Episode 16: Mentally, Physically and Spiritually sick in America with ex-Trump Advisor Katy Talento

Cara (01:01): 

Welcome to invested with Purpose Making the most out of our time, talent, and Treasure. I’m Cara. 

Brian (01:15): 

And I’m Brian. And today Katy Talento is with us. Katie views her faith as a guiding force that has profoundly shaped her professional journey. She believes that her commitment to public health and epi 

Cara (01:30): 

Epidemiology, 

Brian (01:31): 

Epidemiology is deeply intertwined with her values, motivating her to address healthcare disparities and advocate for holistic solutions. As the director of Alliance of Healthcare Sharing Ministries, welcome Katie. 

Katy Talento (01:44): 

Thank you so much for having me. 

Brian (01:45): 

I knew I was going to mispronounce that word before we even started. It’s a 

Cara (01:50): 

Tongue twister. Say it three times fast 

Brian (01:52): 

Epidemiology. 

Cara (01:54): 

All right, Katie, can we begin with you just sharing a little bit about your faith walk and how it’s influenced your career, particularly in your interest in epidemiology and healthcare? 

Katy Talento (02:05): 

Yeah, I think I started many, many moons ago. I remember being in college and wishing I could just go join up with Mother Teresa’s nuns or something because I wanted to do something radical. And as I learned sort of what I was good at, what I wasn’t good at, and I fell into this public health thing, I think I thought I wanted to be a doctor and realized that I don’t like that, so do not 

Katy Talento (02:28): 

Want to be a doctor. I wanted the whole population to be my patient, which is what happens with epidemiology and that’s what public health is. And it was fun because I had worked with churches that worked overseas in various places and I ended up going to Africa and spending some time there in actually when Sudan, Southern Sudan was a war zone and hanging out in UN camps really. But what I found is that I’m a little not diplomatic enough to interact with sort of African warlords to let us help people. 

Cara (03:05): 

Wow, 

Katy Talento (03:06): 

Let’s come back to America and work in the inner city. So I came back and worked in the inner city. We started a ministry for junior high girls here in the DC area, and really I think working with the least of these, the poorest of the poor. And I was really inspired by missionaries who’ve been killed like Jim Elliot or Mother Teresa’s people and Agent Martyrs and for the faith. And I thought, you know what? We really have to prioritize these people that Jesus loves the most. And that is when I started working primarily in hiv aids with drug users, ejection drug users, prostitutes, and people who are really enslaved, totally enslaved. And we ended up going all over the world. 

Cara (03:50): 

That’s incredible 

Katy Talento (03:51): 

DC on those issues, but that’s kind of how I got into public health. 

Cara (03:56): 

Wow. And you were a nun at one point working in the inner city, correct? 

Katy Talento (04:01): 

Yeah, eventually I did. I became a Catholic in my thirties actually. I left at sort of the height of my political career and government policy career. I like to say that Senator Tom Coburns was my boss at the time, drove me to the nunnery. He was awesome. Anyway, so yeah, I think I fell in love with the church and thought I had to marry the church and I wanted to be radical and it was a beautiful life. I did it for about two years and I realized that God wasn’t calling me to stay in that life and that actually I was called to be back in the world working in government, trying to have that bigger population as my patient again, 

Cara (04:42): 

The greater good. Well, Katie, you were quoted recently in a Fox News article is saying America has never been sicker, fatter, or more anxious and depressed in our history. And I would like to add spiritually unwell on top of that, what is a first step for Christian families? Where can we go from here? What can we monitor? What can we be doing better? 

Katy Talento (05:05): 

Yeah, I think so many of us have focused, when we hear that idea of treating our bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit, I think that we think about our moral behavior, we think about our tongue and whether we use bad language and whether we’re engaged in drinking and other types of things we associate with morality. We don’t think about the most important thing we put in our bodies, which is the pounds and pounds of food every day and what we drink. And so I think there’s a lot to be said there. And if you start to look into, we’re very good at looking at sort of the corruption of industries, whether it’s the sex trafficking industry or all kinds of industries that Christians get really jacked up about tobacco industry, pornography industry. But when you start looking at the food industry, it is equally corrupt and also medications. 

(06:01): 

The pharmaceutical industry extremely corrupt and very tied in with captured regulators in government who have been lobbied. I mean the pharmaceutical industry, no one compares with their lobbying efforts in Washington. They outpace them by far. So they are getting sweetheart deals out of government regulators that has an impact on what you’re putting in your precious children’s mouths and what’s helping them to grow. And when I think about how much food affects your mental state and your ability to focus, your ability to be joyful, our mental health and also our concentration, our ability to educate our children, our ability for them to feel peace and stillness and joy. This is serious. And you look at the autism community will talk about how dramatically diet affects their 

Cara (06:54): 

Children. Absolutely. It does 

Katy Talento (06:57): 

Amazing. It’s the most important biological influence on us every day. 

Cara (07:02): 

So true. 

Brian (07:04): 

Katie, I wanted to respond with that too. I started down, you can start down the wormhole of these food documentaries and I think the food ink was the first one that I watched and then once you start it’s like, oh, now I need to see all these other ones. And you brought up something that as a parent, I had a younger child, he’s 14 now, but when we had him, we were really cognizant of this already. There was this explosion of early onset diabetes in these young kids and I guess the food pyramid always looked a little wonky to me. Can you speak a little bit to that? How do they come up with this? What appears to be a food pyramid that should be a recommendation for our diet? That seems to be all just confused, I guess is the word. Yeah, 

Katy Talento (07:52): 

How it comes up is the agricultural lobby. So there are reasons why all of our crops are subsidized. Sugar is subsidized dramatically in our country and it’s probably the thing that’s killing us the most is process and refined wheat and sugar. And it’s not just that, but the pesticides that are put on our food, not just to help them grow and to keep weeds away, but actually before wheat is harvested. Not just wheat but very much wheat before it’s harvested, right before it’s put into the mills and ground into flour that goes into all our food. It’s drenched in glyphosate wound up so that it can dry out better. It’s a good drying agent. So we’re not just, we are drowning in glyphosate. I remember I got my own glyphosate level tested and it was literally off the chart. The chart did not measure how much glyphosate was in me and I a normal throughout my life. I ate a normal diet. I was not an organic food eater until a few years ago, but I ate a normal standard American diet, which is killing all of us. That’s 

Brian (09:01): 

Incredible. And 

Katy Talento (09:02): 

Glyphosate is an obesogen. It causes obesity, it causes diabetes, and it causes cancer. And so this is all our food. If it’s not organic, it’s riddled with glyphosate. Many European countries have banned these pesticides. They’ve banned a number of additives that are in American foods that are not in their foods. I was just in Europe recently and I went around obsessively looking at the ingredients on packaged food everywhere I saw it. And I would not see the seed oils, I would not see the food yellow number five, red dye number. I would not see those things that are riddled in the foods that go into our children everywhere here it’s really different. A box of fruit loops in Canada is totally different ingredients than the box of fruit loops here in America. It’s six. These companies can do it differently, but it’s cheaper and easier for them to do it the way they’re doing it. And because of the well-funded lobby coming out of the big Ag interest, special interest, the FDA is captured. USDA has captured an EPA are captured. 

Brian (10:04): 

Katie, that’s wildly interesting. And just a quick follow up to that. So why is there such a difference between Europe and America and Canada and America? You mentioned the lobby, you mentioned a lot of money and I’m sure that’s a big, big part of it, but is it because we’re such a big country versus a smaller country in Europe? Is it regulations? Yeah. What is it? What is it that’s making the big difference? 

Katy Talento (10:29): 

So anytime someone comes into Congress and wants to pass a bill that would regulate food in any way, whether it’s requiring labels for GMO, whether it’s banning certain additives that have been proven to cause cancer in or proven to be neurotoxins. Whenever that happens, when a bill comes in, and I’ve worked in Congress for 15 years, when a bill comes into Congress, it is crushed by the agricultural lobby. It is crushed if you want to try to regulate drugs or pharmaceuticals. The pharma lobbyists, there’s one pharma lobbyist for, I think it’s something like five pharma lobbyists for every member of Congress. So then they write all the big checks. I can’t emphasize enough how much special interest money drives our politics. Even the most virtuous minded politician has to get elected. That’s a very expensive proposition. So they take money from interest and from companies and from PACS and from Bundlers, and then those people get, it’s not that a corrupt, not every politician is intentionally corrupt, 

Brian (11:39): 

Right? 

Katy Talento (11:40): 

It’s just that when someone writes you a big check, they get their phone calls answered and they get the meeting and then they come in with their one-sided presentation and the academic papers that they’ve paid for to deliver the results they want are put in front of these non-expert politicians who are not epidemiologists or not scientists and can’t see how flawed and ridiculous their studies are. And they make a very compelling case. That case is not rebutted by anyone else in the room. And so then they just walk away. It takes a lot of expertise to feed back these interests. It’s really hard. And in Europe and other countries, this type of lobbying, these type of special interests are not nearly as powerful. 

Brian (12:21): 

That makes a lot of sense. 

Cara (12:22): 

You have an extensive background working in policy advisory, including with senators and then ultimately President Trump in the White House. So what brought you there? What were the steps? How did you get there? And then once there you ended up becoming a homeopath and looking for more a holistic healthcare. Tell me a little bit about your journey. 

Katy Talento (12:43): 

Yeah, so I kind of hated government. I thought it wasn’t really a force for good, but I worked and I lived on Capitol Hill and I went to church on Capitol Hill and I used to see these little hill staffers walking around. I thought they were dumb dumbs and maybe they were, but at one point the Congress had just changed hands. The Senate had just changed hands, and there was a new chairman that needed to staff up on the committee that oversee health, that oversaw health. And a friend of mine at church said, Hey, they’re looking for this type of person and little Republican children don’t grow up wanting to be public health experts, so there aren’t any public health experts that could be a staffer for public health policy on the committee. And so I interviewed for the job. I remember at the time, I don’t even know if I want this job. 

(13:31): 

My manager who became my manager, wonderful man was interviewing me. He’s like, do you even want this job? I’m like, I don’t know. But I think it was God. I got hired for kind of a job I wasn’t really qualified for and found that I loved it. And I worked on that committee for a few years and then for a number of different other committees and different senators over the years. And then from one senate office, my friend who was the chief of staff, left that office to go work on Donald Trump’s campaign. And I could see that this guy was winning all the primaries. He was resonating with the people he was going to win and he was going to be the nominee for the Republican party. And I thought if we don’t help him, bad people are going to help him. 

Brian (14:19): 

Absolutely. 

Katy Talento (14:20): 

So my friend was the next time I saw my friend, he went and worked for the campaign. He was running policy for them. And the next time I saw him six weeks later, he was bedraggled and leery, eye chained, smoking. He hadn’t sleep deprived. And I’m like, oh, you need some help? Can I help you? I mean, I can help you with healthcare, abortion stuff. What do you need? I started volunteering and then I worked on the platform committee that year in 2016 and went into the campaign in New York for a few months into the election from there into the transition and from there into the White House. 

Brian (14:53): 

That’s a very interesting journey and one that I like how you said, do I want to do this? Because I think so many get into these things and they’re like, do I really want to do this or can I make a difference? It is hard. I wanted to transition a little bit and talk to you about your passion with the Healthcare Alliance Ministries. What do you see as the primary benefit of leaving your traditional insurance company in favor of these types of ministries? 

Katy Talento (15:21): 

Yeah. Well, I think perhaps the most important reason is that in a number of states across the country, unfortunately state laws have mandated that all insurance policies have to cover abortion and they have to cover transgender surgeries for children and other procedures or so-called therapies that violate our Christian conscience. And so Christians will have a very difficult time, if not an impossible time, finding a healthcare solution in those states that doesn’t violate the conscience. And so healthcare sharing ministry is perhaps the most important reason to join them is that it’s the only a hundred percent pro-life solution out there for financing your healthcare bills. And so that’s one reason. I think another reason is that I’ve worked in health policy a long time and it is a bureaucratic, cold, money driven, corrupt industry, and it’s driven by the healthcare industry’s interests. They put politics and money before people and patients, and it’s really disgusting. 

(16:23): 

And this is the most important service that we will consume in our lives. It is life and death. It is the time when you don’t want disgusting, corrupt influences coming between you and your doctor at the most vulnerable time of your life and the scariest time of your life or your children, your family’s life. And that is a time when we need Jesus and we need the body of Christ around us. That is what healthcare sharing ministries are. And they will not just share your medical bills, they will pray for you. They will send you notes. There’s one healthcare sharing ministry that sends a care package to every family 

Brian (16:54): 

That experienced miscarriage. 

Katy Talento (16:55): 

There’s another healthcare sharing ministry that their staff get on a plane and fly to a funeral when one of their members passes away and check to help cover funeral expenses. These are communities of the body of Christ. This is how healthcare should be done. I also think that there’s an increasing movement among healthcare sharing ministries to really explore how to bring in natural treatments, whether it’s naturopathic doctors like me or homeopathy or acupuncture and other types of modalities that increasingly in the post covid era, we’re starting to see more and more people drawn to as the trust in the white coat medical enterprise has really been an all time low. 

Brian (17:35): 

Well, Katie, what you’re describing, we do from a totally different angle at Timothy Plan, but we are a pro-life, pro-family mutual fund and ETF company. And ultimately when we first set out, we were most keen on how can we not invest in any company that we be profiting from or promoting abortion. And immediately, like you just described, that ruled out all these insurance companies. We can’t invest in a single one of them because they allow for women to have abortions, much like companies that fund Planned Parenthood among other things. So yes, it’s a big challenge. Can something like this work in a corporate level versus just like an individual level, the healthcare sharing stuff? 

Katy Talento (18:18): 

Yeah, there are religious employers that our healthcare sharing ministries work with. So there are lots of religious employers in these states that have a conscious objection to subsidizing insurance policies for their people for these reasons I’ve laid out. And also there’s one healthcare sharing ministry that actually went to the Vatican and got a memo written by moral theologians there describing how, why no Catholic of good conscience can participate in the American insurance industry, not because of the pro-life problems. Those are obvious, but because of the financial corruption and the misaligned incentives in that industry. So yeah, I mean what you’re dealing with is absolutely real and what corporations have to deal with as employers of good conscience. It’s really hard. But healthcare sharing ministries will work with religious employers who wish to subsidize memberships in healthcare sharing ministries for their employees. So that is a possibility. It’s not a group health plan, it’s not insurance and it’s not underwritten at the group level. This is not insurance. It’s really just providing a subsidy to each individual employee who wants to sign up for a healthcare sharing ministry, 

Cara (19:28): 

Insurance premium pooling. This is something that many of those that are investing with Timothy Plan or those like us in biblically responsible investing, they would want to know about this, but many do not. Can you please explain what is happening when you are paying into your premium? And you’ve got that percentage of people that are under a poverty line, and there are things that are being covered like gender reaffirming care or drugs that are being used for trans ideologies and then also abortion. Can you please explain to our audience how that works and what they may not know? 

Katy Talento (20:07): 

Absolutely. So there’s two kinds of insurance. There’s group insurance and then there’s individual insurance, group insurance. There’s two types of those types. So you can have employer funds its own insurance, its own group plan, or you can have an employer that basically joined with a bunch of other employers into one giant pool in the small group market. And anytime you have a pooling of premiums, so every time when you write your premium check or your employer writes it for you, they’re paying an insurance company. That insurance company commingles all those funds. And so even if your employer, let’s say that your state allows your health plan not to cover abortion, when you pay into that, you are subsidizing the health plans of other employers that do cover abortion. When you’re in the individual market, like the A marketplace in your state, that is a subsidized abortion pool. 

(20:58): 

So every time that you pay into that insurance pool, they’re paying for gender treatment, they’re paying for abortion and abortion related treatments. Now, the A CA actually requires that funds be segregated so that individuals have to buy separate abortion coverage for $2 or whatever it is. So that pooling doesn’t happen. When I was in the Trump White House, we implemented a regulation to enforce that rule, to enforce the law that required those segregation of funds. The Biden administration immediately undid that rule. So those funds are co-mingled right now the abortion coverage that is going on in the A plan that anyone who’s buying an individual plan on the marketplace, 

Brian (21:41): 

That’s incredible to think how far we have come in just a few short years where abortion was safe, legal, rare on one side of the aisle, on the other side of the aisle, we were very pro-life. And now we’re to the point where safe, legal and rare is long gone. Oh yes. And speaking of getting a little political here, we’re in the season and here in Florida we have an initiative on our ballot. It’s an amendment that we’re fighting to keep what our governor has passed as a six week period where no abortion can occur after that. It’s hotly contested in this state. And now we’re seeing also companies that are getting into the world of offering abor patients by mail companies that you would never suspect that would’ve done this. Are now starting to lean into this a little bit. What would you recommend we can do to educate ourselves on these kinds of things and how can we push back on some of this? 

Katy Talento (22:42): 

Yeah, I mean, the vast majority of abortions right now are by mail order pills. They’re being done by medication. And that’s happened primarily because of great states like Florida that have shut down the in-person clinics for Planned Parenthood and others. But we just saw some new abortion statistics come out that abortions have actually increased by 20% in this 

Brian (23:04): 

Past year. That’s crazy. 

Katy Talento (23:06): 

So we thought that, I think the pro-life community wasn’t prepared for a post roe environment where now we’re fighting these battles in skirmishes in every community, in every state across the country. And we’re losing a lot of them. We’re winning some. I mean, Florida is an example. I’m very hopeful that this terrible referendum will be beaten back in Florida. But is the referendum to protect the law or is it to undermine 

Brian (23:31): 

The law? Yeah, we’re voting no on the law. So yeah, it’s to keep 

Katy Talento (23:36): 

Right. Okay. So we’re seeing these referenda all over the country and I’m very nervous about them. 

Brian (23:43): 

Yes, 

Katy Talento (23:44): 

Obviously you thought Ohio was safe, 

Brian (23:46): 

Right? Right. 

Katy Talento (23:47): 

But it’s not Kansas, not So on the other hand, I think we need to acknowledge and meet people where they are. We’re seeing that we have not won the argument on life begins a conception all the way, all nine months of protection for the unborn. However, you can easily say to somebody that we may not agree on when life begin or about all abortion policy, but we want to have some reasonable allowance for our legislature to legislate on this. So we don’t want to tie the hands of future legislatures to provide reasonable regulations for the safety of women in the future by putting this into our constitution, for instance. So there are some ad campaigns that I’ve seen that I think could be helpful if they were funded properly, but I think it is going to be a dog fight. And one thing I would say is we’re going to lose in some places, and maybe in many places, it doesn’t mean that we’ve lost forever. Roe was bad, right? It took two generations, but we won the hearts and minds back. We won the argument. It feels like we’re dying now in the 

Brian (25:04): 

Ideas 

Katy Talento (25:04): 

In the arena, but we won this argument a few years ago. We had won it, and they were running from the truth. The other side was running. They were on the defense. Things do not always stay the same. Our Lord is in the long game, and we don’t need to get despairing and fearful that we’ve lost forever. But in the meantime, middle babies are dying. Women are feeling desperate, and they have no other choices. And so we definitely need to be reaching out to our neighbors and showing the value of the gospel that we actually not insulated in our little Christian enclaves and we never come out of them. I think it is tempting to do that, obviously in a time when we feel such persecution and censorship and cancellation, but we’ve got to continue to know our neighbors. We have to know our kids’ schools and the other parents of our kids’ friends and just show what life as a pro-life Christian really looks like. 

Brian (26:01): 

We can go back to the Europe argument and we appear to be one of, at least what appears to come from one side is the most liberal use of abortion up until birth even, or whatever they may think. And then you look over across the sea and Europe has, what is it, 12 weeks, maybe 15 weeks. And here we are, we one side pushing it all the way to birth and then also going over to Europe and looking at, especially in England, which just came out, and they’re saying, no, children should not transition genders, and you need to wait till you’re an adult. And over here, we’re on the opposite end again. It seems that yes, we should not give up the fight because sane people are on our side 

Cara (26:51): 

Yes 

Katy Talento (26:52): 

Think legislators when they’re given the chance over time to figure this out, they arrive at positions that I would argue or cognitively dissonant. It’s either a baby at three months the same as it’s a baby at nine months, whatever. But they land at these sort of compromised positions that are pretty widely held consensus in their population. The problem here in America is that it was not allowed to go to legislators. 

Brian (27:15): 

No