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--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for 40% off. Terms apply.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): President Biden delivered his State of the Union address last night to a polarized Congress. The State of the Union is strong. We break down the President's big speech and the Republican response. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Wednesday, February 8th, and this is Morning Wire.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): New York Mayor Eric Adams is now busing illegal immigrants out of New York to other cities and Canada. Will this move solve the city's growing migrant problems? And the UK's health care system is in crisis. Record numbers of nurses are on strike. Patients are waiting up to a year for treatment and thousands of people are projected to die this year while waiting for care. If there was ever a time that it would be a rational thing to do to consider some kind of a radical overhaul of the system, now is the time.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
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--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): President Biden gave his second official State of the Union address before Congress last night, a speech delivered amid economic headwinds and growing dissension in the president's own party. Here with more on what the president said, how it was received and how Republicans responded as Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, as we've talked about on the show, this speech comes at a politically fraught time for the president. The majority of Democrat voters now say they want him off the ticket in 2024, and his approval rating has not hit 45 percent in over a year and a half. So coming in, the Biden camp was looking for a strong speech to convince voters that he's still the best option for Democrats.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Biden promised a speech aimed at unity, and the first two minutes did include congratulations and recognition of members of both parties and some friendly banter with Republicans, saying you're allowed to smile tonight. But from there, it got more divisive.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: This was an at times contentious night, to say the least. Biden invoked the January 6th riots, calling them the most serious attack on American democracy since the Civil War. He accused Republicans of holding the economy hostage over the debt limit. And he blamed the attack on Paul Pelosi on Republican claims regarding the 2020 presidential election.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Now, the president spent a good amount of time on the economy at the start. What did we hear? Well, the economy is one of the topics that Biden is most vulnerable on. If you look at the latest polling, just around one in three Americans support his handling of the economy. And his team is very aware of that.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But despite the fact that inflation remains stubbornly high and the cost of living has continued to skyrocket in the last year, Biden painted a rosy picture of the economy under his watch. Gas prices are down $1.50 from their peak. Food inflation is coming down, not fast enough, but coming down. Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months. Our take-home pay has gone up.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So an attempt to counter the growing angst over inflation. Definitely. You mentioned earlier that this got contentious at some points. What did we say? It did. Last night there was quite a bit of back and forth between Biden and Republicans.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: To give you an idea one of the more tense moments came when Biden implied that Republicans wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare which prompted shouts of liar from GOP members. Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I'm not saying it's the majority. Let me give you, anybody who doubts it, contact my office. I'll give you a copy. I'll give you a copy of the proposal.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: We also heard some comments from the president about border security and the fentanyl crisis. Yeah, the president called for Congress to secure the southern border, which drew applause from some Republicans. But then he suggested that any such legislation must be tied to a pathway to citizenship for those here illegally, which obviously is not supported generally by the GOP.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Right. Later on, Biden began to tell the story of a young girl who died of a fentanyl overdose, which prompted cries of the border and it's your fault from Republicans who've long said that the ongoing crisis at the border is the main reason for the surge in overdose deaths.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Fentanyl is killing more than 70,000 Americans a year. You got it. The president also focused significant time on the Democrats' so-called Inflation Reduction Act. But he mainly focused on one of the more controversial elements of that legislation, the billions of dollars in climate change funding.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: As part of that focus on climate change, he spent a good amount of time vilifying oil and gas companies, saying it was a problem that they'd made more money last year than ever before, and then later saying that we must start phasing out fossil fuels more quickly than we are right now.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: One comment on the U.S. only being reliant on oil for at least 10 years drew loud laughter from Republicans, clearly mocking him. I said we're going to need oil for at least another decade, and that's going to exceed and beyond that.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Now, each year, the opposing party offers a State of the Union response. This year, Republicans went with Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. What did we hear from her?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, as you can expect, Huckabee Sanders had a much different view of Biden's handling of the presidency. She repeatedly described Biden as a, quote, weak leader who she said has caved to the radical left and abandoned common sense.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: I'll be the first to admit President Biden and I don't have a lot in common. I'm the first woman to lead my state. And he's the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can't even tell you what a woman is.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: She also made a point of hammering the president on the skyrocketing inflation and the unsecured southern border under his watch. President Biden inherited the fastest economic recovery on record. The most secure border in history, cheap, abundant, homegrown energy, fast rising wages, a rebuilt military and a world that was stable and at peace.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And as many expected, she made sure to work in a reference to that Chinese surveillance balloon fiasco that ended over the weekend. From Afghanistan to Ukraine, from North Korea to Iran, President Biden's weakness puts our nation and the world at risk.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And the president's refusal to stand up to China, our most formidable adversary, is dangerous and unacceptable. President Biden is unwilling to defend our border, defend our skies, and defend our people.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): One of the biggest nights of the year in Washington. Cabot, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): That's Daily Wire's senior editor, Cabot Phillips. Coming up, the Big Apple begins bussing migrants out of town.
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--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): New York City is enacting a new plan to help ease its migrant crisis, and it may sound familiar. The Big Apple is now busing illegal immigrants to other cities, including some in Canada. The effort is a partnership between the city government and Catholic charities meant to ease the burden on city resources, as well as to send migrants to places they may prefer.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): But the move comes just months after New York's mayor, Eric Adams, roundly criticized Southern governors for busing migrants to northern cities. Here to discuss is columnist David Marcus.
--:-- David Marcus: So Dave, is this a bit ironic that Adams is now himself packing migrants on buses and shipping them off?
--:-- David Marcus: Good morning. And yes, absolutely. It feels like 10 minutes ago, Governors Abbott and DeSantis of Texas and Florida were being accused of human rights violations for doing the same thing. It's hard to see how Adams' policy, which he calls re-ticketing, is really any different.
--:-- David Marcus: He's been saying for weeks that the city is full, that it doesn't have the capacity or resources to care for these tens of thousands of migrants, even though Gotham is a sanctuary city with right to shelter laws that compel the government to find housing.
--:-- David Marcus: He surely realizes that bussing migrants out, including out of the country to Canada, is hypocritical. But it's not clear that he has much other choice. This all comes at a time when we've seen migrants protesting the living conditions at a ferry terminal in Brooklyn and demanding to stay in the Midtown hotels instead.
--:-- David Marcus: I mean, it's hard to say what, if any, the direct connection is, but certainly the protests by the migrants didn't make Adams' job any easier. He spent the night last week at the Brooklyn facility that some of the single adult male migrants were objecting to.
--:-- David Marcus: You know, it was meant to say, hey, look, you know, conditions are great. It's warm. There's ping pong tables. But critics accused the sleepover of just being a photo op for a mayor who really seems in over his head on this crisis and frankly isn't getting much help from his supposed Democrat allies in the White House.
--:-- David Marcus: Adams is left basically saying to the migrants, if you don't like the shelter, here's a taxpayer funded bus ticket to someplace else. Given that many of the migrants are asylum seekers, do efforts like this to move them to places of their choice undermine at all the claim that they actually qualify for amnesty that's meant for emergency situations?
--:-- David Marcus: Yes, and many people are pointing this out. The right to asylum is meant for extreme situations in which people are being persecuted in their own nation. So if the migrants and the White House, for that matter, are saying that conditions in these origin countries rise to that level of oppression, then one would think the Brooklyn Ferry Terminal would be a welcome refuge, not an Airbnb that you leave a Yelp review of.
--:-- David Marcus: Yeah. Now, the motivation for moving these single adult males to the shelter was frustration on the part of hotel owners that were forced to house them and who found them in many cases unruly, trashing rooms and engaging in drunkenness and drug abuse.
--:-- David Marcus: Has that problem turned around at all? I think that's unclear. But as you say, the complaints from these hotel owners have been vociferous. At a time when New York is still trying to recover from the COVID pandemic, these owners want tourists in their rooms. They didn't really sign up to run a de facto migrant processing facilities.
--:-- David Marcus: And there are concerns from potential tourists that they could wind up in one of these hotels. The one thing that Adams has right is that the situation is untenable as more and more migrants just continue to arrive. Hence, the not exactly ideal busing operation, I guess.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): David, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): That was Daily Wire contributor, David Marcus.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Britain's National Health Service is facing an unprecedented worker's strike amid concerns that the system is on the brink of collapse. Joining us to discuss is Robert E. Moffitt, Senior Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: So, what are the key issues straining the NHS? What it is is that they have an excessive demand and they have a limited supply of both doctors and nurses medical facilities hospital beds medical equipment you name it they have a very serious problem meeting the natural demand of a country that has got 67 million sold.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: Their problem is that they have a system of central planning in which they set budgets for the provision of medical care. And these budgets are often not enough to provide the kind of care, the quality of care that the British population needs.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: And when you have a situation like that, you're going to have massive shortages. Now, this has been going on for years. But with the coming of the COVID pandemic, their situation has actually worsened, where roughly 7.2 million British citizens are awaiting medical care.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: Now, when you say they're waiting for care, are people waiting for their annual primary care visit? Or are we talking about acute medical issues?
--:-- Robert Moffitt: The more serious problem that they're dealing with right now is emergency care. The most salient problem, of course, is for people who have strokes or who suffer from a heart attack.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: And the most recent data reported by the Daily Telegraph is that people suffering a heart attack face an average wait of 90 minutes for an ambulance. And some folks are waiting up to two and a half hours.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: And that is why British medical authorities are saying that thousands of people are going to be dying as a result of this unless they fix it.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: Now, how much is the UK spending on health care and how does that compare to other countries? It's roughly about half of what we spend. They spend between 10 and 11 percent of their entire gross domestic product on medical care.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: We spend between 19 and 20 percent on medical care in the United States. So altogether, they spend much less than we do. There is a big price. You pay less, you get less.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: And where they really skimp compared to the United States is that they pay their doctors and their nurses and other medical professionals much lower reimbursements than we do.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: In your article, you mentioned that some people in the UK actually buy supplemental private insurance. How many people are doing that and how does it work? Is there a separate hospital system?
--:-- Robert Moffitt: Well, yes, they do have a separate hospital. The way it works is that if you're a British doctor, you can practice without any restriction in the National Health Service, but you can also open up a private clinic.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: And there's also independent private health insurance in Britain. It's about 11% of the British population has routine private health insurance to take care of their primary medical care.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: In other words, they don't use the system, but it's no more than about 11%. Rishi Sunak, who is the prime minister of Great Britain, was asked directly whether he's using private care, and he refused to answer the question on three different occasions.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: I think the reason why is that on one level, the British are very proud of their system because they claim that they have universal care, they have universal coverage. The only problem is what they're promising or what they advertise does not come true in fact.
--:-- Robert Moffitt: And right now, they're in the midst of an unprecedented medical crisis in the United Kingdom.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): All right, well, we're just about out of time. Robert, thanks so much for coming on.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): That was Robert E. Moffitt, Senior Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more of the news you need to know.
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