February 26, 2025 • 21 mins
(February 26, 2025)
ABC News national correspondent Steven Portnoy joins the program to discuss the White House saying it ‘will determine’ which news outlets cover President Trump. Bosses won’t need a ‘what did you do’ email… they’re already tracking you. Dr. Jim Keany, Chief Medical Officer at Dignity Health St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, joins The Bill Handel Show for 'Medical News'! Dr. Keany talks with Bill about why people don’t trust doctors as much, Measles outbreak, and yogurt and colon cancer.
ABC News national correspondent Steven Portnoy joins the program to discuss the White House saying it ‘will determine’ which news outlets cover President Trump. Bosses won’t need a ‘what did you do’ email… they’re already tracking you. Dr. Jim Keany, Chief Medical Officer at Dignity Health St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, joins The Bill Handel Show for 'Medical News'! Dr. Keany talks with Bill about why people don’t trust doctors as much, Measles outbreak, and yogurt and colon cancer.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
KFI AM six forty Home Day, Wednesday, February twenty sixth
I want to pitch again what we do on Friday
at eight thirty. I was just talking to Neil about it.
The calls that I get, which are hilarious, and that
is ask Handle anything. And what you do is you
record during the course of the show. You go to
(00:27):
the iHeart app, click on the KFI microphone the upright
hand corner, and you have fifteen seconds to ask a
question and we record it, and Neil and and choose
it and I get to answer.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
It's great fun.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
All right, let's move over to what's going on in Washington.
Stephen Portnoy, ABC News national correspondent in Washington and the
news that the White House what a shocker on this
one said that they'll choose, they'll decide who actually goes
into the press room or covers the president in that small.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Group of reporters that pool. What does that mean? Does
that mean you're out of luck?
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Stephen Portnoy, Look as a let me explain for the
audience who it is you're hearing from. I am a
sort of a senior, old wise man here in Washington, DC.
I'm not on the White House beat on a daily basis,
but I formerly was and was president of the White
House Correspondents Association in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two,
(01:30):
so I have some degree of expertise and all this.
What I can tell you is that for the first
time in the modern era, since reporters have been covering
the presidency, the White House has suddenly decided that it's
going to choose for itself who.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Has the right to cover the President of the United States.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
The Press Corps for generations has had this representative elective body,
which again I once led, that assesses the public interest,
that assesses the abilities of each of these organizations to
fulfill the mutual responsibilities to one another. You know, I'm
part of We are part of a pool of radio
(02:14):
networks that provides services. The owner of this radio station, iHeartMedia,
is also part of that pool, and we combine our
resources and our efforts to represent the radio networks in
this pool.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
All right, So that's one example of it.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
There are more than sixty news organizations here in the
United States and all over the world that are part
of this of a series of pool rotations that get
to cover the White House. I'm sorry, the President in
his oval office, the Roosevelt Room, the Diplomatic Reception Room,
and the Cabinet Room. Today other areas of the White
(02:49):
House where the entire Press Corps, which is hundreds of
people can't go. And the reason why it's important, I
believe for it to be a representative body that makes
these decisions is so it's more fair and equitable. Over
the years, over the decades, the WHCA has expanded its
membership to include new and emerging outlets of varying ideological backgrounds. So,
(03:10):
for example, in our pool you have outlets such as
The Daily Caller, Real Clear Politics, and New York Posts,
The Washington Times, Washington Examiner arguably from the right side,
along with a number of outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch
from the right side.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Let me throw something at you, and that is when
I watch the press conference and when the president is there,
there are a lot of reporters that I see are
there forgot you moments where it really is about, well
basically getting a press secretary or getting the president to
(03:47):
go into one.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Direction or the other.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Is there amongst you reporters that have a reputation of
doing that versus reporters that are even Stephen and are
totally objective.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I just want to know the inner workings of this.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Well, look, what you described as a gotcha question could
also be described as an element of accountability. And the
idea here is and I think that reporters serve an
important role for the public in bringing concerns that the
public might have, or elements of the public might have,
or some things that they might be working on to
the White House to the President and his representatives or aids,
(04:26):
to challenge their presumptions, to challenge their policies, get them,
put them on the defense, so they can explain to
the public what they're doing in the public's name, with
the public's money.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
So is it gotcha? I suppose you could look at
it that way.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
That's certainly a way that the White House might spin
it and say, you know, that's a ridiculous question. You
can say that, but it's still that answer is important
for the public and for history.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
All Right, that resonates one last question. What do you
think is going to happen?
Speaker 4 (04:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Okay, Look, I'll tell you I'll tell you, well, I'll
tell you what's going to happen.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
I'm being honest and direct.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
What's going to happen today in about an hour is
the President's going to bring in a pool that he
has selected for the cabinet meeting the first of his term,
where special government employee Elon Musk is going to be present.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
He will take questions, but.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
You should know that the people who are there have
been invited by the President, and that you know, for
the first time we've seen him choosing his own press
corps and the signal it sends, whether it's in Sacramento
or in city Hall. The idea here is in the
United States, if all of a sudden, leaders start choosing
their own press corps, just you wait and see what
happens and the spillover effect.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Fair enough.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
And if you're talking about him choosing the reporters and
those who cover, what do you do when you turn
on Fox News?
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Is it going to be dead air? No?
Speaker 4 (05:40):
I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Listen.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
I imagine that the networks will carry this because again
there's a public interest in making sure the whole world
sees that there's that to the problem.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
The problem is not the addition of other outlets.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
It's the exclusion of outlets.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
And what we should say today is that the.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
White House has decided to exclude the world's one of
the world's oldest and largest news organizations, the Associated Press,
the Global News Wire, Reuters, and the signed pooler today
which is huff Post, which is again alongside the rotation
with the Daily Caller, the New York Post, the Washington Times,
and a whole bunch of other outlets. So this idea
that there's this cabal of media elites deciding what the
public should know, it's not exactly that way, and we
(06:13):
in our profession do a terrible job of explaining this
because it's generally not meant for public assumption. This is
inside baseball. Nobody ought to care about this. But the
problem is when the government decides for itself who should
be permitted to cover the president. That's a whole new thing,
and it strikes squarely at press freedom in the United States.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
You got it, Stephen, Thank you for joining us. I
always has good stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
By the way, when I said it's going to be
dead air at Fox, that was my bad joke.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Seeing that the.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Only people that will be covering the president come from Fox,
and therefore if you turn on Fox, it's dead air
because they're not.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
This is Alex Jones.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah, it's that almost worked.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
By the way, I don't know if that that did
what I was supposed to do, but boy, I'll tell you,
I've never seen Stephen this.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Exercised about this. I engage that these.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Are reporters that really take their job very seriously. All right,
I want to spend a minute talking about that that
requirement federal employees across the board I have to email
their supervisors. These are the five great things that I
have done this past week to justify my employment. And obviously,
(07:30):
let's say, the morale was a little bit tough on
this one, because you have federal employees going, wait a minute,
is my job at risk? Even the people that are
commenting on that will not let their names be.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Used for fear of retribution that that alone could cost
them the job.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Now, the reality is, you know, talk to people who
actually are supervisors, managers, owners of business.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
They know what people do.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
You know, they have full access you know how many
but for example, let's go upstairs with the sales department.
Management knows how many people have been approached, what meetings
have taken place, what the subjects were. I mean, it's
all there in the emails, and there's algorithms all over
the place. The reality is is that you say what
(08:20):
did you do?
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Two things going to happen.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Number One, you're gonna lie, You are going to embellish,
and let me ask you this. You've got everybody that says,
here are the great things I've done. Who vets that
I saw five different people this week.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Okay, so let's.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Contact five different people to make sure you actually saw
them this week.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
If you're a salesperson, I mean, how far do you go?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Technology is already there, and if bosses want to use that,
management wants to use that information, it is there. And
there are micromanagers and there are others who aren't. There
are management that says you just do your job. I
don't care how you do it, and others want to
know every single thing, what you did when you walked
(09:10):
in the door in the office, who you talk to,
how much time you spent on a sales call, what
your percentage of closes are.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
I mean, all of that. It runs the.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Gamut, But the bottom line is what did you do?
Email is basically superfluous. It's more of a I would
guess political statement. I would think the information is already there.
I think it causes a lot of grief, a lot
(09:40):
of grief among people who now don't know if their
jobs are going to be around next week. Federal employees
who are sweating bullets that their job is not.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Going to be there. What if they did it wrong?
You know what is five things I did last week, which.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Okay, I think we're pretty good. Turns out your manager
is not impressed. The only really did only three? Does
that mean you're gonna go? And this takes a there's
a philosophy, and I think the.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Guy ran General Electric.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
I interviewed him, wels Jack Welsh many years ago, and
he said, I keep track of my employees with top
management people and the bottom twenty percent I always let
go every year.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
That's it, bottom twenty percent gone.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
And I think that may be the philosophy that Doge
that Eli Musk has following.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
If he's going in that direction, can you do that
with federal employees?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Not really does it work in terms of running any
organization and maybe including the US government on that level.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Don't know, but I think he bit off.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Board than he can chew, because this is you talk
about the rule of unintel consequences. I think this is
right at the top of the heap. When we find
out what's happening. All right, Doctor Jim Kinney is with
us as he always is on Wednesday of this time. Jim,
chief medical officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical Center in
(11:15):
Long Beach. As I said earlier this week, Jim, you
and I hang together. I mean we actually socialize and
Neil occasionally. Nobody else do I ever talk to. And
one of the things we talk about when we have
lunch is where medicine has gone and how it has
changed so dramatically since you started practicing what thirty thirty
(11:38):
five years ago. And this is a story out of
the Wall Street Journal that I want to refer you to,
or I want to talk to you about, is why
we don't trust doctors.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Like we used to.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Have you seen just the basic trust of patients changing
over the years.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean right when I grew up,
my mom would take me to the doctor as a kid,
and whatever the doctor said was absolute. You know, the
gospel came straight from God's mouth to our ears. Right,
there was very little questioning, you know, pre of course,
(12:15):
pre Mixon and Watergate, I think people were a much
more trusting, right. I think that was a big event
that kind of changed our culture as far as should
we question authority? And so that's all changed. But the
health system has degraded so much, and unfortunately doctors are
(12:36):
stuck working in this broken health system to the point
where they really don't seem very trustworthy. Right, you walk
into the doctor's office, you wait forever. You know, how
can he be an hour and a half behind for
the appointment at nine am? How do you get that
far behind in your first hour of work?
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Right?
Speaker 5 (12:57):
Then you get there and they rushed through it. You
got like maybe ten minutes with that's actually that's extreme. Yeah,
maybe five minutes with the doctor to rattle off all
your issues and then they run out of the room,
and then a nurse walks in, gives you a bunch
of paperwork, and you leave, and then there's a prescription
somewhere and you're wondering a lot of questions and you
don't feel very confident in what the doctor came to.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Now, how can you do a decent diagnosis in five minutes?
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Just by asking you a few questions.
Speaker 5 (13:24):
Jim, Yeah, I mean that's the problem, right, is like
nobody has confidence in that. On the other hand, you know,
medicine's and art, there's the camplaint there's always a couple,
you know, agenda's going on in the room. The patient
will come in for something like a sore throat. If
we screw up that sore throat, diagnose it wrong, don't
give you the right antibiotics, you're still going to get better.
(13:46):
I mean, even strep throat gets better by itself without
any antibiotics. We give antibiotics to reduce the risk of
heart damage and for kidney damage. That's why we treat
strep throat. We don't treat it to make you feel
better faster. But that's what that's the agenda of the
person in there. They want to get better faster. And
then while you're there, the doctors should be looking, oh, wow,
I noticed you have high blood pressure. We should talk
(14:07):
about that, you know the I noticed that you're that
it says you're a smoker. Do you want to talk
about ways I could help you quit smoking? Those are
how that's how it should go, right, But once somebody
walks in and they say they have a sore throat,
and the doctor now knows they just wanted a prescription,
and they write a prescription and then leave. That can
make the interaction go so much faster they can get
(14:27):
a little closer to being on time for the next appointment.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Right.
Speaker 5 (14:31):
So that's the problem is we just the health system
itself and the doctors haven't demanded it because we don't
feel like we have any control over that.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Right.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
The insurance companies pay you what they pay you.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
That's it which comes in. I mean, you can't be
right one hundred percent of the time.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
And I'm assuming there are times when someone's coming too
v R that you're sort of perplexed, your flummoxed as
to what's going on, which has to happen. Do you
ever go to web md figure out what's happening like
your patients do.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
No, I don't ever go to web Md. But you know,
I've been trying with chat GPT to create what we
call I ask it to create a differential diagnosis. And
the great thing about chat GPT is it doesn't know
when to like acts things out, so it gives you
an exhaustive list of the craziest things. So if you're
not a doctor, I can understand how that might freak
(15:25):
you out. If you, all of a sudden see that
like cancer is in the differential diagnosis or or you know,
CT syndrome, like and you've never been to Africa, I
don't know, you know. So I use that though, because
it generates ideas, right, like if sometimes you're like, wow,
I can't I don't get this. The person really there's
got a lot of they got a rash, they got
arthritis all over their body. This is confusing. I don't
(15:47):
know what it is, and all of a sudden, in
the differential diagnosis it says that it might be what
do you call now, I'm blanking on the word. That's
a disease you get from mosquito pipes. Oh my gosh,
I need to GPT to help you out here.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Yes, all the fun diseases from mosquitoes or mosquito bite.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
Yeah, and then you go.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Westyle virus hilaria.
Speaker 5 (16:09):
Yeah, exactly, it's okay for a thousand alex so, yeah, no,
it's it's sometimes it's a little bit helpful. And that's
what like what we call clinical decisions support tools are
going to do in the electronic medical record. They're going
to help us make decisions as far as have you
considered this, you know, maybe pop ups or alerts and
(16:30):
then you know when you try and write a prescription already,
if the person has an allergy and you write a
prescription for something that could trigger that allergy, it'll alert you.
You know, So that's extremely.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Helpful, Jim.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Usually we don't pay attention who is head of Health
and Human Services sort of one of those cabinet posts
that yeah, you know, I mean Secretary of State Justice.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah, but this one not so much.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
I have some real concerns, almost to the point of
being frightened, that are a ca is there is this justified?
Speaker 5 (17:04):
Well, I mean it remains to be seen, right, how
much power this position has because for the most part,
you're right, it kind of goes unnoticed.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
But right, the.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
Concern here is that he has in his legal career,
you know, created so much controversy around vaccines, and I mean,
you know, the measles outbreaks are a good measure of
how well our public health is working. It's a highly
contagious these the most contagious disease we know of. You know,
(17:34):
if you if one kid walks into a classroom of
unvaccinated you know people of kids, ninety percent of those
kids will get measles when they walk out, and it
hangs in the air for two hours after you've been there.
So it's such a highly contagious disease. The vaccine's been
around since the sixties. We know for sure that it
(17:55):
doesn't cause any of the things that everybody worries about,
and yet that still seems to cycle through every few years.
It gains traction, cycles through and he's kind of, you know,
building that up again with this. We're going to look
into vaccines and we're going to see if they're really
I worry that he's doing that because that will help
(18:15):
out the legal industry, right as the government goes helps
the lawyers when they have cases, because some of these
cases would just on their face. We'll say, look, here's
the government stance on this, and we know that these
vaccines are safe, and IH has come out with this
or whoever else, and it kind of puts some of
the legal stuff to rest. But this may open up
(18:37):
a lot of doors for legal pursuits.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Okay, Now I look at this job in many ways
ahead of HHS as a bully pulpit. I mean, does
he have the actual ability to stop.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Or get in the way of vaccines.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Does he have the ability to withhold federal moneys to
an organization that either gives promotes t is about vaccines.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
So I don't know the answer to that.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
But the influence, how important is the influence just this
guy saying this is the way medicine should be.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
How do you view that?
Speaker 5 (19:13):
Yeah, that's that is the issue. I mean, he has
the ability to influence priorities. And if the priority is
to question everything, well, then you're not going to get
a lot done. You know, you're not going to move
forward and progress. All you're going to do is sit around,
you know, arguing over things that already have been adjudicated.
And we've already we already understand these things pretty well.
(19:34):
So he's going back in time essentially, if you look
at like the I interact with AHHS because my disaster
team is under AHHS, and depending on who's in charge,
and really depending on sometimes the president as well, our
funding comes and goes, and sometimes we can feel the
whole team because we have enough staff. Other times we
(19:56):
don't have a hiring there's a hiring freeze for whatever
budgetary reason, and then if a disaster happens, we're stretched
thin or there's no response to disaster. So over the
last thirty years, I've seen those ups and downs. So
I do see, at least in my little microcosm, how
he can have that influence to say either this is
a priority or it's not a priority, and what he
(20:18):
deprioritizes really falls by the wayside quickly. And again, public
health is one of the basics is preventing disease. The
spread of disease and measles is a great measure of that.
Here we are in an outbreak in Texas because of
reduced vaccination rates, and vaccination rates are a direct result
of people's confidence in the healthcare system and in the vaccination.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Jim, thank you always, good stuff, and we'll catch you
next week seven thirty, as we always do on Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
You have a good one. Take care. Okay. This is
KFI AM six. You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Catch my show Monday through Friday six am to nine
eight and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
KFI AM six forty Home Day, Wednesday, February twenty sixth
I want to pitch again what we do on Friday
at eight thirty. I was just talking to Neil about it.
The calls that I get, which are hilarious, and that
is ask Handle anything. And what you do is you
record during the course of the show. You go to
(00:27):
the iHeart app, click on the KFI microphone the upright
hand corner, and you have fifteen seconds to ask a
question and we record it, and Neil and and choose
it and I get to answer.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
It's great fun.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
All right, let's move over to what's going on in Washington.
Stephen Portnoy, ABC News national correspondent in Washington and the
news that the White House what a shocker on this
one said that they'll choose, they'll decide who actually goes
into the press room or covers the president in that small.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Group of reporters that pool. What does that mean? Does
that mean you're out of luck?
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Stephen Portnoy, Look as a let me explain for the
audience who it is you're hearing from. I am a
sort of a senior, old wise man here in Washington, DC.
I'm not on the White House beat on a daily basis,
but I formerly was and was president of the White
House Correspondents Association in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two,
(01:30):
so I have some degree of expertise and all this.
What I can tell you is that for the first
time in the modern era, since reporters have been covering
the presidency, the White House has suddenly decided that it's
going to choose for itself who.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Has the right to cover the President of the United States.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
The Press Corps for generations has had this representative elective body,
which again I once led, that assesses the public interest,
that assesses the abilities of each of these organizations to
fulfill the mutual responsibilities to one another. You know, I'm
part of We are part of a pool of radio
(02:14):
networks that provides services. The owner of this radio station, iHeartMedia,
is also part of that pool, and we combine our
resources and our efforts to represent the radio networks in
this pool.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
All right, So that's one example of it.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
There are more than sixty news organizations here in the
United States and all over the world that are part
of this of a series of pool rotations that get
to cover the White House. I'm sorry, the President in
his oval office, the Roosevelt Room, the Diplomatic Reception Room,
and the Cabinet Room. Today other areas of the White
(02:49):
House where the entire Press Corps, which is hundreds of
people can't go. And the reason why it's important, I
believe for it to be a representative body that makes
these decisions is so it's more fair and equitable. Over
the years, over the decades, the WHCA has expanded its
membership to include new and emerging outlets of varying ideological backgrounds. So,
(03:10):
for example, in our pool you have outlets such as
The Daily Caller, Real Clear Politics, and New York Posts,
The Washington Times, Washington Examiner arguably from the right side,
along with a number of outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch
from the right side.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Let me throw something at you, and that is when
I watch the press conference and when the president is there,
there are a lot of reporters that I see are
there forgot you moments where it really is about, well
basically getting a press secretary or getting the president to
(03:47):
go into one.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Direction or the other.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Is there amongst you reporters that have a reputation of
doing that versus reporters that are even Stephen and are
totally objective.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I just want to know the inner workings of this.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Well, look, what you described as a gotcha question could
also be described as an element of accountability. And the
idea here is and I think that reporters serve an
important role for the public in bringing concerns that the
public might have, or elements of the public might have,
or some things that they might be working on to
the White House to the President and his representatives or aids,
(04:26):
to challenge their presumptions, to challenge their policies, get them,
put them on the defense, so they can explain to
the public what they're doing in the public's name, with
the public's money.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
So is it gotcha? I suppose you could look at
it that way.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
That's certainly a way that the White House might spin
it and say, you know, that's a ridiculous question. You
can say that, but it's still that answer is important
for the public and for history.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
All Right, that resonates one last question. What do you
think is going to happen?
Speaker 4 (04:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Okay, Look, I'll tell you I'll tell you, well, I'll
tell you what's going to happen.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
I'm being honest and direct.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
What's going to happen today in about an hour is
the President's going to bring in a pool that he
has selected for the cabinet meeting the first of his term,
where special government employee Elon Musk is going to be present.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
He will take questions, but.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
You should know that the people who are there have
been invited by the President, and that you know, for
the first time we've seen him choosing his own press
corps and the signal it sends, whether it's in Sacramento
or in city Hall. The idea here is in the
United States, if all of a sudden, leaders start choosing
their own press corps, just you wait and see what
happens and the spillover effect.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Fair enough.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
And if you're talking about him choosing the reporters and
those who cover, what do you do when you turn
on Fox News?
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Is it going to be dead air? No?
Speaker 4 (05:40):
I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Listen.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
I imagine that the networks will carry this because again
there's a public interest in making sure the whole world
sees that there's that to the problem.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
The problem is not the addition of other outlets.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
It's the exclusion of outlets.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
And what we should say today is that the.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
White House has decided to exclude the world's one of
the world's oldest and largest news organizations, the Associated Press,
the Global News Wire, Reuters, and the signed pooler today
which is huff Post, which is again alongside the rotation
with the Daily Caller, the New York Post, the Washington Times,
and a whole bunch of other outlets. So this idea
that there's this cabal of media elites deciding what the
public should know, it's not exactly that way, and we
(06:13):
in our profession do a terrible job of explaining this
because it's generally not meant for public assumption. This is
inside baseball. Nobody ought to care about this. But the
problem is when the government decides for itself who should
be permitted to cover the president. That's a whole new thing,
and it strikes squarely at press freedom in the United States.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
You got it, Stephen, Thank you for joining us. I
always has good stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
By the way, when I said it's going to be
dead air at Fox, that was my bad joke.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Seeing that the.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Only people that will be covering the president come from Fox,
and therefore if you turn on Fox, it's dead air
because they're not.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
This is Alex Jones.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah, it's that almost worked.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
By the way, I don't know if that that did
what I was supposed to do, but boy, I'll tell you,
I've never seen Stephen this.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Exercised about this. I engage that these.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Are reporters that really take their job very seriously. All right,
I want to spend a minute talking about that that
requirement federal employees across the board I have to email
their supervisors. These are the five great things that I
have done this past week to justify my employment. And obviously,
(07:30):
let's say, the morale was a little bit tough on
this one, because you have federal employees going, wait a minute,
is my job at risk? Even the people that are
commenting on that will not let their names be.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Used for fear of retribution that that alone could cost
them the job.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Now, the reality is, you know, talk to people who
actually are supervisors, managers, owners of business.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
They know what people do.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
You know, they have full access you know how many
but for example, let's go upstairs with the sales department.
Management knows how many people have been approached, what meetings
have taken place, what the subjects were. I mean, it's
all there in the emails, and there's algorithms all over
the place. The reality is is that you say what
(08:20):
did you do?
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Two things going to happen.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Number One, you're gonna lie, You are going to embellish,
and let me ask you this. You've got everybody that says,
here are the great things I've done. Who vets that
I saw five different people this week.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Okay, so let's.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Contact five different people to make sure you actually saw
them this week.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
If you're a salesperson, I mean, how far do you go?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Technology is already there, and if bosses want to use that,
management wants to use that information, it is there. And
there are micromanagers and there are others who aren't. There
are management that says you just do your job. I
don't care how you do it, and others want to
know every single thing, what you did when you walked
(09:10):
in the door in the office, who you talk to,
how much time you spent on a sales call, what
your percentage of closes are.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
I mean, all of that. It runs the.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Gamut, But the bottom line is what did you do?
Email is basically superfluous. It's more of a I would
guess political statement. I would think the information is already there.
I think it causes a lot of grief, a lot
(09:40):
of grief among people who now don't know if their
jobs are going to be around next week. Federal employees
who are sweating bullets that their job is not.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Going to be there. What if they did it wrong?
You know what is five things I did last week, which.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Okay, I think we're pretty good. Turns out your manager
is not impressed. The only really did only three? Does
that mean you're gonna go? And this takes a there's
a philosophy, and I think the.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Guy ran General Electric.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
I interviewed him, wels Jack Welsh many years ago, and
he said, I keep track of my employees with top
management people and the bottom twenty percent I always let
go every year.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
That's it, bottom twenty percent gone.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
And I think that may be the philosophy that Doge
that Eli Musk has following.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
If he's going in that direction, can you do that
with federal employees?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Not really does it work in terms of running any
organization and maybe including the US government on that level.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Don't know, but I think he bit off.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Board than he can chew, because this is you talk
about the rule of unintel consequences. I think this is
right at the top of the heap. When we find
out what's happening. All right, Doctor Jim Kinney is with
us as he always is on Wednesday of this time. Jim,
chief medical officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical Center in
(11:15):
Long Beach. As I said earlier this week, Jim, you
and I hang together. I mean we actually socialize and
Neil occasionally. Nobody else do I ever talk to. And
one of the things we talk about when we have
lunch is where medicine has gone and how it has
changed so dramatically since you started practicing what thirty thirty
(11:38):
five years ago. And this is a story out of
the Wall Street Journal that I want to refer you to,
or I want to talk to you about, is why
we don't trust doctors.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Like we used to.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Have you seen just the basic trust of patients changing
over the years.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean right when I grew up,
my mom would take me to the doctor as a kid,
and whatever the doctor said was absolute. You know, the
gospel came straight from God's mouth to our ears. Right,
there was very little questioning, you know, pre of course,
(12:15):
pre Mixon and Watergate, I think people were a much
more trusting, right. I think that was a big event
that kind of changed our culture as far as should
we question authority? And so that's all changed. But the
health system has degraded so much, and unfortunately doctors are
(12:36):
stuck working in this broken health system to the point
where they really don't seem very trustworthy. Right, you walk
into the doctor's office, you wait forever. You know, how
can he be an hour and a half behind for
the appointment at nine am? How do you get that
far behind in your first hour of work?
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Right?
Speaker 5 (12:57):
Then you get there and they rushed through it. You
got like maybe ten minutes with that's actually that's extreme. Yeah,
maybe five minutes with the doctor to rattle off all
your issues and then they run out of the room,
and then a nurse walks in, gives you a bunch
of paperwork, and you leave, and then there's a prescription
somewhere and you're wondering a lot of questions and you
don't feel very confident in what the doctor came to.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Now, how can you do a decent diagnosis in five minutes?
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Just by asking you a few questions.
Speaker 5 (13:24):
Jim, Yeah, I mean that's the problem, right, is like
nobody has confidence in that. On the other hand, you know,
medicine's and art, there's the camplaint there's always a couple,
you know, agenda's going on in the room. The patient
will come in for something like a sore throat. If
we screw up that sore throat, diagnose it wrong, don't
give you the right antibiotics, you're still going to get better.
(13:46):
I mean, even strep throat gets better by itself without
any antibiotics. We give antibiotics to reduce the risk of
heart damage and for kidney damage. That's why we treat
strep throat. We don't treat it to make you feel
better faster. But that's what that's the agenda of the
person in there. They want to get better faster. And
then while you're there, the doctors should be looking, oh, wow,
I noticed you have high blood pressure. We should talk
(14:07):
about that, you know the I noticed that you're that
it says you're a smoker. Do you want to talk
about ways I could help you quit smoking? Those are
how that's how it should go, right, But once somebody
walks in and they say they have a sore throat,
and the doctor now knows they just wanted a prescription,
and they write a prescription and then leave. That can
make the interaction go so much faster they can get
(14:27):
a little closer to being on time for the next appointment.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Right.
Speaker 5 (14:31):
So that's the problem is we just the health system
itself and the doctors haven't demanded it because we don't
feel like we have any control over that.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Right.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
The insurance companies pay you what they pay you.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
That's it which comes in. I mean, you can't be
right one hundred percent of the time.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
And I'm assuming there are times when someone's coming too
v R that you're sort of perplexed, your flummoxed as
to what's going on, which has to happen. Do you
ever go to web md figure out what's happening like
your patients do.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
No, I don't ever go to web Md. But you know,
I've been trying with chat GPT to create what we
call I ask it to create a differential diagnosis. And
the great thing about chat GPT is it doesn't know
when to like acts things out, so it gives you
an exhaustive list of the craziest things. So if you're
not a doctor, I can understand how that might freak
(15:25):
you out. If you, all of a sudden see that
like cancer is in the differential diagnosis or or you know,
CT syndrome, like and you've never been to Africa, I
don't know, you know. So I use that though, because
it generates ideas, right, like if sometimes you're like, wow,
I can't I don't get this. The person really there's
got a lot of they got a rash, they got
arthritis all over their body. This is confusing. I don't
(15:47):
know what it is, and all of a sudden, in
the differential diagnosis it says that it might be what
do you call now, I'm blanking on the word. That's
a disease you get from mosquito pipes. Oh my gosh,
I need to GPT to help you out here.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Yes, all the fun diseases from mosquitoes or mosquito bite.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
Yeah, and then you go.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Westyle virus hilaria.
Speaker 5 (16:09):
Yeah, exactly, it's okay for a thousand alex so, yeah, no,
it's it's sometimes it's a little bit helpful. And that's
what like what we call clinical decisions support tools are
going to do in the electronic medical record. They're going
to help us make decisions as far as have you
considered this, you know, maybe pop ups or alerts and
(16:30):
then you know when you try and write a prescription already,
if the person has an allergy and you write a
prescription for something that could trigger that allergy, it'll alert you.
You know, So that's extremely.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Helpful, Jim.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Usually we don't pay attention who is head of Health
and Human Services sort of one of those cabinet posts
that yeah, you know, I mean Secretary of State Justice.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah, but this one not so much.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
I have some real concerns, almost to the point of
being frightened, that are a ca is there is this justified?
Speaker 5 (17:04):
Well, I mean it remains to be seen, right, how
much power this position has because for the most part,
you're right, it kind of goes unnoticed.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
But right, the.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
Concern here is that he has in his legal career,
you know, created so much controversy around vaccines, and I mean,
you know, the measles outbreaks are a good measure of
how well our public health is working. It's a highly
contagious these the most contagious disease we know of. You know,
(17:34):
if you if one kid walks into a classroom of
unvaccinated you know people of kids, ninety percent of those
kids will get measles when they walk out, and it
hangs in the air for two hours after you've been there.
So it's such a highly contagious disease. The vaccine's been
around since the sixties. We know for sure that it
(17:55):
doesn't cause any of the things that everybody worries about,
and yet that still seems to cycle through every few years.
It gains traction, cycles through and he's kind of, you know,
building that up again with this. We're going to look
into vaccines and we're going to see if they're really
I worry that he's doing that because that will help
(18:15):
out the legal industry, right as the government goes helps
the lawyers when they have cases, because some of these
cases would just on their face. We'll say, look, here's
the government stance on this, and we know that these
vaccines are safe, and IH has come out with this
or whoever else, and it kind of puts some of
the legal stuff to rest. But this may open up
(18:37):
a lot of doors for legal pursuits.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Okay, Now I look at this job in many ways
ahead of HHS as a bully pulpit. I mean, does
he have the actual ability to stop.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Or get in the way of vaccines.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Does he have the ability to withhold federal moneys to
an organization that either gives promotes t is about vaccines.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
So I don't know the answer to that.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
But the influence, how important is the influence just this
guy saying this is the way medicine should be.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
How do you view that?
Speaker 5 (19:13):
Yeah, that's that is the issue. I mean, he has
the ability to influence priorities. And if the priority is
to question everything, well, then you're not going to get
a lot done. You know, you're not going to move
forward and progress. All you're going to do is sit around,
you know, arguing over things that already have been adjudicated.
And we've already we already understand these things pretty well.
(19:34):
So he's going back in time essentially, if you look
at like the I interact with AHHS because my disaster
team is under AHHS, and depending on who's in charge,
and really depending on sometimes the president as well, our
funding comes and goes, and sometimes we can feel the
whole team because we have enough staff. Other times we
(19:56):
don't have a hiring there's a hiring freeze for whatever
budgetary reason, and then if a disaster happens, we're stretched
thin or there's no response to disaster. So over the
last thirty years, I've seen those ups and downs. So
I do see, at least in my little microcosm, how
he can have that influence to say either this is
a priority or it's not a priority, and what he
(20:18):
deprioritizes really falls by the wayside quickly. And again, public
health is one of the basics is preventing disease. The
spread of disease and measles is a great measure of that.
Here we are in an outbreak in Texas because of
reduced vaccination rates, and vaccination rates are a direct result
of people's confidence in the healthcare system and in the vaccination.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Jim, thank you always, good stuff, and we'll catch you
next week seven thirty, as we always do on Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
You have a good one. Take care. Okay. This is
KFI AM six. You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Catch my show Monday through Friday six am to nine
eight and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
The Bill Handel Show News
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