that is sort of fixed by several things that help them in federal law, including the FDA, who’s on their side, we’ve got to control that.

(12:27):

We’ve got to do something about it. And that’s a big problem. There’s a whole other problem, Chris, when it comes to the pharmacy benefits managers who are also part of that thing. So they’re taking the already high cost and then taking the rebates they get from the pharmaceutical companies for driving people to the highest cost drugs rather than lowest cost drugs, and they’re profiting that and they don’t have to report it. So that’s a whole other issue that is actually probably a bigger issue. And again, we just continue to be the ones that get to benefit from their wisdom and how they can make more money.

Chris DeSimone (13:00):

Other question, it’s being that Solidarity is a Catholic pro-life organization, how do you think the war on 139 is going right now in the state of Arizona? I mean, this is pure infanticide, this thing. What’s your take on how the fight’s going?

Chris Faddis (13:18):

It’s really hard because our work is national. I am so not as connected as I should be locally. Of course, I’m good friends with the folks at Center for Arizona Policy and Arizona Right to Life and all of those groups. And so I get updates here and there. I would say those groups single handedly have done more than anyone to get Catholics and Christians to register to vote. So many of those folks stayed out of the election last time, and they’re really pushing that. So that’s been good. The only other thing I can say is I’ve actually been very surprised in the Phoenix East Valley area of Phoenix in that I’ve hardly seen any Pro 139 signs anywhere.

(13:57):

They’re not around. You see a ton of no signs and very few of the pro sign now they’re spending money on ads. I don’t think they’re worried about the signs. I think they’re spending it on ads. So I don’t really have a barometer. I have no way to know. They’re lying so much about what’s in that bill and talking about our abortion ban and how mothers are dying, and that’s all lies. But I don’t have a sense of it because I’m not as connected as I was, but I’m reading things that I see around, and I would say the passion about it right now, they were really passionate about signing those ballot initiatives or those ballot signatures, but I think there’s not really that same movement around the actual vote. So I’m hopeful that that helps us. I think the difference is they paid people to be out there to do the ballot signatures and they’re not paying people to vote. So that’s the reality. Most of those people signing those signatures weren’t even from Arizona. They were people that were paid and brought in from other states. So I don’t know if they’ll get it, but they’re lying. They’re very effective in their craftiness, in their lies, especially on their ads.

Chris DeSimone (14:58):

I always tell the story, I was up in Pinetop with the fam, and there’s the lake in Pinetop that has a walking path around it, and there were these ladies who were getting signatures for that. And I said the I word to them and infanticide, and they freaked out like you would never believe. Just freaked

Chris Faddis (15:16):

Trying to push you off the mountain. And look, the reality is it is absolutely infanticide. It also, if you think about the fact that we’re allowing people who are not doctors, massage therapists can write you a script to say, your life is in danger and you need to get an abortion. This is mind boggling. You have places in the country that are trying to promote that non-clinicians can do abortions. I mean, regardless of whether they think abortion’s, okay, medically, it is a risky procedure. You are putting sharp tools inside of a woman’s uterus. It is a risky procedure. And for them to be able to take away those kind of protections of having a physician, those kind of protections of a physician needing to be involved in determining if a woman needs one, all of that stuff. I mean, it absolutely goes up to nine months. Don’t let them tell you otherwise, if you’re not sure, go read the actual proposal because it’s all hidden. I don’t know if it’s on page two, but let’s just say it’s all hidden on page two, right? It’s in there. And this is not good for Arizona. It’s not good for our children. And let’s remind people that this is another one of those valid initiatives that came from outside of Arizona.

Chris DeSimone (16:24):

Correct.

Chris Faddis (16:24):

This is funded by groups that probably aren’t even American. So this is an affront on our freedoms here in Arizona, and I think people have got to vote, they’ve got to talk about it. Very proud of my daughter. She’s been out there doing, get out the vote efforts as a high schooler, and

Chris DeSimone (16:39):

God bless her

Chris Faddis (16:40):

Has a lot of courage, and I think we’ve got to have more of that this next couple of weeks.

Chris DeSimone (16:43):

Alright, I want to get back to our regular stuff. We only have about a minute to talk real quick before we run out of time, but looking at our notes together here, the one thing that totally hit me is now that where we’re at in the world of healthcare that compared to other countries, US patients, we’re more likely to report of not having a regular doctor regular. If you have a regular doctor now that’s actually practicing medicine, you’re a special person in this country right now.

Chris Faddis (17:09):

Yeah. It’s like a high society thing. Some of that is a, you can’t find one that has time for you. And I think the other part of that is I think a lot of people just don’t trust the system anymore. I mean, I had this conversation with people all the time where they’re like, I don’t dunno where to go. I don’t trust anyone. And some of them might go to a nurse practitioner or an alternative practitioner of some sort just to have some care. And that’s okay actually. I mean, I use an naturopath, but I use an MD for a cardiologist, right? I mean, you’ve got to find the right fit for you. But I think that is a real problem that we have a shortage. And again, that shortage is wholly, largely due to the consolidation of the healthcare system that has come about since Obamacare. People are unhappy, they’re leaving the system, and we need to bring back independent healthcare so doctors will come back to medicine.

Chris DeSimone (17:59):

Chris Fadi, love talking to you, my friend. Keep up the great work at Solidarity HealthShare.

Chris Faddis (18:04):

God bless you. Have a great one.

Chris DeSimone (18:05):

My friend.

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Solidarity HealthShare is a non-profit healthcare sharing ministry rooted in the teachings of the Catholic Church. Established in 2016, we operate on the Catholic principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, in accordance with the Church’s commitment to promoting life-affirming, faith-based healthcare.

We strive to provide an ethical, community-driven alternative to traditional health insurance. Through direct Member-to-Member sharing, Members are able to access quality healthcare services while preserving their family’s financial, physical, and spiritual health, all at once. Members never need to worry about their healthcare dollars funding immoral medical procedures. We promote a holistic approach to healthcare, emphasizing the importance of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.

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