#2461 - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

**Joe Rogan** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:06)
Shrain by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:12)
I like them, but if it's just me wearing them, it feels stupid.

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (0:15)
Why do you wear them?

**Joe Rogan** (0:16)
I like it because it locks me in. Just locks me in. The only thing I hear is that person's voice, and I can't hear Jamie's chair moving, I can't hear anything else. It just makes me really focused on the conversation only.

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (0:33)
I have ADHD. I had 11 siblings and I have 7 kids, so I can work. I can focus.

**Joe Rogan** (0:41)
No matter what.

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (0:42)
No matter what.

**Joe Rogan** (0:43)
It's a skill. It's a thing to learn.
If you're the person that can focus without distraction, you're a good person to be in the job you're at.

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (0:54)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (0:55)
What is it like since you've been appointed? I haven't talked to you on a podcast since.

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (1:01)
I know.
It's the best job I could ever have. I feel like I was designed for the job and I just have so much fun. I mean, it's a target rich environment, so there's so many ways that you can be effective and improve people's lives every single day. Part of that is because the agency was just such a mess. You know, it wasn't doing health care. It was doing sick care and just managing, you know, all of these perverse incentives. And have us spending $5 trillion a year two to three times per capita when any other nation spends. We have the sickest population in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world.
And we're the best at medicine in this country. But that's when people get sick. You'd rather get sick here than any place in the world. But you're more likely to be sick here than any place in the world. And you know, and then it was just a big political patronage operation. And it still is. You know, we're putting an end to that now. I mean, the amount of fraud that goes through that place. We lose just in Medicaid and Medicare $100 billion a year. And it's all just this really, you know, shocking blatant fraud where that's become industrialized. I mean, there's foreign nations like Russia. Everybody's heard of Somalia, but also Cuba. As this operation in Florida, where it's, they open up these little, they open up these PO boxes for durable medical equipment, like knee braces and wheelchairs. And then they don't have any knee braces or wheelchairs, but they have patient identification numbers. So they just claim to be shipping them to people. And we found one hotel, it had like 129 rooms, and everyone was a different company that was selling durable medical equipment. And we go in and shut them down, and they immediately go back to Cuba. The whole thing is apparently run by the Cuban government, but Russia is doing the same thing with hospices in...

**Joe Rogan** (3:30)
Where do they get the patient ID numbers?

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (3:33)
They can buy those numbers on the black market. Really? Yeah. And Russia does the same thing in Los Angeles with hospice care. So there's more hospice care in Los Angeles than the entire rest of the country combined. It's all fraudulent. And we're just pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into these fraudulent operations. The same thing that the Somalis did in Ethiopia. A lot of that money was going back to Boko Harang and terror groups over there. But a lot of it was based... The Medicare stuff is different and we're able to... We're going to be able to catch almost all of that now because we're using AI to do it. It was never used before. There was no effort at program integrity. In fact, the Biden administration deliberately, purposely ordered them... They ended the program integrity office. So they went from hundreds of people to six people. And they said, we don't want you doing program integrity. We just want you doing enrollments.
And so we got all this fraud. But most of it came from these waivers that the states got. All the states got them for home care and community care. So you know, 30 years ago, Medicaid, Medicare, if you got a hernia operation, we paid for that. And you could tell somebody got the hernia operation because they had the scar, they used a licensed nurse, they used a licensed doctor. It was all documented. Then some of the states said, you know, we're sending a whole lot of people to the hospital and we don't have home care providers. So if you let us pay family members to do home care, the patient won't have to go to the hospital, they won't have to go to the emergency room and we'll save a lot of money. So it was well-intentioned. But then what happened is people immediately started abusing it. So today, if you... These are services that are normally played by family members, performed by family members. Buying groceries for your grandmother and bringing them home, you now get paid for that. Balancing your grandmother's checkbook, driving her to a medical visit. So, then you had this, you know, organized fraud where... And this is what happened in Minnesota.