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Underground USA Podcast

Underground USA Podcast

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No Fear. No Political Correctness. No Wokeism. An irreverent fact-based podcast heard and read across 50 US states and 44 countries.

www.undergroundusa.comFrank Salvato Ciencia Política Ciencias Sociales Política y Gobierno
Episodios
  • How For-Profit Health Insurance Turned American Healthcare Into A Predatory Enterprise

    How For-Profit Health Insurance Turned American Healthcare Into A Predatory Enterprise
    Dec 23 2025
    The story of health insurance in the United States begins not with Wall Street sharks circling for profits, but with a modest act of community solidarity during the Great Depression.In 1929, at Baylor University Hospital in Texas, administrators faced empty beds and unpaid bills as economic collapse kept patients away. So, they devised a prepaid plan: for a small monthly fee, teachers could secure hospital care without fear of ruinous costs. This became the blueprint for Blue Cross, a nonprofit model that spread rapidly across the country in the 1930s. Soon after, Blue Shield plans emerged to cover physician services. These were explicitly nonprofit entities, often granted tax-exempt status and special regulatory privileges in exchange for serving the public good—community rating (charging everyone the same premium regardless of health status), acting as insurers of last resort, and prioritizing access over profit.During World War II, wage freezes pushed employers to offer health benefits as a perk, cementing employer-sponsored insurance as the dominant model. By the 1950s, enrollment exploded from millions to over 140 million. The Blues dominated, focusing on broad coverage and affordability. Commercial for-profit insurers existed but only on the fringes; they couldn’t compete with the Blues’ nonprofit advantages until they adopted “experience rating”—charging higher premiums to sicker groups—allowing them to cherry-pick healthy customers and undercut the Blues in certain markets.This nonprofit era wasn’t perfect, but it kept costs relatively contained. Patients and providers dealt directly, with insurance stepping in as a safety net rather than a profit extractor. Medical loss ratios—the share of premiums spent on actual care—hovered around 95%, meaning nearly every dollar went to healthcare rather than overhead or dividends.The enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, while a landmark social safety net achievement in expanding access to the elderly and poor, tragically hyper-intensified the demise of nonprofit health insurance and healthcare. By injecting massive third-party government payments into the system—reimbursing hospitals and physicians on a cost-plus or fee-for-service basis—these programs severed the direct link between patients and providers, unleashing unchecked cost inflation. Providers, shielded from price sensitivity, charged whatever they wanted, knowing the government check would arrive. This “third-party payment problem” flooded the system with money, rewarding volume over value and creating irresistible profit opportunities. Nonprofit hospitals and insurers, once focused on community service, faced mounting pressure to expand bureaucracies, raise charges, and compete in an escalating arms race of costs. For-profit entrants exploited the gusher of funds, accelerating the shift toward shareholder-driven models that prioritized extraction over care.The devastating turning point came in the 1970s and 1980s, when greed began to infiltrate. The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, signed by Richard Nixon, provided federal subsidies and loosened restrictions to promote HMOs. Early HMOs were nonprofit, emphasizing preventive care. But the law unleashed a wave of for-profit HMOs, which quickly dominated the space by prioritizing cost-cutting over quality and skimming healthy enrollees.The real betrayal occurred in 1994, when the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association—under pressure from competitive threats—abandoned its nonprofit mandate, allowing member plans to convert to for-profit status. What followed was a feeding frenzy. Blue Cross of California aggressively acquired plans in other states, rebranding as WellPoint (now part of Anthem, the second-largest insurer). Conversions swept through states: Georgia to Cerulean, Missouri to RightChoice, Virginia, and more. By the 2000s, many iconic Blues had morphed into shareholder-driven behemoths, with assets often transferred to foundations as a deceptive fig leaf for public benefit.This shift to profiteering transformed health insurance from a public service into a rapacious industry. For-profit insurers face relentless pressure to deliver shareholder returns, leading to skyrocketing administrative costs—marketing blitzes, executive bonanzas, lobbying armies, and denial machines designed to avoid payouts. Studies show that for-profit plans have higher administrative overhead (often 6 percentage points more than nonprofits) and lower medical loss ratios, meaning less money reaches patients and providers.The result? Exploding prices. US healthcare now consumes nearly 20% of GDP, double what most developed nations spend, with worse outcomes like lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality. For-profit dominance incentivizes higher provider payments because insurers can simply pass costs to premiums—especially under rules like the Affordable Care Act’s medical loss ratio requirements, which ...
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    34 m
  • K Street’s Lawfare Democrats Weaponize Anonymous Lies To Mislead Voters

    K Street’s Lawfare Democrats Weaponize Anonymous Lies To Mislead Voters
    Dec 15 2025
    The modern Democrat Party no longer trusts elections to deliver power; it trusts Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, and Andrew Weissmann—along with their K Street lawfare factories—to manufacture it through deception. These are not mere attorneys; they are political arsonists in $3,000 suits who have turned the First Amendment into a loaded weapon.From the marble lobbies of Perkins Coie to the revolving doors of WilmerHale and Covington & Burling, the Lawfare Democrat class—led by Elias (the architect of the 2016 Clinton-funded Steele dossier), Eisen (author of the “how-to” impeachment playbook), Mary McCord (the DOJ official who helped launch Crossfire Hurricane and later became the legal face of every anti-Trump “resistance” group), and Weissmann (Mueller’s pit bull)—has perfected the false-flag media operation. They invent a scandal, launder it through “anonymous sources,” and watch their stenographers at CNN, NPR, and The Atlantic detonate it across the country. The goal is never truth; it is always partisan domination by any means necessary.The formula is brutally simple: a Lawfare operative drafts a lurid claim, feeds it to a cooperative reporter as coming from “a senior official familiar with the matter,” and the story is published without a single named source or piece of verifiable evidence. Retractions, when they finally crawl out weeks later, are printed on page 19 in 8-point font. By then, the damage is done—polls have moved, donors have panicked, and another chunk of the republic’s faith in institutions has been hollowed out.Four recent examples expose the playbook in crystalline detail.Arlington Cemetery “Desecration” HoaxDays after Trump visited Section 60 to honor the 13 service members killed in Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, NPR—citing only anonymous “Army officials”—accused Trump’s team of shoving cemetery staff and illegally filming a campaign ad on sacred ground. The story was immediately weaponized by Kamala Harris and every blue-check pundit on X. Within 48 hours, the Gold Star families themselves released statements and video proving they had personally invited Trump and thanked him for being there. The “anonymous officials”? Almost certainly coordinated through Marc Elias’s network, whose firm has specialized in weaponizing military families against Republicans since the Russiagate era. NPR’s half-hearted correction came only after the families threatened legal action.The Atlantic’s “Hitler Praised Generals” RevivalJeffrey Goldberg, still nursing wounds from his debunked 2020 “suckers and losers” fantasy, dropped another anonymously sourced bombshell weeks before the election: Trump, according to “sources close to the former president,” had repeatedly praised Hitler’s generals and complained about the cost of a slain soldier’s funeral. The timing was surgical—maximum panic, minimum time for fact-checking. John Kelly, the supposed primary source, refused to go on the record. No one else ever did. Yet the story dominated the final stretch of the campaign. Behind the curtain: Norm Eisen and Mary McCord were openly coordinating anti-Trump messaging with Atlantic writers during this exact period, according to leaked Signal chats later published by independent journalists.The “Astronauts Aren’t Stranded” GaslightingWhen Trump and Elon Musk moved aggressively to bring home NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore—left orbiting for ten months because of Boeing’s Starliner debacle under Biden—NPR ran an extraordinary piece insisting the astronauts were “not stranded at all,” citing only anonymous “agency sources.” This directly contradicted NPR’s own reporting from the previous nine months, in which the word “stranded” had appeared dozens of times. The sudden reversal came just as Trump was scoring political points for decisive action. The fingerprints of Andrew Weissmann’s network were all over it; former Obama-Biden holdovers inside NASA and the White House comms shop, still taking marching orders from the Lawfare clique, fed the line to friendly reporters to blunt the president’s momentum.The Cabinet Purge Whispers:Firing Kash Patel & Kristi NoemAs whispers of a post-midterm reshuffle gained traction, outlets like MS NOW and The Daily Beast unleashed a barrage of anonymously sourced speculation that Trump was plotting to axe two of his most loyal lieutenants: FBI Director Kash Patel and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.In late November, MS NOW cited “three people with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity” to claim Trump was “weighing” Patel’s ouster over alleged missteps, including using a government jet for a date with his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, and assigning FBI resources to her security detail. The story painted Patel as “on thin ice,” with Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey floated as a replacement—ignoring Patel’s successes ...
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    41 m
  • How Voter Turnout Disasters & Voter Apathy Are Handing The Country To Democratic Socialists

    How Voter Turnout Disasters & Voter Apathy Are Handing The Country To Democratic Socialists
    Dec 12 2025
    Let’s cut the bullshit, and this is going to be a little harsh, so strap in: the Republican Party, from its bumbling state chapters to the bloated national machine, has once again proven itself utterly incompetent at the one job that matters—getting its voters to the polls in off-year elections.On December 9, 2025, in Miami, a measly 21.3% turnout handed the mayor’s office to Democrat Eileen Higgins, who crushed Trump-endorsed Republican Emilio González 59% to 41%. That’s right—only 37,496 out of 175,692 registered voters bothered to show up in a city that’s supposed to be a conservative stronghold in Hispanic-heavy Florida. This isn’t just a loss; it’s a humiliating surrender, ending nearly 30 years of GOP control in a place where Republicans have preached family values and border security for generations.Higgins, a 61-year-old former county commissioner with a resume padded by Peace Corps stints in Belize, didn’t just win—she signed on explicitly to Democratic Socialism, campaigning with a platform that reeked of equity-driven policies, environmental hand-wringing over Biscayne Bay, and streamlined services that sound an awful lot like government overreach dressed in feel-good drag. Her victory amplified a realignment among Hispanic voters battered by economic squeezes and federal policy whiplash, as noted in sharp election coverage.And it’s not an isolated fuck-up. Across the country, from Seattle’s socialist strongholds to New York’s progressive playgrounds, Democratic Socialists are racking up wins in these low-stakes races, turning city halls into petri dishes for equity experiments and wealth redistribution schemes. The GOP? They’re asleep at the wheel, too busy circle-jerking over presidential fantasies to notice the ground crumbling beneath them.Miami’s debacle is the poster child for this electoral malpractice. Higgins waltzed into office by hammering affordable housing and falsely slamming Republican immigration crackdowns as heartless attacks on Cuban, Venezuelan, and Haitian families right in Little Havana. González, the ex-city manager who ran USCIS under Bush and pushed for axing property taxes while toughening borders, had the dream team of endorsements: Trump, DeSantis, Rick Scott, Ted Cruz. What did it get him? A 41% ass-kicking in a nonpartisan race where national Dem groups poured in cash to flip the script.Turnout at 21.3% is unacceptable at every level—city, county, state, national. It’s not bad luck; it’s a symptom of a party that’s forgotten how to fight when the cameras aren’t rolling. Republicans whine about “low-turnout protests” fueling these losses, as if that’s an excuse rather than a confession of their own laziness.NewsMax reports Democrats crowing about these Florida and Georgia off-year victories as “momentum” for 2026, with the Democrat Legislative Campaign Committee dropping $50 million on an expanded war chest targeting 42 state chambers. In Georgia, Dems snagged a state House special election to replace a Republican rep, narrowing the GOP edge while holding onto a runoff in suburban Atlanta. These aren’t flukes; they’re the bleeding edge of a socialist creep that’s already colonized blue cities but now eyes red-state underbellies.This wave of Democratic Socialist triumphs isn’t confined to Miami’s humid sprawl. Zoom out, and you’ll see the pattern: from Seattle, where eco-socialists have locked down city council seats with mandates for rent control and “just transition” green boondoggles, to New York, where Mamdani and AOC-style firebrands have turned boroughs into laboratories for universal basic income pilots and defund-the-police reruns. Miami’s just the latest notch, a gateway drug for Marxism-lite in the Sunshine State, complete with Higgins’ full-throated embrace of the ideology.These wins thrive in the shadows of off-year apathy, where ideologues on the Left mobilize like it’s D-Day, door-knocking and meme-warrioring while conservatives treat local races like optional Netflix binges. The GOP apparatuses—those sclerotic state parties and the national RNC clown car—deserve a lion’s share of the blame for this abstract failure to manufacture turnout. They’ve got the data, the donor lists, the algorithms, but zero fucking aptitude to use them. Instead of blanketing airwaves with ads exposing how “Democratic Socialism” is just Stalinism with pronouns, they let narratives fester unchecked.Deep-pocket Republicans and conservatives, those Wall Street fat cats and Silicon Valley turncoats, too busy golfing and comfortable in their self-importance, who fund the party like it’s a vanity project, are the worst offenders. Clueless doesn’t begin to cover it—they’re willfully blind, dumping billions into presidential PACs and TV blitzes while starving the grassroots organizations that actually do effective work at the local level. Preserving Trump’s reform movement? Forget it. ...
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    44 m
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