Amy

Hello Senator Thune, Let's expose what you're really doing with "reconciliation." You announced it yesterday, eleven months after the House passed the SAVE America Act. You're not trying to pass this bill. You're trying to kill it in a way you can blame on process. Here's how we know: Reconciliation requires the Senate parliamentarian to rule that provisions are "budgetary." Citizenship verification is not budgetary. Photo ID mandates are not budgetary. The parliamentarian will gut the bill. Then you'll shrug and say "we tried." We see through you. Meanwhile, you WON'T use the tools that actually work: Rule XIX limits each senator to two speeches per legislative day. Keep the Senate in continuous session, file cloture daily, and the filibuster exhausts in ~12-20 days. You dismissed it as "complicated." Because if you tried and succeeded, you'd have to actually pass the bill. Harry Reid nuked the filibuster in 2013 when he wanted results. Mitch McConnell changed Senate rules THREE times and canceled the August recess. Chuck Schumer used reconciliation within months on a 50-50 Senate. You have 53 seats. You've changed nothing, canceled nothing, and waited eleven months. Now let's talk donors: • Goldman Sachs: $150K to you - top H-1B user • Google: $75K - lobbies against E-Verify • Meta: $72.5K - Zuckerberg's FWD[.]us pushes mass immigration • Wells Fargo: $90K - banks undocumented immigrants Same corporations sponsor Punchbowl News, where you sit for "Fly Out Days" which nobody watches except Congress staffers and K Street lobbyists who pays premium bucks for legislative intelligence. Their reporter then telegraphs to the audience the SAVE Act "will ultimately fail." Corporate money flows to you AND to the outlet that frames your inaction as inevitable. We see the loop. You called grassroots anger a "paid influencer ecosystem." YOU are the paid influencer. You take the wrong side of a 80% issue because you are indistinguishable from a K Street mouthpiece, and an ineffective one to boot who won't bend the rules to get anything passed. What we want: 1. Force a real talking filibuster. 2. Stop hiding behind process. 3. Pass the SAVE America Act. YOU will become the reason that we will have our butts kicked in midterms. Not Candace Owens, not Nick Fuentes, not anyone else. You and you alone, and all because you want to make the 200 or so viewers of Punchbowl Fly Out Days happy. You're living in a K Street information bubble, addicted to the comforts and praises of lobbyists masquerading as journalists. You mistake the steak and martini dinners you get invited to as your own constituents. You are not "moderate." The SAVE America Act has 98% support among Republicans. Name one other thing that has 98% support. You are an extreme minority who prides himself on being a calm leader, when in reality you are well in the running for the most ineffective Majority leader of all time. Prove me wrong. Do the bare modicum of effort. Not symbolic. Actual effort. Cancel the recess. Get SAVE America Act passed.

Hello Representative Levin, I'd like to introduce you to an organization called the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. NDI is one of the four core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy, established by Congress in 1983. It is the Democratic Party's official international arm. Its board members include Stacey Abrams, Donna Brazile, and Michael McFaul. Its previous chair was Madeleine Albright, who served until her death in 2022. Also on the board: Eric Kessler, founder of Arabella Advisors, the largest dark money network in Democratic politics. NDI reported $181.5 million in revenue in fiscal year 2023, nearly all in government grants. NDI's mission, for four decades, has been to tell countries around the world how to run democratic elections. And what NDI consistently tells them, across dozens of countries, is that voter identification is a fundamental pillar of election integrity, and that proving citizenship is a basic prerequisite for participation. Here is what NDI has demanded of other countries: NDI's foundational guide, Building Confidence in the Voter Registration Process (2001), describes voter ID systems as standard democratic infrastructure. It states that voter registries should contain "voters' photographs and even their fingerprints" and that registered voters should be issued "a voter or other ID card that serves as proof of their right to vote." NDI explains that "issuing ID cards, either national or voting, requires a second point of contact between election officials and voters, which introduces an additional safeguard into the system." (pp. 10–11, 15) NDI's 2015 study of voter registration across the Middle East and North Africa goes further, laying out that voters must "prove their identity, essentially demonstrating that they are who they say they are" and must "affirm their citizenship and age." (p. 11) That same 2001 guide identifies married name changes as a routine voter roll maintenance challenge: "Election officials must update information about people who have moved or who have married and changed their surname." NDI also notes that voter lists "may omit information about changes of address or name for those eligible people who have recently moved or married." NDI's recommendation is not to eliminate voter ID. It is to maintain clean, continuously updated voter rolls that accommodate name changes within the system. In its 2009 Bangladesh report, NDI praised the country's new photo-voter list and national ID card system, noting that the ID cards gave "a sense of empowerment and belonging to the disadvantaged and marginalized people of the country, particularly women." Read that again. NDI itself called voter identification empowering for WOMEN! In every case, NDI's position was identical: marriage-related name changes are a solvable administrative problem. The solution is better record-keeping and updated systems. Not fewer safeguards. Not the elimination of voter ID. Your party's own international arm has already solved the problem you bring up. The answer is: maintain the rolls. Update the records. Issue the IDs. Accommodate name changes within the system, don't use them as a reason to have no system at all. The exact opposite of what you push here - refusing to clean voter rolls. By NDI’s own standards, by the standards of your own international soft power branch, YOUR position is the anti-feminist position. The SAVE America Act asks Americans to do less than what NDI demands of Nicaragua, less than what NDI praises in Morocco, and far less than the biometric fingerprint-and-facial-recognition system NDI supervised in Nigeria. Eighty-four percent of Americans support photo ID to vote. Two-thirds of Democrats support it. Jimmy Carter's own 2005 bipartisan commission recommended it. You voted no. Your party's international arm, funded with taxpayer money, chaired by your party's former Senate leader (Tom Daschle), staffed by your party's most prominent voting-rights advocate, says yes. For everyone else. NDI's guides are publicly available on their website. You might consider reading them before you spout mindless drivel to protect your own grift.

In a few minutes Democrats will be giving Republicans a FIFTH chance to pay TSA workers. Will they finally fund TSA or once again object?

Sarah has not merely exposed Joe Kent...she has eviscerated him with forensic lethality. This is no harmless evolution of a thinker; it is the calculated metamorphosis of a pure opportunist, a psychological specimen whose voter registration reads like the diary of a chameleon in heat: Libertarian from 2012 to 2019, Democrat from 2019 through 2020...including that deliberate primary vote for Bernie Sanders...before the seamless pivot to Republican in 2021, timed with surgical precision to launch his congressional assault on Washington’s 3rd District. Delve deeper into the psyche and the venom reveals itself: Kent is the archetype of the hollow careerist, a man whose convictions are not anchors but garments, donned, discarded, and resized according to the prevailing winds of power. There is no fixed north star here, no immutable principle forged in fire or blood...only the predatory calculus of narcissism, where loyalty is transactional, ideology is costume jewelry, and every affiliation serves the singular god of ascent. Such creatures do not grow; they adapt like viruses, mutating to exploit the host’s immune system until they command the body politic itself. He voted Bernie not from leftist fervor but as tactical sabotage; he wore the Democrat label not from belief but as a bridge; he became Republican not from revelation but because it unlocked the next rung. This is not integrity. This is soulless parasitism masquerading as patriotism. Sarah nailed the man to the wall with one word: windsock. Kent is not a leader. He is a weather vane in human form, spinning wherever the gales of ambition blow, ready to betray any banner the moment a shinier one flutters by. The base that embraces him does so at its peril: opportunists like this do not defend principles...they devour them, then smile while the faithful bleed. Well played, Sarah. The mask is shattered. The serpent stands revealed. 🗡️💀🐍

Disgraced Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino will retire at the end of the month. Two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents under his watch.

I am Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare. The largest for-profit hospital system in the United States. One hundred and eighty-two hospitals. Twenty states. I oversee a spreadsheet called the chargemaster. It has 42,000 line items. Each line item is a price. The prices are not real. I need to be precise about that. They are not estimates. Not approximations. Not market rates. They are anchors. An anchor is a number you set high so that every negotiated discount feels like a victory. No relationship to cost. No relationship to value. A relationship to leverage. My team sets the anchors. That is the job. The price is correct. Take a drug. Keytruda. Immunotherapy. Treats sixteen types of cancer. The manufacturer charges approximately $11,000 per dose. That is the acquisition cost. What the hospital pays. My team enters it into the chargemaster. They do not enter $11,000. They enter $43,000. That is the gross charge. The gross charge is a fiction. No one pays it. No one is expected to pay it. The gross charge exists so that when Blue Cross negotiates a 68% discount, they pay $13,760, and the contract says "68% discount" and both parties feel the transaction was rigorous. A 68% discount on a fictional price produces a real price that is 25% above acquisition cost. That margin is where I live. My 2025 compensation was $26.5 million. Eighty percent of my bonus is tied to EBITDA. Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. It is also earnings before the patient opens the bill. Same dose of Keytruda at the hospital across town. Gross charge: $12,000. Blue Cross rate: $10,200. Same drug. Same dose. Same needle. Same cancer. Different spreadsheet. The CMS transparency data showed the ratio between the highest and lowest negotiated price for the same drug at the same hospital can reach 2,347 to one. Not 2x. Not 10x. Not 100x. Two thousand three hundred and forty-seven to one. For the same thing. In the same building. On the same Tuesday. The price is correct. Every drug in the chargemaster has twelve prices. Twelve. Gross charge. Medicare rate. Medicaid rate. Blue Cross. Aetna. Cigna. UnitedHealth. Humana. Workers' comp. Tricare. Auto insurance. And the self-pay rate. The self-pay rate is for the person without insurance. It is the gross charge. The fictional number. The anchor. The person without insurance pays the number that was designed to be negotiated down from. They pay the ceiling because they have no one to negotiate on their behalf. Same drug. Same chair. Same nurse. They pay the price that no insurer in the country would accept. I maintain a file. CDM line item 637-4892-PKB. Saline flush. Sodium chloride 0.9%. Acquisition cost: $0.47. We charge $87. That is an 18,410% markup. The saline flush is used before and after every IV infusion. A chemo patient receiving twelve cycles will be charged $87 for saline fourteen times per visit. I know the math. My team built the math. The math is the job. The price is correct. In 2021, the federal government required hospitals to publish their prices. The Hospital Price Transparency Rule. Machine-readable file. Gross charges. Discounted cash prices. Payer-specific negotiated rates. We complied. We posted the file. The file is a 9,400-row CSV on our website under "Patient Financial Resources." Four clicks from the homepage. Column F: "CDM_GROSS_CHG." Column J: "DERV_PAYERID_NEGRATE." My team designed the column headers. They designed them to comply. They did not design them to communicate. CMS reported 93% of hospitals now post a file. Compliance. But only 62% of the posted data is usable. That gap is where we operate. We are compliant. The data is published. The data is incomprehensible. A researcher downloaded our file. She spent three weeks cleaning it. She called the billing department for clarification on 340 line items. They transferred her four times. The fourth transfer was to a voicemail box that was full. She published her analysis anyway. Cardiac catheterization lab charges: $8,200 to $71,000 for the same procedure depending on the payer. The report received eleven views on our press monitoring dashboard. I saw it. I did not forward it. On April 1, a new CMS rule takes effect. Hospital CEOs must personally attest — by name, encoded in the machine-readable file — that the pricing data is "true, accurate, and complete." My name. Sam Hazen. In the file. Attesting that 42,000 fictional anchors are true, accurate, and complete. They are complete. I will give them that. Forty-two thousand line items is nothing if not complete. A new analyst read the transparency data. She asked why the same MRI costs $450 for Medicare and $4,200 for Aetna in the same building on the same machine. I told her the rates reflect negotiated contractual agreements between the payer and the facility. She said that doesn't explain the difference. I told her the difference IS the contractual agreement. She said that sounds like the price is arbitrary. I told her the price is the result of a rigorous, multi-variable analysis that accounts for acuity, case mix, regional market dynamics, and payer contract terms. She asked if I could show her the analysis. I told her the analysis is proprietary. The analysis does not exist. The analysis is my team, in Q4, adjusting the chargemaster upward by the percentage the CFO wrote on a sticky note. The sticky note this year said "6-8%." They chose 7.4% because it is between six and eight and it has a decimal, which makes it look calculated. She stopped asking. The price is correct. My insurance. The executive health plan. Not in the chargemaster. Administered separately. I do not pay the gross charge. I do not pay the negotiated rate. I pay a $20 copay for services at our own facilities. Gross charge for my treatment: $14,200. Insured rate for our largest commercial payer: $8,600. I pay $20. The executive health plan was designed by the Chief Human Resources Officer and approved by the compensation committee. I was not on the compensation committee. I was a beneficiary of it. That is a different thing. I benefit from the system I price. I price the system I benefit from. These are two separate facts that happen to involve the same person. HCA Healthcare was named the Most Admired Company in our industry by Fortune magazine for the twelfth consecutive year. That was February. The same month I sold $21.5 million in company stock and purchased zero shares. Fortune did not ask about the chargemaster. I am Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare. I have 42,000 prices in a spreadsheet across 182 hospitals. None of them are real. All of them are charged. Same drug: $12,000 or $43,000. Depends on which spreadsheet. Which building. Which contract. Which page of which PDF. The patient who has no contract pays the most. The researcher who found the discrepancy got a voicemail box that was full. The analyst who asked why stopped asking. The executive who prices the system pays $20. On April 1, I will personally attest that this is true, accurate, and complete. The price is correct. The price has always been correct. I am the price.