Gut It Like a Fish

February 26, 2025 by Karl Denninger

I'm speaking of the medical monster generally.

The infighting in Congress is not going to go away. Neither House or Senate has any intention of returning spending to pre-Covid levels. But even that's not enough because we were on a runaway train before then, and yet rather than deal with it we slammed the throttle wide open.

Trump's "budget bill" will do nothing to prevent the detonation.

You have to gut the medical monster like a fish. $500 to **** in a box and then, on a high percentage of the so-called "positives", you are then lined for a several thousand dollar procedure that, after scaring you to death, finds nothing?

This **** has to stop. All of it. Right ****ing now.

Its a ******n racket and it needs to stop.

ALL OF IT.

It is what is driving basically all, numerically, of the budget problem, all of inflation and if it isn't stopped there will be an asset collapse and a societal one because the government will collapse.

Trump has the tools just as have all the other Presidents. When it comes to illegals he's had them too, as did Brandon, as did Trump the first time, Obama and before. 8 USC 1324 has been on the books since the 1950s.

And 15 USC Chapter 1 has been on the books for over a hundred years and even better twice was challenged when it came to the medical and health insurance schemes all the way to the Supreme Court and found valid; the medical and insurers lost both cases.

15 USC Chapter 1 carries criminal penalties, not just fines. Long ones; 10 years in the slammer to be specific.

There is no reason for insulin to not be a competitively priced product at retail, and cheap. Ditto for basically every other off-patent drug and further, there is no reason for "gatekeeping"; if there is an attempt to fix prices for such drugs then the answer is to prosecute people along with simply destroying their market entirely by putting out for bid a contract to make and sell it by the government.

In addition the current monopolist entities, which extend all through the medical system both vertically and horizontally -- can be prosecuted directly. I remind you that international pricing disparity and control of the supply channel to prevent circumvention is one way of proving such control and thus violation of the law -- yet nobody has done so.

You cannot resolve the budget issue if you won't go after the one area that is fully one third of the spending. Its not possible, and time is short.

Trump can reasonably argue that "building outrage" that the DOD is buying $10,000 HDMI cables that do the same thing, with the same specs, as the $30 one you can buy at Best Buy or on Amazon is a "softening tactic" but reality is the budget is still open, a bill must be passed, and kicking the can is not available without catastrophic consequence. Inflation is already baked into the forward view by the actions of the previous administration in the last few months it was in office and nothing has been done, nor is it really on the table in the current bill discussions, to address it.

Thus you either take a meat axe to the medical system generally or you lose, and if you try to kick the can and "go slow" the collapse comes NEXT YEAR and the Republicans lose both House and Senate in the midterms.

In addition you also have to take a meat axe to supply on labor which means 8 USC 1324 is used against all employers and landlords; you can only collapse inflation (which means deflation of prices, specifically for housing) by getting rid of all the illegals who compete for same, specifically at the lower end of the economic ladder (e.g. apartments) and at the same time greatly decrease insurance costs for car owners since uninsured motorists are often illegal immigrants, none of whom have insurance, driver licenses or money to pay for the damage they cause.

The only way to address that problem in a reasonably-short period of time is to destroy demand and removing, on a mass basis, 10 or 20 million illegals will do exactly that. Deporting them manually can be done but is both time-consuming and expensive; making it impossible for them to work or live anywhere as they can rent housing will cause them all to leave on their own. That is both cheaper and a lot faster; it can literally happen almost immediately.

BOTH OF THESE HAVE TO HAPPEN RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW WITHIN THE NEXT COUPLE OF MONTHS SO THE CRASH COMES NOW AND WE ARE RECOVERING BY NEXT SUMMER -- WHEN THE MIDTERMS LOOM.

You CANNOT grow out of this; the math prohibits it because only one half of the population works and "wage following" won't work either because for them to catch up everyone on fixed incomes literally starves and if you try to goose that then the tax base detonates or the bubble pops in stocks, layoffs spike and tax receipts go in the ****ter -- which makes the deficit explode higher.

Both Trump and Musk grabbed this sword of their own volition -- Trump must now wield it and chop off the heads of the snakes in the medical system or he will wind up cutting off his own dick within months.