In today’s episode, Jenny Beth Martin is joined by Dr. Scott Jensen — physician, medical freedom advocate, and Minnesota gubernatorial candidate — for a powerful conversation about government overreach, COVID truth-telling, and the future of Minnesota. Dr. Jensen recounts how his warnings about manipulated COVID death certificates led to multiple investigations into his medical license, why he refused to stay silent, and how the political and medical establishment tried to punish dissent. He also outlines his plan to restore affordable healthcare, protect individual liberty, confront rising crime and socialist influence in Minnesota, and rebuild trust in government. This is a candid, in-depth discussion about courage, accountability, and the fight to preserve medical freedom and constitutional rights in America.
In this episode of The Jenny Beth Show, Jenny Beth Martin speaks with Dr. Scott Jensen, physician, author, medical freedom advocate, and candidate for Governor of Minnesota. Dr. Jensen details his journey from small-town family doctor to state senator, and how raising concerns about manipulated COVID-19 death certificate guidance triggered multiple investigations into his medical license.
He explains why he chose to speak out during the pandemic, how political and bureaucratic pressure shaped public health decisions, and why restoring trust in medicine requires transparency, accountability, and honest debate. Dr. Jensen discusses the collapse of scientific skepticism during COVID, the loss of medical autonomy, and the human cost of fear-driven policy.
The conversation also examines Minnesota’s political landscape, rising crime, affordability challenges, and the spread of Democratic Socialism and the Red-Green Alliance in Minneapolis. Dr. Jensen outlines his vision for Minnesota’s future, including healthcare reform, protecting parental rights, strengthening public safety, safeguarding girls’ and women’s sports, and promoting limited, accountable government.
The episode concludes with rapid-fire questions on medical freedom, health insurance, and his message to Minnesotans who feel abandoned by their leaders.
For more information about Dr. Scott Jensen, visit DrScottJensen.com. | X: @drscottjensen
Host: Jenny Beth Martin, Honorary Chairman, Tea Party Patriots Action | X: @jennybethm
Narrator (00:14):
Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:18):
Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show, brought to you by Tea Party Patriots action, where we stand him for personal freedom, economic freedom, constitutionally limited government, and a debt-free future. Today we're talking about something personal, your health, your family's freedom, your doctor's ability to practice medicine without political interference. We live through government overreach during COVID mandates, threats, censorship, and punishment for speaking truth. Some turned a blind eye, others stood up. Today our guest is one of the men who stood up when it wasn't easy when doing so came with consequences. Today I'm joined by Dr. Scott Jensen, physician author, advocate for Medical Freedom, and now candidate for Governor of Minnesota. Dr. Jensen, welcome to the show.
Dr. Scott Jensen (01:06):
Well, thank you very much Jenny Beth for having me. It's good to be on and I get a few chances to have long form interaction like this, so it'll be fun.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:14):
Very good. Well, I'm looking forward to it. So before we get into policy and your race for governor, take us back to the beginning. What was the moment that made you say, I can't stay silent any longer? I have to speak the truth, no matter the cost.
Dr. Scott Jensen (01:28):
That's an interesting question because I've never considered myself a politician. I am a family doctor and I practice in a community of about 4,000 people in Minnesota, just on the edge of rural Minnesota, if you will. And about 10 years ago I was asked if I would run for a Senate seat and I told the people who were trying to recruit me that I was flattered, but no thank you. I was a family doc, but they kept pushing and so I challenged them and said, why are you pushing? I've already said no thank you. And they said, well, you know healthcare and that's a big deal. You started your own clinic and you know what infrastructure looks like because you've been involved with your local community and county in terms of getting road projects done, but you've also been on school board for 10 years and education.
(02:25):
So when my wife and I looked at things through that set lenses and did the soul searching for a couple of months, we decided, okay, maybe we are to do this. So I ran for senate in 2016 and as good luck would have it right in the middle of our campaign, the Minnesota Academy of Family Practice notified me that I had been chosen as the family doctor of the year for the entire state of Minnesota, which was flattering and humbling both at the same time. We went on to win in November of 2016 and I received more votes than any other Republican senator in the entire state that year. So there we were. We ended up winning the majority in the Senate. I was asked to chair as a freshman senator, healthcare access and affordability. So I did that. I was vice chair of the Health and Human Services.
(03:25):
President Trump had been elected the same election cycle I had. And so we were off and running. And remarkably Jenny Beth I wasn't prepared for was how rapidly I became disillusioned with the political process. It really wasn't like anything I'd ever experienced. It was almost as if once you win the election, the assumption was that you got 10 times smarter when in fact I think you actually became susceptible to thinking more highly of your own opinion than you maybe should. The intellectual curiosity that I assumed would be part of our everyday discussion, it wasn't there. There was a lot of fear about what would the next election be like. I remember every year almost trying to put a term limit bill forward and my own Republican colleagues wouldn't let it have a hearing. So by the time my first four year term was coming even close to ending, I had announced I wasn't going to run for reelection and I thought I was done, but then COVID hit and when COVID hit, I had no idea that I was going to become such a strong soul voice.
(04:56):
And I remember it began when the Minnesota Department of Health and the CDC combined efforts to inform physicians that the way we were to do death certificates, if we had any patients that died related to COVID, was going to be modified. And so I read this over quite carefully and I balked. I said, hold it. You're telling us to treat COVID as a respiratory viral disease differently than other respiratory viral diseases, specifically influenza RSV. And I said, this doesn't make sense. You're going to end up corrupting the normal reliability of the numbers. And I ended up announcing that on local TV broadcasts in Minnesota. And through that I ended up learning more about people Likeor Ingram and Tucker, and these people wanted me to talk about it nationally. So I did. And within two months I was notified by the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice that my license to practice medicine and take care of my patients, I was being investigated.
(06:17):
That was hard. That was an absolute gut punch and it made me angry. And that anger along with what I saw going on, riled up in me and awareness that I couldn't step away from the public arena. So I ended up getting recruited to running for governor. And so I ran for governor in 2022 against Tim Waltz and a lot of people have heard of Tim Waltz and I lost and did the soul searching in the wake of losing. And that's not fun. It's the first time I've ever lost an election really as an adult. I think I might've lost the election to be class president in fourth grade and maybe in high school, but as an adult I never lost. And we spent a lot of time thinking about it and realizing where we'd gone wrong, what we'd done wrong. And so I'm running again to be the governor of Minnesota and I'm looking for a face off against Tim Walls in about one year.
Jenny Beth Martin (07:33):
Was 2022 the first term for Tim Waltz as governor or not? I don't remember.
Dr. Scott Jensen (07:39):
No, he was already an incumbent for four years. It is interesting. He ran six times for Congress in the southern part of Minnesota and he won every time. And then he ran for governor in 2018 and won. And in all of those elections, he relatively easily won his southern district where he was from, where he'd been a school teacher for years. But when I ran against him in 2022, we beat him 52 to 45, the same margin of victory that he beat me statewide. And it was interesting to me that the people that knew him best were willing to say, no thanks. We've had enough. But obviously the whole state didn't say that.
Jenny Beth Martin (08:32):
And then that term limit Bill that you were talking about, your governor doesn't have term limits either in Minnesota. Isn't that correct?
Dr. Scott Jensen (08:41):
That is correct. And my term limit Bill did not address the governor's term limits. I simply wanted my colleagues in the House and the Senate to have some kind of term limits. And my term limit bills weren't real rigid. I mean, the one bill that I had talked about with many colleagues was you can serve 16 years and then you have to take one term off and then you can run for reelection. And if your district says, we want you back, then good for you, but at least you would've given up the power of the incumbent. And I could not get a hearing on that bill either.
Jenny Beth Martin (09:22):
It isn't shocking, I'm not surprised by it. But when you see it like that 16 years and then no, we don't even want to want to even consider that in Minnesota. When you were first elected Republicans, you were elected to the Senate. Did Republicans control the Senate and what about the house and do they now or not? I don't remember
Dr. Scott Jensen (09:47):
In 2016 when I was recruited to run, I was assured that the Republicans would not win the majority in the Senate. And I was told that because people knew that I was going to continue to practice medicine, but lo and behold, we did win the majority. So I was in the majority party and the House of Representatives also went to the Republicans. The governor was a Democrat, a governor, mark Dayton. And Mark Dayton was someone who I thought was pretty easy to have conversations with and I enjoyed working with him on many healthcare bills, but of course he was Democrat. So there was no trifecta for the Republicans. But I think looking back in 2017 and 18, the Republicans could have gotten quite a bit more done had they been a bit more courageous. But courage isn't the order of the day in politics. So oftentimes the nervousness about your next election, what's going to happen with the next election, I remember many times telling my colleagues, could we stop worrying about the next election? That's four years away and let's take advantage of the fact that we get to introduce the bills, debate them on the floor. We're in the majority party, let's get some good stuff done. And I think we squandered an opportunity.
Jenny Beth Martin (11:16):
Yeah, I think that is correct. Now, whether the governor would've signed bills, maybe he would not have. But I think that sometimes people when they get elected, not just sometimes, most of the time they're not bold enough and they're timid and they're shy and they're afraid and they just want to do whatever it takes to go along and get along so they can win again. And I think sometimes they forget that if you actually go do what you said you were going to do, keep your promises, be bold and courageous on behalf of your constituents, that'll guarantee you're going to win again. And I think they don't believe that and they're not willing to have that kind of courage that you mentioned.
Dr. Scott Jensen (12:03):
I think you're absolutely right, Jenny Beth. And I think that it's a sad state of affairs, and I do think that term limits would help remedy some of that. But the way it is, it's almost as if getting elected and walking in those hallowed halls of the state capitol, it does something to a person as a physician. It reminds me of some of my patients who have the unfortunate experience of becoming addicted to some type of medicine or some type of drug. And I think that literally legislators become addicted to having this vaunted position whereby you're no longer an ordinary human now people are clamoring for just two minutes of your time while before you got elected. Nobody really gave a damn.
Jenny Beth Martin (12:59):
Yeah, I think that that is a very good way to describe it. They become addicted to the power, the influence, the fame, the notoriety, whatever it is that clicks on Facebook and then that controls them more than the guiding principles and the core beliefs that should be controlling them. Alright, let's kind of break this into two. So I want to talk about your experience as a physician, especially during CID and then come back and we can close out the second part of the interview with more about your vision for Minnesota and more about why you're running again this time during COVID, you spoke up, you talked about what was happening with the death certificates, you got some fame yourself and then you were targeted. You just went through all of that. What happened with your medical license? And then I want to talk more about what they were saying about the death certificates and remind people what you were exposing back in 2020 and 2021.
Dr. Scott Jensen (14:11):
Well, basically to start with the death certificates, I've taught medical students and residents for decades. I've been an a adjunct professor at University of Minnesota Medical School for 30 plus years. I'm no longer on faculty with the med school, but when you do a death certificate, there's basically an obligation on the part of the physician to identify what was the pathway whereby a patient died, what did they die of at the very end, what prompted the death? Was it a cancer process that ultimately caused their demise? But in this situation, what we were told was normally there's a separation what caused the death, but what also might've contributed to it. So for instance, perhaps someone dies of emphysema. A contributing factor might be that they smoked for 30 years, but the cause of death you would put down emphysema. You would not put tobacco in the same way if a person dies of say, end stage renal failure, but at the time they had their death, perhaps they were even on hospice.
(15:31):
But if in the days or weeks before their death, they happen to have a positive PCR test for COVID, but they didn't have any respiratory distress or anything like that, you might as a physician choose to put the cause of death as end stage renal failure. And in the contributing condition section of the death certificate, you might put COVID, you might put tobacco exposure, you might put nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug usage like ibuprofen or ale over a long-term basis. You can do what you want. But what we were basically being told to do is if COVID was identified as a contributing condition, go ahead and move it over to the cause of death. And I said, well, that's crazy if a person gets hit by a bus and they whisked by ambulance to the emergency room and they're found to have two collapsed lungs. But in the initial laboratory workup, there's a positive PCR test for COVID and they die within an hour or two of being in the emergency room.
(16:43):
They didn't die of COVID, they died of a bus accident. And this was a kind of silliness that was being introduced into the process by which we complete death certificates. So I said it out loud and within two months I was being investigated and I subsequently went on to have six different investigations. Not one of them was ever from a person who received any medical care from me. It came from Democrats, it came from physicians who were indignant. It mostly came from political activists who didn't appreciate me. I was accused of being reckless. I was accused of saying things against science. I was accused of saying things against Tony Fauci when at the beginning I frankly repeated what Tony Fauci said when I said COVID is like a severe flu. So it got crazy. Jenny Beth and I was so stunned. I mean it brought me to tears.
(17:43):
I wasn't certain what was going to happen. My wife and I spent a lot of nights with the lights pretty much darkened and talking quietly wondering was my medical career over? So ultimately I was cleared of everything. There was no disciplinary action. But when I look back on it, I think that in the same way that my medical career has been devoted to helping heal my patients, I think my future in politics has to be devoted to trying to heal the political divisions. I mean, I know people are angry out there and they want a pound of flesh. I get that, but I don't think we get to do that. There are some people clearly that probably had an absolute conflict of interest. They may have benefited in numerous ways by sort of rallying the troops to shut everybody else down. Maybe they financially benefited, maybe they need to be investigated.
(18:54):
But the everyday person who had an opinion that turned out to be wrong doesn't need to be persecuted. I mean, we all had an opinion. Should you lock kids out of school? Should you lock nursing home patients into nursing homes? Should you lock businesses down? Many people were wrong on most things. Many people were right on most things. I certainly was not right on everything, but I was right on a lot of things. And I think looking back at my medical career, I have been so blessed to play a role with my patients, helping them get better. And it's been the joy of a lifetime to have that honor as a family doctor. And I think that that's probably the biggest reason why I'm running again is because I think I can help heal Minnesota. I think by creating hope and being honest and talking to people about what does good government look like.
(19:56):
I think that's what people are hungry for. I don't think they're hungry for more mandates from public health departments. I don't think they're hungry for a lot more executive orders from a governor who thinks that he's a king. I think they want honest talk and I think they want people on both sides of the aisle to get along and at least be willing to listen to one another. And if we do that, I honestly think that Republicans do have a chance at winning, even though this is a blue state that hasn't voted for a presidential candidate since Richard Nixon. So I think we've got our work cut off for us. But if we focus on good garment and recognizing people's right to personal privacy and individual rights and recognize that people want us to focus on crime and safety and education and our kids and what does a good economy look like and how can we lower the cost of living and can we listen and learn and can we have limited government lower taxes, if we run on those things, I think we can win.
Jenny Beth Martin (21:06):
Well, I think that you're right. You absolutely can win if you're running on that kind of a platform. It'll be a challenge in Minnesota to be sure. But I think that it is the kind of thing that no matter which side of the aisle you are on, these are the questions people are asking and they want the answers to. Let me go back just a little bit. The thing that you were seeing from the death certificates, my father is he's a retired United Methodist minister. He had three funerals I think in the first eight or nine weeks of COVID, maybe the first three months, but I think it was more like the first two, two and a half months. And all three were older people who had all sorts of other preexisting conditions. Two of them were cancer patients before COVID ever happened. They died from cancer, they were dying anyway, and on the death certificates for all of them, he said that all three had said it was COVID.
(22:16):
And he just was sitting there saying this. He was telling me how crazy he thought it was because he knew he'd been visiting them. He knew how sick they were before COVID even happened. And I think that there are other people who were like you and they were seeing this. Either it was ministers, possibly people who work in funeral homes who are also seeing it. And then doctors and nurses, especially around the country, we're seeing something's not right. We're not treating this disease at all like other diseases. And yes, they understand. They were worried about the pandemic and the virality of the virus itself, but they also did. You can be worried about those things and be honest, when you start lying to the American people, you lose trust and people lose faith in institutions, which I think shakes the very foundation of our government.
Dr. Scott Jensen (23:16):
I'll bet you Jenny Beth, that your dad a year before COVID had no idea that he would be put in a situation where he would develop this level of mistrust, sort of to the point where he is looking in the mirror and saying, what's going on?
(23:36):
I know that's the pathway I walked, and I think I built my own medical clinic 25 years ago and I built a second clinic seven ago. I've built restaurants, I've built buildings, and when I build things, even if it's building consensus in the state senate, one of the things I found that works for me is oftentimes the first step is you've got to be willing to disrupt the narrative. You've got to say no. And that's what happened with me with COVID. I said, no, this death certificate thing you're mandating is wrong. And then I think in the world of trying to get to the bottom of something, you have to be willing to dream, if I did this, what might happen next? And then I think you have to be living in the world of doing. You can't just disrupt and scream and holler and dream.
(24:35):
You've got to do it. But sometimes doing it's pretty darn tough. So you better be willing to drive. And those are my four Ds. I disrupt, I dream, I do and I drive because if you're not willing to drive forward, you might be nothing more than noise. So when COVID hit, I drove hard and it ended up that I was right on most things. But one of the first things I did sort of similar to what your dad recognized was I said, I need more information. So who did I call? Well, I certainly didn't call Tim Walls and I didn't call the Department of Health because they weren't answering my phone calls, even though I was a state senator and vice chair of the Health and Human Services Committee. So Jenny Beth, I did the logical thing. I called hospitals and I asked the hospital administrators down in the basement, are your morgues full?
(25:35):
Are you overflowing with bodies? And then I called morticians and I said, what are you seeing? Are you seeing a lot of people dying of COVID? And they said, no, we're seeing a lot of death certificates to say COVID on them, but I've lived in this community, says the mortician for 40 years, and I know John Doe or I know Jane Smith, and these people have both been dying of end stage pancreatic cancer for the last year. They've either been on hospice or going on hospice. And in the last week of life they might've gotten a little bit of a cough and someone diagnosed a PCR test positive for COVID, but they died of pancreatic cancer. And the morticians were the ones who really reaffirmed what I was thinking. To me, that wasn't any rocket science on my part. It was just common sense. If something seems wrong, ask some questions.
Jenny Beth Martin (26:32):
And you know what? With my dad, we talked a lot about COVID as things were going on and I was out there organizing doctors all over the entire country, getting doctors to sign a letter, sending it to the White House, doing interviews with them. I am still in touch with many of those doctors like yourself, but there was a video, I think it was of mortician from the uk, I think it may have been from the uk, and this was a little bit into it as it may have been after the medication they forced everyone to have was a factor. And he was talking about the blood clots that he was seeing. So he was actually, he worked at the funeral home, he ran the funeral home and he was preparing bodies for embalming. I saw the video, I sent it over to my dad and it was such a light bulb moment for my dad.
(27:39):
That particular video, and it's sort of like what you were saying, and I'm sure the people who are listening to this right now find this part of the conversation a little bit odd, but during COVID, I told doctors, and so I'm just going to share it with the audience. What my family did growing up was we took the reigns after doctors had to pronounce somebody dead. We took the reigns for the family as they were grieving and mourning and helped them through that next stage. That's what ministers do when they're doing funerals and they're helping at the very end of life. And my family was involved with that because as a child, especially in the day when there were landlines and not cell phones like there are now when the phone rang late at nine and in the middle of the night, we knew that that meant my dad was leaving to go to the hospital. So it's a weird way that these kinds of things connect with doctors or with ministers, but it's the same, a very similar structure of how light bulbs went off for people. They just knew it wasn't, things weren't right. They weren't normal. They weren't using the standard operating procedure at all, and they felt like they were being lied to.
Dr. Scott Jensen (28:59):
Well, I was in the seminary before I went into medicine, Jenny Bath, and I have many good friends that are ministers and priests, and my background was Protestant, but I saw that with ministers, ministers were way more than people might realize on the front line even after the vaccine was introduced. I think ministers were oftentimes called on to care for people one-on-one, but also ministers were put in a very challenging situation in terms of how do you lead your flock and what is your congregation to do? And I think some churches made decisions vastly different from other churches and it's all playing out now and some churches have been celebrated and some churches have struggled. But I think what your dad went through was, I guess for me, I'm going to guess that the words of Esther four 14 apply to your dad, and those words are, have you considered, you're in the position you're in for such a time as this.
(30:11):
Your dad was in that spot off. He went and he did so in part because of the words of Hebrews four 14, which is hold fast to the beliefs you profess your dad didn't really have a choice. He probably put himself in harm's way, probably put himself right in the way of that virus when he was being coughed up by dying patience. But it was what he was called to do. And so here he is, he's probably experienced a heartbreak, probably experienced some epiphanies that he might've thought he could do without, and in the end he might've experienced some slings and arrows that weren't fairly thrown at him.
Jenny Beth Martin (30:52):
That is absolutely true, and so many ministers went through this. So many doctors and nurses and then ordinary everyday citizens and especially parents also went through it because we all were navigating that crazyness. And really what became a very tyrannical time for you, you had the government essentially weaponized against you, and there were other doctors who experienced that same kind of those investigations. Not all of them wound up coming out of it the way that you did. Several of them wound up losing their medical license and for what was their crime. Their crime is just speaking the truth. That was their crime. And medicine is supposed to have critical thinkers who disagree with each other. That's what science is about so that we can figure out if a scientific theory is actually true or not. It isn't ever supposed to be so fixy you don't discuss things. So it was a very difficult time for so many people and it bothers me that you had to go through what you went through and I'm also glad that it hardened you and shaped you for the time that you are in right now.
Dr. Scott Jensen (32:11):
Well, thank you Jenny Beth, that's kind. You sort of struck a nerve as you're sharing. There's a phrase called cognitive dissonance and I think perhaps the simplified definition of cognitive dissonance is when something just doesn't connect. I think maybe you could say it doesn't pass the smell test, and that was one of the hardest things for me as a physician because I was raised in a time where we would have weekly grand rounds and when we had grand rounds, we would look at a patient who had a difficult to diagnose condition. We would ask questions, we would do examinations, we would look at lab tests. But when we're doing this, never, never did we as physicians gather around the patient, hold hands and sing kumbaya. This was an exercise in Socratic discussion. Dig deep. No one is above criticism. What is the diagnosis? What is the treatment?
(33:23):
What is the prognosis? That's what I was raised doing until now all of a sudden, my profession, the MDs, the physicians, the ones who share the doctor's lounge in the hospital, they were rejecting me simply because I was saying something different than what they said. My entire career being trained or training others, always we embraced skepticism. It's the only way we could advance. It's the only way that our profession finally came to agreement that there are such things as germs. We didn't believe it for hundreds of years to have to go through a transition where I had to recognize that either some of my physician colleagues were dense, duplicitous or just downright mean,
(34:23):
Which was it. And that was the hardest thing for me to make peace with was physicians would criticize me, they'd scream for my medical license. I'd call 'em up and say, do you want to get together for a cup of coffee? We're not that different. They wouldn't go out for coffee with me. They didn't want to have a conversation. Everybody had dug in their heels. That's what makes COVID so overpowering even now as we think about that dark cloud that we lived under for three years and that's the thing that we got to make sure never happens again.
Jenny Beth Martin (34:58):
You're absolutely right about that. And the Kumbaya thing, it really actually, if you were very sick with COVID, there was no kumbaya moment for you. I have a friend who was it's who has very severe preexisting conditions and ultimately wound up having a kidney transplant and she was in the hospital with COVID. It struck her very, very hard and it does, and I've never been one to say that it doesn't strike. It can be a very serious illness for people and other people can do just fine with it. She up being hospitalized and was on oxygen, really wasn't even supposed to be getting out of the bed because she was on oxygen yet they wouldn't even come into the room to check on her. So she's in a room in a hospital cordon off from the world and they would bring food and set it right outside her door and make her get out of the bed, push her oxygen with her to pick up the food to carry it back to her. But that isn't kumbaya, that's just cruel. It's just crazy. Their brains went away. Caring for patients went away for so many of these because of the protocols and they just checked the box, read the protocol, did what they said they were supposed to do and dialed it in and it really taught us a lot about, we always wondered how can certain things happen in history? How can these kind of things happen in history? Well, we kind of learned a lot about it during COVID and how those kind of things could happen.
Dr. Scott Jensen (36:41):
I think that's really very, very profound. I think that human behavior when overwhelmed by fear is not a very attractive thing and I think that for those persons who might proclaim from the highest mountaintop that they would never stoop so low as to behave in that fashion, I would say be careful, be careful. Because what we saw during those three years was devastating. But again, I tend to be Jenny Beth, an optimist, perhaps even a naive optimist. I refuse to let myself become a jaded cynic, so I am absolutely convinced that we can heal, but as would my patients, if I give someone a diagnosis, say something nonspecific, I say, you're losing weight. I'm concerned that whatever's going on could ultimately take your life. If I leave it there, that patient will be paralyzed by fear. But if the next time I see them I say, I've got bad news and good news. The bad news is you do have lung cancer. The good news is we now know what you have and we can do this, this, and this, and we're going to help you and we don't know how this chapter of your life is going to end, but there's a good likelihood that it's going to end with you beginning a new earthly chapter and who knows how good that'll look.
(38:21):
Once we get past that paralyzing fear, the human creature is capable of incredible healing and that's why we have to get in sync. We cannot let the profound fracturing that has gone on become our new normal. We've got to heal. We have to otherwise humans aren't nearly as intelligent a creature as we assume they were.
Jenny Beth Martin (38:53):
Okay, so let's talk about some of that healing that we can do for the state of Minnesota, for local communities and for the country. You're running for governor, what are the things that you want to see happen and how are you going to heal your state and help heal the country?
Dr. Scott Jensen (39:15):
We are going to focus on what does good government look like? What do most people want? What does the everyday person want out of their government? And I would submit that most people don't want the political shenanigans that go down, go on down at the capitol. I think most people say, listen, I want an affordable lifestyle. I want an affordable cost of living. I want accountability by the government if they're spending my tax dollars. I want the chaos replaced by competence, but I want compassion. I want some kind of safety net there to help people who are down and out, but those people down and out, I don't want them living there. It's not a destination, it's a ladder. They got to use that safety net to find a better spot to dream dreams and go achieve those dreams. I want the kitchen table issues of inflation and crime and education to be top priorities.
(40:11):
I want personal privacy to outweigh public policy when it comes to personal moral decisions. I want true freedom of speech. I want health freedom. These are the things I want and I think that we should be called to advocate clearly for girls and women in the locker room, in the restrooms on the field of competition. This isn't hard. We know what boys are. They're x, y, and girls are xx. I think people want to secure border. The idea of a nation without borders isn't a nation. The notion that a person has the God-given right? To move from one culture to another without permission and then inflict on the host culture, the values you brought with you that didn't work in your former culture doesn't make sense. I think that's what people want. I think people want to see rules and regulations minimized. I don't think they like this idea that licensing and permitting has to be this wound out process.
(41:18):
These are the things that I think most people want and I think people want government to serve the everyday person, not the political elite, not the big financiers of all the campaigns serve the everyday people. I think a healthy society is one that a big middle class. I think the smaller the middle class gets, the more problems we have. I think most people think we should be energy independent. We should be producing energy. We should be using small mod to their nuclear reactors. Most people recognize it. We're not going to get from sun and wind all the energy we need. Everybody wants their cell phone, their computers, all their lights, TVs and everything else to work fine. I think these are things that people want and if we run on those issues, I think we win. But if we lose our way, if we forget that so many of the ideals that we hold dear in our heart come from our upbringing and our spirituality and our religion, if we forget that those things come from that space and we're supposed to be a land of separation of church and state, we're in trouble if we forget that because that's not what people want.
(42:33):
People don't want a small group of people to decide what the collective moral compass should look like. Everybody gets to choose their moral compass.
Jenny Beth Martin (42:47):
That is true. Everyone gets to choose their moral compass, and I think so many people have just lost their way and don't even know which way true north is. Scott, you mentioned affordable housing and people want things to be affordable and affordability is a huge buzz word right now when it comes to first healthcare, and then we can expand to just products in general more broadly, affordability. What do you think it takes to help make healthcare more affordable and how do we address what people feel like? Health insurance is one of the biggest expenses people have every single year, so how do we deal with that and ensure that we're lowering the cost of health insurance, but increasing and improving the care, the quality of care people receive?
Dr. Scott Jensen (43:45):
I think we have to break it down. We've got to have honest conversations with folks. First off, what we've seen more than anything else over the last 25 years is an inflation in healthcare of utilization. We do more MRIs and CAT scans and x-rays and even dental X-rays are over the charts. Everybody's getting dental x-rays every two years or whatever. We have got to stop over utilizing that, which we can do because when we do that, we buy more MRI machines. We buy more x-ray machines. We just do more and more because all a healthcare professional oftentimes has to say is, well, if we don't do an x-ray, we might be missing something on you. Boom. Well, maybe we better get it. The only way you're going to control that is if you have some skin in the game. If you tell the patient it's free, they'll say, sign me up.
(44:36):
If you say this a hundred dollars x-ray will be paid for in large part by insurance, but you will probably pay 10 or $20. Patient will have some skin in the game. They'll say, well, how's this going to change what I'm going to do? We need to recognize that insurance isn't magic. Insurance is a bunch of people paying in so that if something happens bad to one or two of those people paying in, there'll be some funds to help take care of them. No different than what we used to do with barn raising. In the rural days where someone's barn blew over from a tornado, all the neighbors would come over, pitch in, build a new barn. It was sort of a collective social contract. That's what we did, but that's what insurance is. Now, I think one thing we forget is with all our rules and regulations, insurance companies, for the most part, I'm approximating here, but for the most part, if an insurance company takes in a billion dollars of premiums by many state laws, they have to pay out $850 million in healthcare.
(45:41):
They can keep 15%, they can make $150 million for administrative costs, but if they have more than 150 million in administrative profit, they got to pay it back to the insurers. That happens occasionally. So what's the message from that? That means they're stuck at a billion dollars and they get 150. How do they make more money? You take a 12 inch pizza and you make it a 16 inch pizza. You say, we don't want to hold our total cost to a billion dollars. We want to bump 'em up to $2 billion because then we get to hold onto $300 million. Insurance companies do not have an incentive to hold costs down, so frankly, the higher the total healthcare bill, the more money they make. We need to recognize these kinds of things and have conversations that are real. We're not having conversations that are real. Jenny Beth, there was a state out west, it might've been Oregon or was it Washington, on their medical assistance program.
(46:46):
They put all the things that the doctors do for patients and they said, what do we have the money to pay for? And they drew a line and firstly prioritized all the things. So one through a thousand, the most important thing being save a life, take care of someone's heart attack, remove their appendix when it's inflamed, and maybe toward the bottom of the list was freeze a wart. The bottom line is they looked at all those things, how many were going to be done. They drew a line and said, this is what we can afford. We're going to have to have those same kinds of conversations because I would ask you, Jenny Beth, do you know anybody? Do you have a neighbor? Do you have someone in your church that you hope that if they get appendicitis, that they have treatment, that they can't have the surgery?
(47:31):
No. None of us want our neighbor dying on the street of pneumonia because they couldn't get an antibody. None of us want an appendix to rupture because that person didn't have healthcare coverage. We're at a place in a nation that can do way better than we're doing in healthcare, but we're not doing it. It makes me mad. We need to do better. We do not need to provide a Cadillac health plan for every American citizen, but I would think that there's a basic plan that we should and can do, and if it means physicians charge way less, accept way less, pharmaceutical companies accept way less. If it means that the people who are receiving healthcare without having to pay for it perhaps recognize that they also have to some way or another contribute to how do we make that affordable, then so be it, but we'll never get there if we can't stop the politicking and start having conversations that matter because that's not what's happening.
Jenny Beth Martin (48:38):
You're exactly, exactly right. We're not having those kind of conversations that matter at all when it comes to healthcare. Alright. We only have a few more minutes. I think I'm even running a little bit over the time I'm supposed to have you, so I need to be respectful of that and wrap up. I wanted to ask you to weigh in on one other thing that I was thinking about because we're hearing so much more these days in the news about democratic socialism being on the rise across all of America. Minneapolis has been the center of the American socialist movement in a hotbed of the Red Green Alliance, which is the communist or socialist, the fusion between communism, socialism, and Islam. You've got Congresswoman Ilan Omar from Minneapolis Defund. The police started a Minneapolis, four members of the Minneapolis City Council or Democrat Socialist. The mayor gave a victory speech in Somali.
(49:41):
I mean, there is a lot coming out of Minnesota, Minneapolis, not just Minnesota, but Minneapolis specifically, that seems to be spreading to the rest of the country. A lot of people are focused on New York City because of Zoran Mond, but Minneapolis has already gone through a lot of this. What do you see living in the state, and I know you're not in Minneapolis and you're in a more rural area, but what do you see about how this Red Green Alliance has spread throughout the state of Minneapolis and is spread the state of Minnesota and is spreading through the country, and does that motivate you at all in your run for governor?
Dr. Scott Jensen (50:24):
It motivates me powerfully. I taught at the medical school for years and I was in Minneapolis and St. Paul every week during my campaigns. I've been in the urban core of Minneapolis and St. Paul over and over again. I have started businesses in downtown Minneapolis with other investors. Quite frankly, what we're seeing is an outpouring of disappointment and fear such that people are grasping at straws. Socialism is a failed experiment. Wherever it's been tried, it's twin sister is communism. When you put together a society that says Why do what you could have someone else do and receive the same as what they're receiving, you're in a bad spot. As humans, we're created to participate and contribute, let's leave the place better than we found it. I don't think Democratic Socialists of America is a legitimate, real philosophical politic position. If you look at many of the people who voted for DSA candidates, they acknowledge they're not socialists, they don't believe it.
(51:40):
At some level, it's nothing more than a vote of protest against the fact that what we're doing today with the two party system isn't working. We're not having honest conversations and our politicians are corrupting that which is good about America. So quite frankly, I think it's a warning salvo being shot across the bow. It's not because they believe in socialism, it's because people are frustrated and they think that everybody should have some basic package of healthcare so they're not dying on the streets. But for heaven's sakes, let's not lose our mind and think that we can all sit around and expect somehow, magically that we're going to have the energy that we want, the food that we want on our table, the clothing on our back. The only way we can discount or dispel or protest or fight back against this poisonous philosophy is to have honest conversations, and this is where our politicians have failed us the most. They're not leading. They're simply worried about their election, their power, their control. So I get it. I understand why people are frightened and they're angry, but socialism is not the cure. It is simply jumping from one thing to another, throwing mud on the wall and hoping that the right thing sticks.
Jenny Beth Martin (52:56):
You're exactly right, 100%. Okay. I'm going to end it with a few very rapid fire questions so you can answer these questions quickly, so fill in the blank. If we lose medical freedom, we lose
Dr. Scott Jensen (53:12):
Liberty.
Jenny Beth Martin (53:14):
What is the biggest lie? Americans were told during COVID,
Dr. Scott Jensen (53:18):
Tim Walls went to the White House and said that Joe Biden was fit for service.
Jenny Beth Martin (53:23):
That's so true. Another fill in the blank. The best way to fix, I'm sorry, let me say it again. The best way to fix health insurance in America is to
Dr. Scott Jensen (53:36):
Treat people as you would want to be treated.
Jenny Beth Martin (53:39):
That's really good. And then what is your message to Minnesotans who feel abandoned by their government?
Dr. Scott Jensen (53:46):
You have been abandoned by your government, and you have every right to feel the way you are. And in many situations, you've been abandoned by your doctor, by your clinic, by your hospital, and the only way you're going to fix it is step into the arena. You don't get to sit in the cheap seats and complain, step in the arena, vote in the elections, talk to your neighbors, but don't for a minute think that you get to sit on your duff in the cheap seats and expect things to go the way you want them to. It's not going to happen.
Jenny Beth Martin (54:14):
Okay, and the very last one, what is your promise to voters? If they give you the chance to lead Minnesota,
Dr. Scott Jensen (54:20):
I promise you that I will make mistakes and I will repent. I promise you that I will disrupt, I will dream, I will do, and I will drive, and I promise you that at the end of four years, you will say, we did okay or even better.
Jenny Beth Martin (54:36):
Thank you so much, and if people want to learn more about you, they can go to Dr. Scott jensen.com and find you on social media. Dr. Scott Jensen. Scott Jensen, thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. Scott Jensen (54:48):
Jenny Beth, thank you for having me. I'd love to be on again sometime. Thank you again.
Jenny Beth Martin (54:52):
I would love that. Thank you. I'm Jenny Beth Martin, and this is a Jenny Beth show. If you enjoy today's conversation, go ahead and hit like and subscribe. It really helps us reach more people who care about freedom and the Constitution. You can find this and other episodes@jennybethshow.com, as well as Facebook Rumble, YouTube, Instagram X in your favorite podcast platform.
Narrator (55:16):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.