Apologia TV - FULL EPISODE - Colin Gunn and Christian Healthcare!

You're watching Apologia TV. Today we interview Colin Gunn, the documentary filmmaker of Wait Till It's Free and Dr. Nation. Today we're going to talk about Obamacare, the national health care system, the corruption of it and the biblical response to it.

Christian Documentary Filmmaking and the Purpose of Indoctrination

What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of Apologia TV. You guys can become All Access at ApologiaRadio .com. Get all of the television episodes, the after show, you can get on the pastor's couch.

That's where you can get it, ApologiaRadio .com. Don't forget to subscribe to us on iTunes and on YouTube, Apologia Studios on YouTube. That's the bear. What's up though? What's up? That's the girl. Hello.

Because she's a girl. I'm the ninja, right? It's true. Yes. All right, so we have a very exciting show for you guys today. One of my favorite documentary filmmakers, Colin Gunn, we love the film Indoctrination.

It is fantabulous, wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Indoctrination is amazing. If you haven't seen it, go get Indoctrination. It's an amazing film. It's about our responsibility as parents to disciple our children, to educate them, to teach them.

One of the things that we are facing in our nation right now is the government's control of education and discipling our children. And it's amazing. Just trust me when I say this to you, you need to see Indoctrination.

If your children are in public schools, I think it'll open your eyes to a lot. And so I want to introduce to you guys for the very first time on Apologia Radio, Mr. Colin Gunn. Hey guys, thank you for having me on the show.

I've been looking forward to talking to you today. See, this is like 10 times as good as any interview we've ever done because just because of the Scottish accent. I've been looking forward to listening to you.

He said, thank you for inviting me to the show. You'll soon get tired of my accent. No, never happened. Never happened. Well, we're excited to have you on the show. Colin, can you let all of our listeners know and actually viewers know what you do?

You're a documentary filmmaker. Tell us about yourself and your productions.

Absolutely. Well, I have a fairly unusual job. I'm a full-time documentary filmmaker. I've been making films for about 11 years now. We've made six films that we think are important for the Christian community.

We started back 11 years ago with our first documentary film called Shaky Town about San Francisco homosexual politics. I was living out in the Bay Area at the time and working in the computer games industry.

But I was looking for something that I could do for the kingdom of God that was more purposeful maybe than video games. Even though I still like video games, I was looking for something that was very constructive but also very creative.

And I found documentary films and I haven't left the documentary films. I never planned to. I think it is one of the best opportunities for someone with limited skills like me, which are just, you know, the combination of my favorite things, being creative and being artistic and then arguing with people, combining those together in documentary film.

And that's what I love about it. So we made Shaky Town and then we made a bunch of films in between. But the last two, as you've mentioned, Jeff, are Indoctrination. These are our two most important films in a sense, Indoctrination and our new film Wait Till It's Free.

And I think we do our very best to communicate a Christian worldview, which covers aspects of liberty and what we want to say to American culture. I'm not an American. I have the benefit of being an outsider looking in.

So I think I have an advantage to an extent of seeing this is what I see coming into your culture. I'm an outsider, but I'm able to look around and see what does the big yellow bus mean? That's the film Indoctrination.

In our case with healthcare, how can we contrast socialized medicine that we have in the UK with what we're having here under Obamacare? So maybe an unusual type of career, but I think it's, I hope at least that it's profitable for the kingdom of God.

Obamacare, Crony Capitalism, and the Uncompensated Care Scam

Absolutely. And very, very important. And I think what's unique about this is just the perspective that you have, Colin, when you talk about coming from Scotland and coming over here and looking at it as an outsider, you have in Scotland socialized medicine and medical care.

And so this new film you have, Wait Till It's Free, I got a chance to review it. It is absolutely wonderful. You do such a wonderful, wonderful job. And I mean that. There are people who make documentary films that aren't skilled, I think, in the way that you are.

You have a gift for this. And I want to go ahead and let our listeners listen or watch this clip. This is from Wait Till It's Free by Colin Gunn.

A hospital issues a bill for $100 ,000 and the insurance company through their PPO reprices it to $20 ,000. And then they write in to the employer group and say, we've saved you $80 ,000. And now you can pay us a percentage of that $80 ,000 savings.

The hospitals are happy to accept $20 ,000 for a $100 ,000 bill because that $80 ,000 fictional loss helps them maintain that fiction of their not-for-profit status. And it goes into their uncompensated care pool that they then stick to the taxpayers and get a rebate on that really nobody talks about.

I call it the uncompensated care scam because to the extent the hospitals claim they lost money, they actually made money. When hospitals wave their charity flag and say, well, but we take care of the indigent, they don't really.

While they're waving the charity flag with one hand, they're fleecing the taxpayer with the other hand.

So Colin, just quickly before we come into our next commercial break, quickly give us a snapshot of the issue that you deal with of corruption in the health care system that sort of serves as the springboard of the entire discussion about what we can do to regain our freedom in this area of health care.

People need to understand the American health care system is essentially a crony capitalist system. Now, I hate socialism, but what's worse than socialism? Well, one thing worse than socialism is crony capitalism, where big entities, big financial entities use the power of the state, the government, to deliver money into their own coffers.

And this is what's happening with Obamacare. The insurance industry and the medical establishment used Obamacare. Of course, Obamacare forces people to buy the products that they didn't want to buy in the free market, but now we're forced to buy these insurance policies.

And for most people, they're not to their benefit. And this is what we're talking about in the movie Wait Till It's Free. Free health care is a big problem. The problem is we fall back on the third-party pay system as well as the government model.

And so our American system, there's reasons why it's expensive. And you had Keith Smith there, who's a libertarian doctor, explaining why it's so expensive. The way we've decided to do it is what makes it expensive.

We're going to be right back, guys, after this break with Colin Gunn, documentary filmmaker with Wait Till It's Free, ApologiaRadio .com. Back on Apologia Radio, Apologia TV. I want to encourage you guys to go over to ApologiaRadio .com.

Check out the All Access, where you can get not just this television show, but the hour-after show we're going to do with Colin Gunn, really expanding on these issues. You'll be able to get that every week on all of our shows, on top of all the other content by becoming All Access.

So again, Colin Gunn with Wait Till It's Free. It's such an important discussion to have. Colin, we've done shows on Apologia Radio regarding the ethics behind Obamacare from a biblical worldview, that it is simply immoral as a system.

And so I was really encouraged about your film because you weren't just talking about the corruption in the health care system and in government by getting involved in health care, but you were also talking about how do we actually solve this problem?

And so you can't beat something with nothing. And I like that you didn't just leave it sort of with the we're in trouble, the floodgates have opened, and now national socialism and all the rest. You talk about what we can do now to engage this corruption.

But you were finishing a thought before we went to our commercial break. Go ahead and finish that. You were talking about the corruption in the system.

Well, what we've done, the way we've designed our American system is to the disadvantage of the patient and also the doctors themselves. The doctors take nine cents of the dollar off of all of our medical payments.

So there's a very small part of it. Medicine, as we pay for it, or really health care, has become this massively expanded thing, including insurance companies and the executives that work for the insurance companies, and then, of course, government and government waste.

There is a lot of problems in health care, and health care doesn't need to be expensive. And, of course, the Affordable Care Act came along and just doubled down on all of the bad ideas that we already had, which was the over-reliance on the third-party pay system and the intrusion of government into the health care market.

We believe that the solutions are right there, and we need to do a form of an exodus that we've done in the public school system already, as Christians have got together and have left the system, established Christian schools and homeschooled.

We're looking at the health care system right now, and to escape the corruption, to escape the control of government, we're having to think about things that we can do. So our film is optimistic in that sense, in that we offer the alternative to the government model or the over-reliance on the third-party pay model.

So that's what our film is essentially about.

Christian Alternatives to Government-Run Health Care

I want to have Joy and Luke jump in here, but it's interesting that you said that, Colin, about what we have to do as Christians in essentially establishing what is just and righteous within society. And it's cool, guys.

If you look at a survey of Christian history and church history, when you look in the first, say, two, three centuries of the church, and you look at what was happening in Rome, Rome couldn't even handle the issues of justice.

They would have backlogs of 10 or 20 years to seek justice in a conflict. And so Rome began to actually look to the church for the issues of the delegation of justice in society because we were doing it so well, because we could handle this mediation in a way better than the government could.

Isn't that amazing? And so how do you solve this problem as Christians? You demonstrate righteousness and justice in a society. This is how you live as a society. And you begin to do it, and the world looks in.

When their system is crumbling, they look over to the church, and they say, well, look, they actually are doing it right. And they look to the church.

So go ahead. Well, Colin, I mean, I love how you named it Wait Till It's Free. I mean, it's obviously an ironic title, if you will. So talk about that a little bit. I mean, obviously, we would say that the government is stealing from the American people to pay for this insurance.

It's really not free at all. It's costing us all something. Even if you don't even have Obamacare, it's still costing you something.

Right. So the idea of Wait Till It's Free is, well, just wait until you get free health care. Consider the cost. And the cost is massive. The cost actually might be your own life, as we covered when we went to the UK to talk about the single-payer system.

When someone else pays, they get to call all the shots. And that's the crisis right now is that, essentially, government will begin to ration care. It already has. And that's obvious under the Canadian system and the UK system.

So when you get something for free, of course, that's an illusion because you're paying a lot of money for it in your taxis, with Canada and Britain having higher taxis than most the rest of the world.

And we look at the amount that you pay in, the actual amount you get back in terms of care is vastly diluted. Part of the problem is, is what is health care? We can't even agree on that with the unbelievers.

Our concept of health care is a broken leg or a heart attack. Their concept of health care is abortion rights, eugenics, euthanasia, lap band surgeries, sperm banks for lesbians. That was another thing.

I heard tattoo removals, things like that. All of these things that they give for free on the National Health Service is what they call health care. And it will be the same thing here under Obamacare.

We will start, Christians will be forced to pay for the lifestyle choices of other people. And, of course, the lifestyle choices we talk about in the film are particularly dangerous lifestyle choices that really they shouldn't be doing.

But we create more moral hazard by giving them welfare, which actually gives them a reason to continue risky behavior. So that is a problem we're looking at. It's a little bit complicated for some to get first time, but that's the root of the problem is how you pay for health care has everything to do with the kind of service that you receive.

So if you get the government to pay for it, it's a different kind of service. It's not what we think when we go and buy medical services.

I just want to say I really like that you sort of, you get into the general corruption of health insurance. It's something my actually growing up, my mom worked for a very well-known health insurance company.

She's an RN. And she, as a kid, I was probably really young, like maybe like six or seven, and she explained to me how health insurance worked. And I was like, I think I basically responded with like, I thought doctors were supposed, like trying to help people.

I was like, how does this system help anyone? Like it's so expensive.

How can it help anyone? Yeah, it does. The way we've decided to pay for it there is the most expensive way to pay for it. The problem is, is that the person who's purchasing the medical services don't care about the price.

The person who's selling the medical services, the doctor, also doesn't care about the price. So you've got the worst circumstance for escalating costs when you have two people in a room negotiating who don't care about the actual final cost.

And that is why our healthcare has gone up over the years. And now Obamacare just doubles down by forcing us into the insurance model. Insurance by design, or the idea of insurance, is not necessarily bad.

But we don't have true insurance. They call it insurance, but it's more like prepaid medical care. And it's very redistributive. It's like socialized medicine. So when you buy a policy on the Obamacare exchanges, you're agreeing to really subsidize other people's health problems.

And that's to the damage of people who are young and fit. So all of these young and fit people, you probably saw Obama on Between Two Ferns, you know, with Zach Galifianakis promoting it. He was marketing it to young people because it's a terrible choice for young people to buy $500 worth of health insurance.

They will not use it. They may, in rare circumstances, need it. But generally speaking, they don't need all of these medical services. Therefore, the sick people who get the deal of a lifetime where they're able to buy insurance with pre-existing conditions, that would never exist in the free market.

That's a big rule of thumb. Would it exist in the free market? And of course, with Obamacare, none of it would. So when we're talking about insurance, we're not just anti-corporatism or anything like that.

We're just showing that it's not real insurance anymore. It hasn't been for quite a few years.

Subsidies, Moral Hazard, and Distorted Health Care Incentives

That's right. Let me play another clip from Wait Till It's Free that sort of engages this whole discussion that we're having right now. This is from Wait Till It's Free.

If a man chooses to become a woman, or a woman become a man, Portland Mayor Sam Adams says city health insurance should cover it.

Costs for counseling, medicines, and gender surgeries can total tens of thousands of dollars.

Allowing transition-related care is absolutely vital to allow transgender people to live full, good lives.

What you choose to do with your life should not be forced on others, including the cost. This advertising from Obamacare reveals some behaviors that your insurance is meant to cover. You see, one of the problems with sin is that it's expensive, but nobody wants to be personally responsible to pick up the costs.

This assault on choice even extends to private enterprise. Lawyers for Hobby Lobby argued against the mandate in the federal health care law that it must provide coverage for employees, including access to the morning-after pill.

They're not against providing health insurance,.

But this, to them, is immoral.

All right, guys, so that was from Wait Till It's Free, and I think that that really engages the issue that we're talking about. Am I right? Absolutely.

So when you subsidize anything, and of course we know welfare and how that works, it actually subsidizes non-work, and guess what happens? More people don't want to work because the welfare is there for them, so the safety net encourages, and you get more of what you're trying to stop, you know?

You get the corn subsidies, and then we end up with all this corn, and guess what happens when you subsidize health care? You get worse health. It's a crazy thing, but it's true, and we talk about it in the film when we went to my home country of Scotland, which of course is famous for terrible health, alcoholism and heart disease from bad diet and all the rest of it, and we go into that because we're talking about the issue of moral hazard that if you subsidize lifestyles, and there's no consequence, small financial consequences, even in health care.

You know, we talk about the ambulances over there being used like a taxi service because it doesn't cost anything to use them. If it was $5 or £5 over there, there would be a discouragement on using that service, so it only makes sense if you bring in the proper economic model.

Free-Market Health Care, Whole Foods, and the Diner Analogy

Absolutely. Fantastic discussion. Love to have it, and I think what you guys are going to be very excited about is where Colin takes us in Wait Till It's Free, which I like what you said. It's an interesting title because what is everyone trying to aim for?

Free health care, and this is legit, and so it's exciting. We've been looking for an answer, Colin. We've been looking for an answer, and I think you found it, and that's what excites me about this is just that point.

I think we now have a real meaningful solution that is just and that is righteous in a society, and so be right back, guys. Apologia TV with Joy the Girl, Luke the Bear, and me. Be right back. What's up, guys?

Welcome back. Apologia TV. This is the last segment of our television show, and so you're going to get to get more from Colin Gunn and hear us at Apologia TV and discussing the real solution here in our after show.

All of our All Access members get access to that after show, so if you want more after the show, pick us up over there, but Luke, you mentioned someone just tweeted us. Apologia. What's our tweeter account?

What is it? It's Apologia Radio. It's not Apologia Studios? No. Okay, Apologia Radio on the twerker. Yeah. Okay. They twerked us.

Okay. They sent us out a twerk. Yeah. What was it? They asked what a Jesus juke is.

All right. Do you want to explain a Jesus juke, Joy? Do you want to do that?

I don't know if I have the best word. Well, let's see. Basically, it's when somebody answers in a way.

So like if you love Jesus, you would do that better? The radio show right now. Imagine if you worked as hard on your relationship with God as you do on this radio show. There you go. There's an example.

That would be like a Jesus juke? Yeah. You're in the middle of something, and someone leaps in and goes, man, I wish we read our Bibles as much as we watch that TV show.

Especially if it's not a very serious discussion, and someone like

You're just being a human and relatable, and you're just being a person, and then someone has to make it all super Christian-y. So we're back now.

Apologia TV. Let's watch another clip. People are fanatics about Amazon. They're fanatics about Apple. They're fanatics about their favorite restaurant. Because these businesses recognize they're working for the consumer, and they've got to do a good job, or they're going to lose their business, and they're going to go out of business.

But when you give these things to government, let's just be honest, they have a history of just stinking at running business. Every time the government has put their hands on something by way of a business model, they just absolutely destroy it.

And one of my favorite clips from the film was from the CEO of Whole Foods. It is just absolutely amazing.

I love how he describes this. History shows us that top-down governmental solutions to problems don't really work. They don't solve the problems. Capitalism solves problems. Business solves problems.

Entrepreneurs solve problems because creativity and creative solutions come up. Now, most of them don't work.

I want to know, just real fast, we'll play through this in a second, what our worldview is doing coming out of his mouth. You know what I'm saying? You think about that, right? People producing, it's their product, it's their thing.

They own it, right? They have to be wise stewards of it and produce, and they have to be responsible for what is theirs, and it belongs to them, and they can grow it, and it can flourish. You don't just say, hey, you need to share that with everybody.

You know what I'm saying? As Christians, of course, we need to take care of the poor. That's our worldview, take care of the poor, the widows, the orphans among us, make sure that we're taking care of people, lifting them up.

But you don't simply say, hey, they're making a lot of money. Let's take some from them or let the government control it. So here is the CEO of Whole Foods. I'm a fan, by the way. I got this from Whole Foods today.

I got this from Whole Foods, yes, the other day. Right here.

Did you get that too? Some kombucha. I don't have anything from Whole Foods, but I do love Whole Foods.

This is your vermouth, and I think I have some bacon down here somewhere I got from Whole Foods from this morning.

You know the amazing thing about Whole Foods? What? They're not cheap, and yet I still want to shop there. Yes.

Let me just give a little tip to everybody in the television land, a tip about Whole Foods hot bar. Now, don't tell this to the CEO or we're done for. The Whole Foods hot bar, in the morning for breakfast, they cook their pesticide-free and all the things, whatever.

Stage four. Straight up awesome bacon. It's just a huge thing of bacon, and they just precook it, and it's basically cheap. Just go there and just take the tray and dump it. A vat of bacon. It's amazing.

All right, here's more from the CEO.

There's a lot of failure. That's the beauty of capitalism. The bad ideas get competed out of the marketplace, but when government comes up with a bad idea, there's no way to get rid of it. In fact, they just say we just haven't been giving enough money.

A great example is we're signing up for these health exchanges, except it doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? Because government fundamentally doesn't work very well. It doesn't come up with good solutions.

I mean, we all have this experience from dealing with governmental agencies, and we see how that works compared to how it might work if you're dealing with somewhere like Amazon .com or you're dealing with Whole Foods Market or you're dealing with Apple Computer.

We have not had a health care system for 70 or 80 years that's truly a free market health care system. If we allowed that type of competition to occur, if we really allowed entrepreneurs to compete, it would be amazing how quickly we'd solve these problems.

I mean, within a decade, the world would be transformed.

Awesome. That was wonderful. Colin, can you speak to that issue for us?

Yeah. First, Jeff, I wanted to point out that you said something that's key to the philosophy of our filmmaking, and that is having someone else present our philosophy, but in their words. The big mistake in filmmaking, I tell this to a lot of documentary filmmakers, is you have an opinion, and the mistake that most Christian filmmakers do is they go and find 10 of their friends with the same opinion, film them, and make a documentary film.

My job is to bring witnesses to testify to the truthfulness of what I say following a biblical pattern. If you want to prove something is true, bring the eyewitnesses, bring the expert witnesses. People like John Mackey, they don't have the same ideology as me, except on this issue, they have exactly the same philosophy as me.

So we go to them, and they say it better than me because I'm just the journalist, I'm just the filmmaker. These guys have the eyewitness experience of running a big business and also, in his sphere, relating it to health as well, personal responsibility, so unbelievable.

And of course, someone like him can talk very clearly about the merit of the free market. He's in the free market, and that's the analogy of our film. Food is essentially the diner scene. That is the analogy that we present people in our movie with the argument that health care should be as simple, conceptually as simple, as going into a diner and buying a meal, and it's nothing like that at all.

So that's what we're trying to engage people on, to think differently, and I think that's what John Mackey does brilliantly there.

I absolutely agree, and I think that we have to really start expanding our vision and the scope of our reach by really doing what you've done here and appealing to these people that are respected in the world that do these sorts of things, that are really adhering to what are biblical principles, and they may not actually be Christian, but it demonstrates that if you live according to God's principles, you experience blessing.

So I appreciate that.

Well, absolutely. Our films are full of people that are a vast variety of worldviews, but they have it right on this one issue, and so that's important to us. If you make the mistake of just presenting yourself as the authority, that's not what we want to do with a documentary.

I'm not the authority. I'm not the expert. I go find those people that can speak truth to these issues, and we were able to do it and have over 30 people in this film that are able to speak truth to this issue.

Personal Responsibility, Samaritan Ministries, and Caring for the Elderly

Now, Colin, I want you to give our viewers just a little taste. Just give them an idea of what you talk about in terms of the solution to this crisis. It's right to call it that. It is a crisis. And let me just say this.

We don't have the money to pay for this. We are already in debt. We are going off a cliff, fiscally speaking. We can't pay for this. It's a crisis. It will end. Families that live like this, families that raise their debt constantly, who do not make cuts, families that do this, we know those families break apart financially.

Any business that follow the model our government is goes out of business. It's inevitable. We tell people that. You're going to go out of business. You can't continue to do this. You don't have money coming in.

You're raising your debt. You're raising all of this stuff. You're not making cuts. You're going to go out of business. Our government is going to go out of business. And so what's the solution, Colin?

Well, the solution is similar to the solution that I've talked about in indoctrination, which is get the exodus, leave the system and establish your own system based on a Christian worldview. And that's what we need to do with medicine.

And we've covered several areas that that's happening within our culture right now. And so that's why it's an optimistic film. We're looking at capitalism, letting capitalism work properly and seeking medical services within the free market, including going abroad to buy cheaper medical services.

We talk about personal responsibility, looking after yourself, looking after your family's health. Not needing the medical services in the first place is a big part of this. And then other alternatives to the third-party pay system or the government pay system, like Samaritan Ministries, which I use, which is a cost-shooting ministry that works really well.

And it's Christians paying for other people's health care needs. Along with that, we talk about the biggest responsibility in relation to health care is always going to be the elderly. That's where all the expensive is, regardless of how you decide to do it.

And so taking care of our elderly relatives is a huge part in the health care story. All right, guys.

That's the bear. Peace. You see why. He's fuzzy and large. It's easy to call him that. And that's the girl, because...