 Well, I wanted to explain the little bit of my past work history and why I'm no longer doing that. It would be something good to know for some people considering getting into that field and gives quite a different perspective on some political matters, past things now, although still sort of debated. I spent five years of my life in the medical field, started from a CNA, got into home care and then worked up and I liked the work. The work itself was fine, the people I worked with were all right, they weren't anything special but they weren't bad by any means, so five years of work with that was totally fine. By all accounts I was good at it, the performance reviews were absolutely phenomenal and I would be eligible for certain types of promotions or additional training and things like that. Quite a bit earlier than they were telling everybody else, so I was getting these opportunities well before the eligibility. By all accounts I was really adept at it and worked for a company because that's what they all are. They're companies, you can call them something else, but they're still a company for about three and a half years and then actually wound up starting my own business in the field, going through the whole registration process because there's both like the normal business registration that you've got to do with the state and federal government, but also you have to clear that kind of thing through the Department of Health and they've got to do this whole investigation, but I was fine with all of that. But after doing that for about a year and a half, basically succumbed to burnout. So it took me a few months to realize it, but just definitely realized that I am totally sick of this and want nothing more to do with the field anymore. And it was sort of odd considering how well I had done with everything, how my ability to handle everything. I was regularly doing 60-hour work weeks when I was working for the agency before and that even got up to 84-hour work weeks for a while, totally fine. I never left because I felt overburdened. I actually willingly took on. I was the one who proposed that in both cases, handled it fine. So it wasn't the work itself, it wasn't the people. Why was I getting burned out? This largely has to do with a law that was passed over the course of while I was, well, yeah, yeah, basically. Law that was passed over the course of while I was working and went into effect very shortly after I switched over to private practice. The PPACA, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Just so that it's a little bit obvious, I have personal reasons for not liking this, but I'll definitely have other stuff to comment about, but I'll get the personal stuff out of the way just so there's no argument that can be made that I'm trying to hide biases or anything like that. These here are the rates that I would have to pay. Now having bought other types of insurance, automotive insurance for myself, I sold life insurance for a while, the payment for these things is typically expressed as the term, the coverage. So insurance is usually six months, you have others though, but generally it's a six-month period. So when I first saw these numbers I thought, oh well that's not that bad, and then noticed that that's per month. So we're talking $800 to $1,000 per month for affordable healthcare? What's going on here? This was around the time where they were having big problems with the website. Now I will note that year after year these numbers have not really changed, they're still in the same general ballpark, the last two digits will get adjusted slightly each year, so that's what they've been each year when I check. But first year this happened, they were having all sorts of problems with the website and I called them up and they're like, look, this is what's going on, I think you guys might be having some, I know you guys have been having problems with the other parts of the website, is there some miscalculation or some problem with the database lookup or what's going on here? So we looked into it a bit, that's totally correct, asked what the explanation for that would be and they hung up on me, the federal government hung up on me, sorry, state government, state government of New York hung up on me. So whatever, maybe it was a line disconnect or something, call them back, explain again and as time get told that instead I need to contact each of the individual insurance companies and ask them to explain, because all they do is broker the whole thing apparently. Okay, that's fine, I don't really have a strong criticism against that, there's plenty of other sites that broker stuff and when you have a question about that, say like why a specific airplane ticket costs so much, the broker can't explain that to you, you have to... So I don't really have a problem with that, call up each of the companies, get told they're not at liberty to discuss that, I'm like what, what? With my auto insurance I can ask why the rates are what they are even when I'm shopping around for another policy just to see, they can always explain why and so I ask them, what's the deal with this? In each case, they explain that since they cannot properly verify my identity over the phone that it would be a potential medical breach in the event that I was not who I was saying I am and that is totally actually a legitimate thing, once they explain that I'm like alright that's fine, how about we do a HIPAA release and you can mail them to me because there's a special way that you can mail these kinds of documents and they're okay with that, I'm okay with that, we're good. Get the documents and it largely has to do with a congenital heart defect that I have. I have something called Wolf Parkinson White Syndrome which is, there's an anomaly in the heart where something called a bundle of Kent, an extra nerve bundle that doesn't belong, bypasses the atrial node and goes directly to the ventral node and causes some heart rate problems and quite a few cases it just winds up manifesting a superventricular tachycardia which is just a type of fast heartbeat in and of itself not a problem, like if you have a healthy heart and SVT, basically ignore it. If you don't, it can be pretty serious but I've always been pretty fit, any medical tests that are done on me come back with flying colors. We even did a stress test and they were amazed at how well I could do because it was above and beyond what they would normally see, even in healthy people, so the official medical opinion was like, hey, you have this, we want to keep an eye on it, so like a yearly test but you're fine, you don't even really need to take anything because anything that you take would likely cause more problems than you're already experiencing anyways. Cool, that's actually really good because there are cases of that where the person needs to get a pacemaker installed and I'm actually considering that for a while. My insurance rates are crazy high because of a congenital heart defect, something I was born with that I had no control over that was cleared as not needing any medical intervention. So basically you have this thing, we don't really need to worry about it other than the occasional checkup, you're basically good, insurance company, Skyrocket. Now if you listen to the, and I close those blinds, now if you listen to the political narrative that was used to pitch this whole bill, one of the big things touted was about how there would be limits in place to keep these costs from skyrocketing. Or then that wound up changing to, in the event they do skyrocket, we'll be able to discount you based on your earnings. The very first year, which happens to be the graphic I showed you, that was at the start of my medical career and I made about 22,000 that year. Those are really high costs and income quite considerably below the national average, decent income that's definitely above minimum wage, quite a bit above minimum wage, but not high income by any means. We're talking about huge costs per month, easily half my income, where's the assistance from the government there, a few dozen dollars, it's okay, what the hell is going on here, do some digging around and actually come to find out that this is the situation a lot of medical workers find themselves in, not their rates as high as mine, but definitely seeming to be elevated. Now there is arguably a valid reason for that in this kind of work, you are quite literally putting yourself in danger regularly. It's for the benefit of others, but you are regularly exposing yourself to sometimes violent patients, well actually quite often, various diseased patients and you have the possibility of contracting something. I get why the insurance companies are doing it, there's a certain cost that they have to absorb to accept you on and in that certain field, certain lifestyles, there's all sorts of reasons, that cost is going to be higher, but the whole thing the government was saying is that even though that is justified, we like to help the situations that are sort of deserve the help but are falling through the cracks. Now I'll get to some more on that later too, why you're not hearing a whole lot about some issues. I think the overwhelming majority of people can agree that putting yourself in danger literally for the sake of others should not be something that you are punished for, especially considering you have to sort of purchase that insurance. Would you find it acceptable that a police officer or fireman who additionally is putting themselves in danger for the safety of others doing highly respectable and much needed work should be forced to pay the higher insurance? I get why it's higher, there is again a higher risk of something happening to them, they cost more to take care of, but the whole point of this, the big argument in favor of government interacting in anything is to help balance out some of these things, where somebody is doing good and deserves the help, wasn't getting it, but this isn't by any means just about me, like I said I just wanted to get anything that could potentially bias this out in the open as quickly as possible. Towards the very end of this bill going into effect, the narrative about it limiting the cost switched to only ever being limiting the cost in the case of obesity and limiting the cost in the case of smoking, with no mention about limiting the cost for anything else, it became those two very specifically and in fact if you read through the PPACA which I had to do when I went on to private practice, it's not a fun read, it's like 943 pages or something, maybe I'm mixing that up with another one of the bills, but it's very long and very like bash your head against the wall. You want to know why there was controversy about the bill, just read it, then compare that to something like the UCC which has like no controversy, it'd be really obvious after reading both, but quite early in the bill, I think like one of the first 20 sections, they do mention the limits, the restrictions essentially on cost increases and they are only defined for smokers and being overweight. If you were born with a terrible condition, say the Shenz muscular dystrophy or basically born of a death sentence where you're gonna be fine for a while, but the last bit of your life is going to be a living hell like Huntington's, there's no cost limit in place for those types of situations. You get into an accident, not even your fault, you could have been literally just not doing anything, not moving, somebody hits you, that's the accident, you're in an accident, totally a passive agent, but you're in an accident, your spine severed rather high up, you can't move again, you need a wheelchair, you need somebody regularly there to quite literally do some basic things like wipe your ass because you can't anymore. Terrible situation to be in. These people totally deserve help, there's no cost limit in place. Now the shitty thing about having done this kind of work is when I see specific examples of shit like this, I can't disclose anything because to do so, depending on the way it's disclosed, it would be a violation of either HIPAA or HITECH, both laws covering medical privacy. That covers all medical workers even if they only serve clerical roles in medical fields. It's a pretty broad-reaching thing and I do think justifiably so, but it should be a glaring red flag when the very people that can comment on how this law is actually working can't speak up because any specific examples, any way of substantiating it would be in violation of medical privacy. Similarly, any type of research examples wouldn't be able to actually give, release the information because of again, medical privacy. This is not an attack on medical privacy, medical privacy is totally in the right. It's the glaring issue, the sort of information wall. Again, the people who can see directly how this actually pans out can't say anything. Now I've also wound up seeing, because there's no protection in the law for this at all, cases where some of these disabled people from birth, from accidents can't get signed on to the insurance in the first place. They're still declined. Sorry, sorry, sorry, because that's not allowed anymore. I misspoke. Let's start this over again. They're signed on. They have to be. You cannot reject somebody, but the services then get declined. Again, this sucks because I cannot give any specific examples, but I would see people, they're born with some kind of condition which totally, they need help and they, I do believe that they should not shoulder the entire burden of that. I want, I do want some type of public system in place to help as long as it actually helps. But whether they were born with it, whether that happened to them by circumstance, even if not their own fault, they'd be made to buy insurance who would then just reject every little thing they need. Because that was the loophole in the law. You can't reject taking somebody on, but you can reject coverage of specific things. Yeah. In my opinion, that's a hell of a lot worse, because then not only is the person not be filled with the way the system was before, if you got denied, you weren't paying, you also weren't getting anything. It's unfortunate, but purely in a sense, in the commercial sense, there's nothing wrong going on there. Nobody is being exploited. In more social sense, obviously something needs to be done about that, but there's no commercial issue in place. Now, socially, well, people have the insurance. The people have what theoretically will get them the help they need. Theoretically, commercially, what's actually happening is they're paying for the insurance, but each little thing that they actually need gets denied. Eventually, I just couldn't take this anymore. The incredibly dual- phase nature of seeing the people this was supposed to help get melt for money while not getting anything in return, while the government would go up there and have these people that probably were the ones that actually got help talk about how great this thing was. No medical worker can speak up any more than I did in this video, because the violations for medical privacy breach, maximum sentencing of $10,000 fine and 10-year imprisonment per offense. As we all know, you need a lot more than just one example to make a case. That's why I got out of medicine. If you're looking to get in, talk to some people first to see if this is really something you're comfortable dealing with. There's a lot of other issues in play, really high levels of burnout and other stuff. Actually, let's talk about that. Medical community is one of the highest burnout rates in all fields. It's not the highest, and I also don't know the statistics off the top of my head, but I'll see if I can remember to look them up. Typically speaking, anybody that gets into the field needs to take a break after about usually within their first two years. It depends on specifically what they're doing and a lot of other bits of information. Not everybody needs to take a break, and these companies are usually really, really supportive about that because they know it's such a big thing as much as they can be, because a lot of laws get in the way. One of the things that drew me into this field was the pay. It's hard work. It deserves good pay, but the pay was good. One of the things the PPACA put into effect was cost-cutting measures, and this was rather unsurprising from the party that knows almost nothing about business. One of the biggest costs of business is wages. Now, I'm not advocating for people's wages getting cut. Rather, quite the opposite. The hilarious irony is that in implementing cost-cutting measures, you are encouraging suppressing wages. Not okay. That's not okay at all. And in my home state of New York, this is creating, along with another bill that got passed, a very interesting phenomenon. Something that people were saying was going to happen with this measure, the PPACA, that other people were saying was just a crock of shit and would never happen. It has. Today, as I speak, it's definitely in effect. We've got fast food workers making 1175 in this state with many CNAs, PCAs, and HHAs making less than $11. And so what a lot of fast food companies and other related things have been seeing is those specific positions fleeing to go work for, say, McDonald's because the work is less stressful, just as fast-paced, far less emotionally draining, far less risky, and pays better than if you have less people working in the medical field because, rather understandably, if you're at a ceiling using business speak that you cannot go any higher, whether it's just raises or a higher position, you look to find somewhere you can, right? Unless it's a really good job and you're already comfortably well off, you go somewhere else. If you're looking at very high stresses, very high risks, and no promise of increased pay to compensate you for that, you will see people leave. We have been seeing people leave, not just the lower positions. By next year, when the fast food minimum wage goes up in New York State again to $1275, I believe. But remember, right, it's going up $1 each year up until $475, and then it goes up just up to $15. You know, that worked out so well for Seattle. Let's do it for the whole state. Because of the cost suppression measures in place in hospitals, nursing homes, and related fields, related businesses, rather, we're quickly getting to the point where fast food workers will also make more than LPNs do in many areas of the state. Now, yes, I know that an LPN in New York City is going to be still above that. But as of two years ago in New York State, at least in the county that I live in, LPNs were typically making about $1240 to $13. After I moved back here, after being away for a year, stopped by where I used to work, basically just to say, hey, what's up? And me and the administrator got talking, and this came up. And they mentioned about how they were barely able to increase their pay at all. To the point where LPNs just started to make $1225. Next year, in this county for at least one business, and they do pay very competitively, fast food workers will make more than LPNs, the starting level of what we call nurses. Just like with the CNAs, PCAs, and HHAs, you will see LPNs leave as well. And I don't blame them. I would, too. This winds up getting compounded with other bullshit, like the little-known concept of mandates or mandatory overtime. Where, in the states where this is legal, and it does happen to be a lot of them, including New York, because of the essentially duty to provide medical care, legally obligated duty to provide medical care, you have to have somebody there with them the entire time. Or there for them the entire time. It's slightly different depending on whether you're looking at home care or institutionalized care, but between the two, you've got them both covered. So what I mean by this is if nobody is available for that specific position, or if you have a certain capacity that has to be met to meet the needs of all the, say, patients or residents, you can force somebody to come in, or force somebody to stay. And in some cases, this results in absolutely ridiculous situations, like I once did a 49-hour shift. Me, not realizing that that was actually totally legal and obligated by law. Reported that to the Department of Labor, only to be told that, oh no, for that field, that we actually require that. Okay? Because that's what you want. We talk about required to learn about, because it's also something the government worries about, not realizing that there are a huge reason why it's caused, is medical abuse. And to be clear, this is never okay. This is never justified. But when you have people stressed out of their mind, and you're forcing them to also stay there, no fucking wonder it happens. Again, not justifying that. In every single instance where I have seen that, I have been stricter than almost anybody else. I wasn't even at the level of reforming them. I was straight up to take them out back and shoot them. That's not okay. But it's pretty obvious what's one of the big contributors to causing it. So I'll do a follow-up if I think of anything else, but I think I've covered everything that I want to cover for this.