The Tucker Carlson Show - Brigham Buhler: UnitedHealthcare CEO Assassination, & the Mass Monetization of Chronic Illness

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

An unhealthy, over-medicated country means record profits for insurance companies. Brigham Buhler explains how they work to keep us sick and monetize chronic illness. (00:00) The Assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO (13:32) The Opioid Crisis Could Have Been Prevented (30:28) Monetizing Your Chronic Illness (35:00) How Health Insurance Companies Are Scamming You (54:18) How They Profit Off of Cancer Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Get 3 months free at https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker Heritage Foundation: https://Heritage.org/Tucker Hallow prayer app: Get 3 months free at https://Hallow.com/Tucker Policygenius: Get your free life insurance quotes today at https://Policygenius.com/Tucker  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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clearly there's a spiritual crisis in the country. That's nihilism. There's no defending murdering a guy, any guy, in my opinion. However, it also reveals, so I'm not in any sense justifying it. I think it's appalling. But there's a lot of latent hostility toward the insurance companies and i want to understand that more i mean i hate them but i don't really know why i hate them yeah no you tell me what happened is terrible it's terrible and it's tragic and i mean obviously i never condone violence and the loss of human life is a tragedy but so is the loss of of 1.7 million Americans a year to chronic disease.

And these big insurance conglomerates are implicitly contributing to the chronic disease crisis that America faces. They're profiteering off the disease. They're delaying people's ability to get coverage and care. And there's a lot of money being made through these dark pathways and approaches to these insurance companies and the revenues that they generate. It's all become a profit-driven system. And when I testified in front of the Senate with Bobby Kennedy and the Maha Group, you know, my main message was the corporate capture of our institutions and how that is the real cause of the chronic disease crisis that we're facing. And candidly, the insurance companies aren't only implicitly involved, they are probably

one of the major contributors that somehow have gone unnoticed for decades. Welcome to Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.com. Here's the episode. Maybe it does make sense. I'm trying to understand it. So the profit motive is designed to improve the quality of goods and services. That's what we've been taught. So in other words, if I pay more for a hotel, if I stay at the Four Seasons instead of Motel 6, I get a nicer room.

If I pay more for a car, I get a nicer car. We pay more for healthcare than any country in the world, but we have crappy healthcare. Yeah. So what's the difference? The idea of healthcare started, insurance started right in Houston, Texas, in the Texas Medical Center with Baylor. Baylor Hospital began to offer insurance plans to patients to try and make it a consistent payment plan where they could have accessibility to preventative care. And that was the premise of what Baylor did. So health insurance is a fairly new idea? Well, since the 1930s, but it got captured in the 80s and became HMOs. And so essentially, once it was HMOs, it became a profit center and it changed.

It pivoted. And so the money that's being made off of every single chronic disease and by delaying the onset of these procedures and surgeries. So it's pretty nuanced. It is. And I'm going to ask a ton of dumb questions because I'm uninformed. What's the difference between an HMO

and like pre-1980s health insurance? So prior to the 80s, your doctor knew you. They knew your family. They showed up with their little leather bag. They knew everybody in the family. They spent time with you. In the system we have today, because the insurance companies control the doctor's reimbursement rates, the clinician only spends six minutes with you on average here in the United States. And in six minutes, how can they possibly uncover the root cause,

talk to you about family history, diet, lifestyle, nutrition, which they're not trained on in the first place. So it created an issue with the ability to prevent chronic disease is one section of that. But the other end of that is once these insurance conglomerates got a hold of our healthcare institutions and took over, they began to profiteer off of the chronic disease. So it's not just where it gets very, very complicated and what people don't understand, Trump actually yesterday announced that he was going to break up PBMs. And when I talked to Bobby Kennedy,

I was walking him through the PBM and what it is. So many people say these middlemen or even when I did Bobby's podcast, he said, what is a PBM? I have insurance, not a pharmacy benefit manager. And he said, what is a PBM? I only, I have insurance, not a pharmacy benefit manager. And I said, you have a pharmacy benefit manager that claims that it outsources your drug coverage

to a pharmacy, to a PBM. But the truth is they own the PBM. It's like Scooby-Doo. You pull the mask off and it's like, oh, it was Mr. Rogers all along. So a PBM stands for Pharmacy Benefit Management. Pharmacy Benefit Management. They were established in the 70s to be an advocate for the American people to drive down the cost of prescription drug care.

Their job was to negotiate on our behalf to drive down the cost of our medications. And along the way, as the insurance companies became a for-profit institution, guess what they did? They went out and they gobbled up all of the middlemen. So the pharmacy benefit managers in America are all owned by the five big insurance companies. So when you pull back the layers to the onion, what you find is they've turned the PBM into a profit center. So rather than negotiating down the cost of prescription drug care, they negotiated up the cost. But why? Why would you negotiate up the cost?

Because by negotiating up, they get rebates. We would call them kickbacks in any other business. And so essentially, I'll use a real world example. GLP-1s are hot right now. Everyone's talking about the price of Ozempic and how it's so expensive. It's egregious. Roughly 30% of the cost of every prescription drug is because the 30% kickback is going to a PBM.

So if Ozempic's $1,000 a month, $300 a month are going to the pharmacy benefit manager via a kickback. It's a pay-to-play system. So who pays? The drug maker pays the pharmacy? The drug maker pays the pharmacy benefit manager the $300 per month in order to be placed on a preferred contract with the insurance company,

which is the PBM. And it's so staggering. Let's talk about UnitedHealthcare, since that's the CEO that was, you know, unfortunately assassinated. If we break down UnitedHealthcare, they generated $373 billion in revenue last year. Okay, 60% of that revenue came from their pharmacy benefit manager, a holding company that nobody knows about. The general public, our politicians, they don't understand this and they don't get it. And I'm trying to- Are the profit margins high in that business?

The profit margins are not as high as big pharma, but there's a lot of levers that they're pulling to hide their profits, right? And you can make, you know, there's liars, there's damn liars, and then there's statistics. You know, these guys are using a lot of levers to hide their profitability. And so a lot of the profitability's held at the pharmacy benefit manager holding company. And so they can artificially dilute down their profitability on paper. But as an industry, the health insurance companies, and I said this on Rogan, they are the hidden

juggernaut that nobody is seeing. Everyone's saying big pharma, big pharma, big pharma. Big pharma did, I think, $600 million. And you look at these big insurance companies, they did two and a half that in revenue, 2.5 times that in revenue. They did $1.5 trillion north of one point. They're projecting that they'll do $1.9 trillion in revenue by 2029. So can we, in a nod to my personal ignorance, I should just say, I don't know. I don't go to the doctor. I don't know what my health insurance plan is. I just have no, you know, once the COVID thing happened, I was like, I'm not going to the doctor. And I haven't. So I'm a little bit out of it. I'm not as knowledgeable as most Americans on how exactly this works. Can you walk through the average person's experience of health insurance and

medical care? So let's say I'm a 40-year-old woman. Women go to the doctor annually. I think most do. So they use the doctor more. How much is this person paying for insurance? Where's that money coming from? What's the experience like? Yeah.

So the average American, because of our food and our diet and our lifestyle, 90% of chronic disease is driven by lifestyle. If we peel back and look at what's causing these chronic diseases and get to the root cause, it's not just diet, lifestyle, nutrition. It's that the system is failing Americans. Again, there is no safety net anymore. Your clinician doesn't have the time to do a deep dive. So the cancer that develops in your 40s started in your 30s. The diabetes that develops in your 40s started in your 30s. The chronic disease that

hits you in your 50s started in your 40s. If we got proactive and predictive, we could prevent chronic disease. And chronic disease is killing 1.8 to 1.9 million Americans a year, more than every war we've ever fought since the history of this country. That's how staggering this is. Like you and I were talking before we got on this, the equivalent to a 747 jet worth of people are dying every day of opioid abuse, deaths of despair at an all-time high, greater than that of the Great Depression, suicide, all time high. All of these things are through the roof. We are chronically ill as a society. And if we look at the pillars of what's causing that, one branch is the big pharmaceutical industry. Yes.

Another branch is the food industry. But the other dirty branch is the insurance companies. They are implicitly involved in this. And I'll show you how and why. So the reason I know all this is because I was a drug rep, and then I was a medical device rep, and I stood in surgeries with some of the best and brightest minds in the country. And from there, I owned labs and pharmacies that attempted to build and work within the insurance framework. So if your grandmother were to come in and try and fill a medication, the average American's on four or more prescription drugs, which is just mind-boggling in itself. Four or more prescription drugs is what the average American's on. Average American?

Yes. So like, I'm 55. Would that apply to my age group? Yeah. This is all age groups. The age demographic, I think 18 to 70-something years old, we're on four or more drugs on average, which is mind boggling. If that doesn't tell you that there's something wrong with us and our system and our food, like we've got to wake up and realize somebody has to say the emperor wears no clothes. Like it's, it's terrifying. So I love using the example of metformin because it's a

very simplistic number that I can show you. If you come into a pharmacy and you tell me you have UnitedHealthcare, I have a gag clause as a pharmacy owner. It is illegal for me to tell you that I could sell you your Metformin for cheaper than what the insurance is charging you. But you paid for that insurance coverage. Why can't I disclose to you

that I can give you the product for cash cheaper than your copay? So you come in, I swipe your card. Metformin cost me, I'm going to use ballpark numbers, roughly $2 for a month's supply. I would have sold you the Metformin for $4. I'm not allowed to tell you that. I swipe your card. It tells me to charge you $10. That's your copay. So I charge you a $10 copay. Me, the pharmacy, I don't get to keep that money. Who takes that money? The pharmacy benefit manager.

They pull that money out to their holding company and they get the additional $7. They short pay me. I don't even get what I would have made if I sold it to you for cash. They're an unnecessary middleman. And when they say they're negotiating down for the behalf of the people, that's just not true. So I'm going to methodically walk you through what I like to

tell people is the margins are made in the mystery. When people say, why is it so confusing? Why can't healthcare be more transparent? How do I not know what I'm going to pay? All of that bullshit is because of these insurance companies. It's because of United, Cigna, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield. It is a system built to monopolize and profiteer off of your sickness. There's more money in you being sick than in you being well. And so most of the insurance company's profits come from you being on prescription drugs. So they obstruct your ability to get surgery because that's a loss leader.

They don't want you getting surgical procedures. They don't get a kickback on that. They want you on medicine. There was an article two days ago. They're finally talking about how much the big insurance companies were involved in the opioid crisis. Let's look at that.

If you look at a product like an opioid, as a compounding pharmacy like mine, we had non-abusive, non-addictive pain creams. We could have prevented the opioid crisis by not prescribing an opioid in the first place. But when the FDA allows opioids to be rammed into the marketplace, because the head of the FDA went to go work for Purdue Pharma 18 months later after giving them the goose that laid the golden egg, a label that says these are non-addictive, non-abusive, when they never had a human safety study on that. How? How can they do that? They daisy-chained this drug into the marketplace. It's a lot to digest. So, sorry, I'm trying to explain

it very complex. I don't know how I missed the fact that the head of the FDA went to work for Purdue Pharma. 18 months later, took a big salary job. And I think in the last 40 years, only two heads of the FDA haven't gone to work for industry. Then go over to the- Wait, so Purdue Pharma, to be clear, was basically just OxyContin. OxyContin, correct. That was, I mean, they didn't have like an entire- And what happened is what happens so often in big pharma. When they say pharmaceutical companies innovate, and that happened is what happens so often in big pharma. When they say

pharmaceutical companies innovate, and that's why they make all this money, okay, the United States pays for roughly, makes up 60% of the pharmaceuticals industry's profitability, but we're ranked 40th overall in healthcare outcomes. 40th. We have a train wreck healthcare system. Again, four or more drugs the average americans on the pharmaceutical companies are not fitting the bill for the research and development we the taxpayers are because we fund the nih and the nih does most of the early product development then they sell the patent to the pharmaceutical companies for pennies on the dollar pharmaceutical companies pick them up and use their relationship and lobbying power with the FDA to bring these

products to market. Okay, so there's that. The other thing that pharmaceutical companies do that is not innovative and in a way to extend their revenue streams and maximize profits is they refile patents by changing subtleties of molecules or delivery mechanisms, and they get additional patents that make it impossible for a competitor to come into the marketplace. That's exactly what happened with Purdue Pharma. Purdue Pharma's delivery mechanism, the cotton system, was going to expire.

They were making millions, hundreds and hundreds of millions. They panic. They say, what do we do? They scramble to find a different opioid that they could plug into the delivery mechanism. They found Oxy. But the problem with Oxy is it is eight times more addictive than hydrocodone.

They knew this. They knew it. They knew it 100%. And they put it in the drug and they put it into the marketplace and they met with the head of the FDA in a private hotel for weeks in advance and they pushed it into the marketplace, and they met with the head of the FDA in a private hotel for weeks in advance, and they pushed it into the market,

and the FDA gave them the golden goose. They put that this was less likely to be addictive or abused than other opioids, which was a bold-faced lie. And then that individual went to go work for Purdue Pharma 18 months later when they left the FDA. That's shocking. Yeah.

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No. Basically just made opioids. Yeah. And before that, they created the Valium crisis of the 60s where they were advertising to women in the New York Post and New York Times

saying, feeling stressed? Pop a Valium. Yes. And women got addicted to Valium all over the country. Incredibly dangerous drug. So Purdue Pharma

has done this multiple times. And the final ramifications are so much more staggering because again, who pays this? The taxpayers. But the real cost of all of this, and this is what I said to the Senate, we can ramble off numbers and dollars.

Like I can tell you how the number one reason for bankruptcy in America is healthcare cost. I can tell you how the number one budgetary concern for the federal government is our rising healthcare cost. And I could tell you how for employers, one of the biggest burdens is the insurance plans and covering their employees healthcare costs. But the real costs are paid in human lives. People like my brother, who got addicted to opioids and lost his life because the system chewed him up and spit him out and let him down. How did he get addicted to opioids? He had an ACL surgery in high school, like so many kids, and the insurance companies are incentivized to prescribe opioids. That's the article that came out the other day,

and that's what I'm trying to explain about the danger of these middlemen called the pharmacy benefit managers. They're not middlemen at all. They're profit centers for the big insurance companies. And so even on opioids, you could have been prescribed a non-addictive, non-abusive pain cream after your surgery. It's a topical that uses non-abusive, non-addictive ketamine, but in a topical form. You can't consume it, you can't eat it, you don't get high. There's no physiological high from it, but it works. It's very efficacious. Why would the insurance companies not prescribe that over a highly addictive side effect riddled opioid? The answer is the insurance companies were getting rebates on these opioids. If you look this up, you can do the research. They made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars right beside Purdue Pharma, but they floated through all of it unscathed. So how does the rebate work exactly?

So what happens is we'll go back to like a product. Well, here's another hot topic. Insulin will be a great example. Insulin's been out 40 years. Why is insulin six times more expensive than it was when it launched? The pharmaceutical companies are not making more than they did when they launched it. Eli Lilly's actually making less per vial than it ever made on insulin.

Where is all that extra money going? That money is going to the pharmacy benefit manager. So UnitedHealthcare owns Optum. Optum is a pharmacy benefit manager that negotiates rebates or kickbacks with the pharmaceutical companies. So when it came to opioids, they go to Purdue Pharma and they say,

okay, Purdue, I'm just going to use simple math for my small brain. If it's $100 a month, they say, Purdue, if Purdue wants to charge $50, they'll say, charge $100 and give us a $50 rebate. Okay? And so then United will show you, the patient, that your opioid cost them $100 that month

or whatever the prescription drug is. Prescription drug A cost them $100. They never paid the $100 because they got a $50 rebate. So they paid $50. What people don't realize is 80% of your health plan in America, 80% of Americans health plan is covered by their employer. Most people are getting their health plan through their employer. So at the end of the year, these big insurance companies meet with your employer and say, Bobby Sue was on this opioid all year long. It cost us $100 a month. That's $1,200 a year. We've got to raise your co-pays, your deductibles, and your out-of-pocket expenses because it's really running up our costs.

But in reality, they never paid that. Then where this gets more sick and twisted is a lot of people don't understand this. Medicare and Medicaid after Obamacare has all been outsourced to the big insurance companies. So 60% of United's healthcare's profits are coming from Medicare and Medicaid. And how do they negotiate the Medicare and Medicaid prices? They negotiate it by looking at the average wholesale price in America

and saying, we want a discount. Well, that average wholesale price in America and saying, we want a discount. Well, that average wholesale price is a bullshit price because they set the market, but they didn't pay that price. Does that mean, is this making sense? Just follow the dollars. Okay, $100 a month. They didn't pay the $100, they paid $50.

They tell the employer they paid the $100. At the end of the year, that employer is going to get hit with the cost going into the following year. All of those co-pays, deductibles, all that goes up. Then you, the patient, get hit. And so when they decide what drugs to put on a formulary, what drugs they're going to cover, it has nothing to do with the efficacy and what is best for the patient. It has everything to do with who gave them the biggest rebate.

And they incentivize you to go to those drugs by lowering your copay and deductible on those drugs. So with opioids, they made it very easy to get an opioid because it was getting a rebate. But they made it very difficult to get a non-addictive product like a pain cream. And then eventually they just said, we won't cover pain creams at all. You're going to have to take an opioid. Then to go even deeper, that's just the prescription.

And this is what happened to your brother. This is 100% what happened to my brother and what happened to millions and millions of Americans. And it's still happening to this day. And so I'll paint a picture for you. Imagine being a young kid with a spine issue and you're in pain. And this particular spine issue causes the sensation of burning and fire shooting into your hands, your feet, your extremities. And the worst of it all, a large percentage of these male patients with this spine issue experience burning and fire in their genitals. fire and pain shooting into your genitals and extremities. In the insurance model with UnitedHealthcare, you're going to have to go to a primary care first. That's going to take two months to get in with that primary care. You're dealing with this pain and suffering the whole time. Now, you get in with the primary care, they go, whoa, got six minutes with you. This is out of my wheelhouse. I'm going to refer you to

a specialist. You you to a specialist. You go to a specialist. That's going to take months. Oftentimes, you have to argue with the insurance, right? Deny, delay, depose. You're going to argue with that insurance company, begging them to allow you to go to a specialist. Your primary care may even have to get on the phone and get a prior auth and negotiate it for you. Now, you finally get in with a specialist. Specialist says, I want to order an MRI. A lot of times, the insurance companies will deny the MRI or delay it. So now you've got a battle for that.

That's going to be another three or four months. The gist of it is, the average spine patient takes six to nine months before they ever really even get an answer. And then they've got to negotiate to get into the surgery. And now you finally get the day in the sun where you're finally feeling like you're going to get relief and you're going to get that surgery that you desperately needed. But the whole time they've been selling you opioids to keep your pain level down because that's the only option you have. So now you get your approval and you say, I found the best surgeon in the country. I want to go to

this guy. That's not how it works. The insurance company tells you who you're allowed to go see. And they say, yeah, he's not in our network. You've got to go to this other doctor. And then that doctor botches the surgery. It wasn't the surgeon you wanted. You waited nine months to get this thing done. And that surgery messes up your, that surgeon messes up your surgery. That's what happened to this kid, Luigi. Can you imagine how he could have lost his mind and gone crazy? And what's unfortunate is that's what's happening to millions and millions of Americans every day. What happened is terrible. It's tragic. Nobody has the right to play judge, jury, and executioner, but neither do the PBMs and the insurance companies. And that's what they're doing every day. They are monetizing and printing money on the backs of Americans, monetizing our chronic disease and illness, making money off prescription drugs while denying surgeries, slow playing surgeries. And I mean, I could go on for hours because it just gets deeper and deeper. And I love to show people how once I show people the magic trick, they will be able to see through the insurance is scam because it's a scam. I mean,

they're gangsters, like they're the mob. How much did this play out during COVID? I mean, these systems affected how we responded to COVID, correct? It affects everything. I mean, everything under the sun. Again, they decide what gets covered, how it gets covered, what the reimbursement rate is, who gets in for surgery, when you get in for surgery, then they can change the surgery. You know, the other thing is having owned labs and pharmacies and had all these touch points. I didn't know this. Like I was naive like everybody else. You know, I just thought you pay your hard earned money. And when things go south, the insurance has got your back. Like that's literally how naive I was. That's what I thought. But what you learned is HMOs are not health insurance. They are managed care. And what do I mean by that? You've got to think

of it like the analogy I use is think of car insurance. It's there if you wreck the fucking car. Exactly. And that's all it's good for. But they're not going to rotate the tires, change the oil, maintain the vehicle. Right.

If you put your life and your family's life in the hands of these insurance companies, they are going to monetize your chronic disease. And I say it, if you see the average American doctor and you eat the average American diet, then don't be surprised when you die of the average American chronic disease. So I think what's changed, and this is maybe something that it's taken me a while to figure out, maybe it's all right now, because I do think of health insurance that way, just as I think of collision insurance or fire insurance. Had a fire, used insurance, worked great. That's it. But the addition of chronic disease to America where the majority

of the population has a chronic disease, that means that it's not catastrophic coverage. It's a maintenance program that you're paying for. Correct. And the challenge is every safety net throughout the system has been captured. And that's why I think the corporate capture narrative is so important. And that's what I was trying to get through to the Senate. Everyone talks about the. Bobby Kennedy is actually the only person I've ever heard talk about it. And I was so excited when I heard him talk about it because I'm like, finally. And the second half was, if we allow corporate interests to capture our scientific community, then what we will find is we will lose the garage tinkerer. We will lose the innovator. We will stifle and suppress innovation and everything will turn to basically profits and a profit-driven system. Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes. We have built a system based on quarterly profits and quarterly earnings

throughout the system. Whether we're talking about the pharmaceutical industry, the big health insurance companies, the hospital systems, the doctor's practices. Everyone is built into this ecosystem that is attempting to capture human lives and monetize those touch points. So everything that you do is a revenue generator for all of these various entities. And there's so much money being made off chronic disease. There's no interest in curing chronic disease. And so the National Institute for Health, like I said earlier, they are the seed essentially that grows into the tree. And they're the ones doing most of the innovation and early development of drugs. But they're doing it oftentimes through incentives that incentivize them to look at treatments rather than cures. And so the problem is we're just launching band-aids into the marketplace rather than healing the wound. and I'm telling you, the root cause runs deep and it's insidious and it's dark

and it has captured our entire healthcare ecosystem front to back from the food we eat to the way we grow our food to the way we process our food. Big tobacco captured most of the food industry in the 80s. They literally owned the food industry and brought their marketing campaigns and strategies to the food industry

where they made food more addictive, more processed and more chemically laden. And so throughout that process, now you are eating the wrong foods and you're getting chronically ill at a disproportionate rate. The preventative care was the way to prevent that. And now those doctors are out of that ecosystem. So now you're essentially getting pushed into chronic disease, where then the insurance companies monopolize and profiteer off of it for years. And and then your employer and the American people and the taxpayers are who are really fitting the bill for all of this. With Donald Trump returning to the White House, this country has a unique opportunity, maybe our last opportunity to save ourselves from the anti-American and anti-human left. But our efforts may be stymied by the deep state. That's what happened to the first Trump term, permanent Washington.

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inaccurately. 90% of Medicare claims for surgeries were getting rejected inaccurately, right? Which drove up their profits. They're having double digit profit growth right now. When you asked about how profitable they are for the last like five years, they've doubled their stock price. So you also got to not just think about monthly, like it's revenue and profits, but it's also what is your shareholder return on investment and what are your stocks doing? And if we look at that, who, guess who owns the majority of the big five insurance companies? BlackRock Vanguard State Street. Guess who owns the majority of the

pharmaceutical companies? It's BlackRock Vanguard State Street. Guess who owns the majority of the pharmaceutical companies? It's BlackRock Vanguard State Street. Guess who owns the majority of the media outlets? It's BlackRock Vanguard State Street. Do you start to sense a trend here? I do. And so, and guess who funds and lobbies more than anybody? The pharmaceutical industry, followed by, you know, one of the top players is the health is the health insurance industry and then you've got these big conglomerates that are funding all of this so there's so many levers we can pull to generate revenue off of these individuals that it's staggering um yeah and so it's they

they absolutely know and it makes it very very hard hard. There's no alternative. Like if I'm a hospital, I can't afford to lose Blue Cross Blue Shield. I can't afford to lose UnitedHealthcare. I'm out of business. Like in the state of Texas, Blue Cross Blue Shield is 30% of your revenue. So I'll tell you a real world example.

I owned a pharmacy and I still do own pharmacies, but I don't take insurance. Like our model now is we refuse to take insurance because if I don't take insurance, I can tell the patient the real price. I can get rid of all the games, all the fuzzy numbers. And I can just say, Hey, it cost me this. I'm going to sell it to you for that. I'm going to mail it to your doorstep. It's that simple. It's so, I mean, why aren't there more pharmacies like that? They're springing up there. They are coming up. And I think it's taking the American people. So many people think, well, my insurance should cover it. And I try to explain, they're going to cover it,

but there's a price to pay. And that price to pay is way more than dollars. They are going to make you chronically ill and make money off you. And oftentimes you're spending more than you would to just pay cash for the compound. Like here's an example. I also owned labs and I owned a blood lab and I went out and I educated clinicians in the state of Texas on the importance of preventative care. My pitch, my elevator pitch was the five chronic diseases that are killing so many Americans, how do we stop them? We don't let them develop in the first place. And how do we stop them? We don't let them develop in the first place. And how do we do that? We do that through getting proactive and predictive. And how

do we do that? We do that by taking a look under the hood. Do you just go out and romp on a car without changing the oil or maintaining it? No, you take care of the vehicle. We have to take care of our bodies. And the only way to do that is to do the deep dive annually and to understand. A basic checkup in America is a lipid panel. They're looking at like four or five things. They're looking at nothing. You can't get anything out of that. Like to do a deep dive, you look at over 70 biomarkers. Now I'm looking at your blood work and I can tell, like I said earlier, are you headed towards diabetes? And if you are, we can intervene. We can act now before you become diabetic. But what the insurance model does

is they wait for you to become diabetic. Why? It costs sixfold to keep you alive every year once you're diabetic because they're getting paid off the insulin. There's an incentive for them to let you become diabetic. That's terrible. You show you the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes. We've got to pivot this and shift this.

So I would educate doctors on the importance of blood work. And I would tell them, let's get proactive and predictive and let's prevent chronic disease. Doctors start implementing this in their practice. Within months, clinicians, all of them, got letters from the insurance companies. Hey, Dr. So-and-so, we noticed you're pulling a lot of blood work. We don't like this. We don't think there's medical necessity here. Hold on now. One, where did you go to fucking

med school? Two, who are you to tell a clinician what they do with a patient life? Three, that patient paid you their hard-earned money for the right and accessibility to care. Four, you're doing this purely, purely out of evil necessity for profit and greed. That's all this is. There's no reason not to get a comprehensive blood panel at least once a year to be able to do a deep dive. So, clinicians stop pulling the blood work. That's throughout the United States. Doctors are terrified. They are not going to fight the deep dive. So clinicians stop pulling the blood work. That's throughout the United States. Doctors are terrified. They are not going to fight the insurance companies because the insurance companies control everything. And so when we talk about corporate capture, you've got the big

pharmaceutical companies that have captured the FDA. You've got the big insurance companies that have captured, included with FBI and DOJ, which I'll get into here in a second. They've also captured our hospital systems and our clinicians. There are no private primary care practice anymore because insurance cut their reimbursements, forced them to go work as employees of the hospital. Now they've funneled all of the sheep into one location so the wolves can pick them off. And now these doctors are basically fall in line or lose your job. And so doctors fall in line. There are no independent primary care. There's very few independent primary cares that are in an insurance model anymore.

Most of those have gone to work for huge HMOs and like Blue Cross Blue Shield bought Kelsey Siebel, I believe, which so the other thing they're doing is they're vertically integrating and capturing our systems so like when i had where i was going earlier with uh with the blood work is they basically deny the blood work bully the clinician to not pull the blood work so then the doctors don't ever do the deep dive so they can't prevent the chronic disease so now you are headed towards chronic disease because they don't have the ability to help you prevent it. And so that's just one sliver. Then the other end is, as a pharmacy owner, I would bill and collect and I would ship out hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in medications a month.

Crucial life-saving medications for patients. Blue Cross Blue Shield, true story, came, said, they quit paying me. And I shipped out, I think, over a million dollars in prescription medications in a month in the state of Texas. You go to negotiate, say, hey, what happened? You guys didn't pay me this month. I have a million dollars that I've shipped to your patients. Yeah, we don't think you collected co-pays and deductibles. Okay, well, we did. We collected 98%. Okay, well, we'll come audit you. Okay, how soon can you be here? Three months. I can't ship out $3 million in drugs and float you guys. I'm not a bank. And they do that throughout the industry. The hospitals are floating the bills.

It's 90 days on average to get reimbursed, anywhere from 60 to 90 days to get reimbursed on a surgical procedure. Then when patients say, why do I have such a big copay? It's another method to discourage you from having surgery and to force you back to the drugs that they're making money on. Interesting. So, I mean, doctors were associated with surgery. That's why they're called sawbones. Psychiatrists were, you know, talkers. You know, let's talk about your mother. The whole system, every part of medicine seems totally focused on drugs now. Yeah. Now, there's still a lot of money in surgery, but it is a loss leader for these insurance conglomerates.

And so they put obstructions between you. Deny, delay, depose, right? So they delay your ability to get the care. They make you jump through all these hurdles before you finally get approval. You know, UnitedHealthcare denied over 30%, one third of claims. And actually two years ago, they denied 37% of claims. 37%. That's not one third. That's almost half. Let's be honest. And what that means is people are dying. It doesn't mean like, oh, shucks. These aren't aesthetic procedures. These are life-changing procedures that people are desperate for, that they paid for, and you're denying them. And do you know what percentage of people fight the claim? 10%.

10%. People are tired. How do you fight a claim? You have to go to your doctor and write letters and push back and go get second opinions and take time off from your busy job to go try and battle an insurance company. And then even if you get the procedure approved and everything's hunky-dory and you go have the surgery, they're going to tell you who to go to, where to go, and then they're going to take 90 days to pay the hospital back or the surgery center back. And that surgery center

holds the bill. But here's where it gets even more fucked up. They set the co-pays and deductibles. Sorry, am I allowed to cuss? I didn't even ask you that. They set the co-pays and deductibles. Sorry, am I allowed to cuss? I didn't even ask you that. They set the co-pays and deductibles. And so oftentimes your employer offers you 10 different plans. Like I employ 300 plus people. And so I let my employees choose the plan. They have an option between like 10 different plans. My young people will usually choose a plan that has a bigger out-of-pocket expense. Maybe a $10,000

deductible on a surgery. The way they word the insurance contracts is they make you the hospital or me the lab. Like when I had a genetics lab, there were times I had to go after the patient for a $5,000 deductible, right? I don't want to. It's not what I, I don't want to it's not what i don't want to play you know collection agent on a patient but the way they word the contract is if i didn't collect the copair deductible they have recourse they can deny the claim and never pay me for the procedure the surgery or the lab screening that i did and so i have to show a reasonable effort to collect. And if I don't, they can do an array of things. They can deny the claim. They could come back and say, we're going to do an audit. This is where we get into depose, right? Deny, delay, depose.

The depose of the situation is, let's say I did that spine procedure. And let's say this kid's out-of-pocket expense on it was $10,000 and he doesn't have the money. Well, I'm required by law to go after him and make a reasonable effort to collect. But in the fine print of my contract with United Healthcare, they're going to say, if they uncover that I didn't collect the copay or deductible, they can deny the claim and never pay me for the surgery. And so I have to chase it. So then now you get into a dispute with United or like I did with Blue Cross Blue Shield where they just don't pay me. If I sue them, they're going to depose. They're going to dig into every time I didn't collect a

copay or deductible. And they're going to argue that they have a contractual ground to stand on that they don't owe me the money. It's almost like a lie agreed upon. They wait until the deficit gets big and then they put you out of business. And then what happens? Hey, it's tough out there for a small privately held pharmacy. We're actually buying pharmacies right now. Would you like to sell to us? So, CVS Health owns Aetna. CVS Health owns CVS Pharmacies. CVS Health owns the PBM. All of that's vertically integrated. They set the price point. They set the copay. They set the reimbursement. They set the deductible. They also own mail pharmacies, like mail order pharmacies, and they will tell patients, oh, we can get you this drug cheaper if you'll go to our

mail pharmacy in an effort to cannibalize and monopolize that patient life so nobody else has access to them. And so they can't see behind the curtain to find out that they're really getting screwed, that they never should have been paying that price point on the drug in the first place. And so like one of the things we're doing at my pharmacy is we disclose pricing, like we added, you could search and find out what the real wholesale price is on any drug and research that. And to show a real world example of how dirty this is, Tucker, and if any of it's too much, let me know. I can tailor this to whatever makes sense. No, it's fascinating. Because it's a lot. Okay, the state of Ohio launched an investigation, hired 32 forensic auditors.

Just the state of Ohio, just Medicare. Just Medicaid, sorry. Guess what they found? $230 million in fraud from the insurance companies in one year through gap pricing, what they're calling gap pricing, the whole Ponzi scheme I just explained. They are telling the state, this drug cost us $200, you owe us $200. But the state pays them the $200, they only paid $100. So they made a hundred bucks every time that script got written. The state realized that they could negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies and get better pricing. So the state of Ohio is saving hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now multiply that times all 50 states. Now multiply that times all the federal payers, because Medicaid is just the state. The Medicare program covers the whole freaking country. 60% of the profits of these insurance companies is coming from the taxpayers. killed on our company insurance plans. And then as a business owner, I'm getting killed because at the end of the year, they renegotiate the rates and they charge me more, right? I'm paying half of the care of my employees, my 300 something employees, and everything that costs that insurance money, they've taken a 30% markup on. That's why we're facing this mega healthcare expenditure issue in America. It's not just the pharmaceutical industries. It's the collusion and the capture of all of them working together

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We enjoy them. You will too. You ever mentioned doctors, really? It doesn't sound like they're getting rich from this. The doctors are making less and less to do more and more. In fact, we're... It's kind of crazy, though, because medicine is... I mean, at the core of medicine is a doctor, right? 100%. And we are facing a crisis with that.

We have a booming aging population. We have a primary care shortage in America. That's why it takes three to six months to get in with primary cares. And 80% of primary cares in an interview, I think it was done by Harvard, said they will not be in this profession within 36 months. They don't want to do it anymore.

It is a beat down. These poor people are working their asses off, but they're in a system that ties their hands up. The people getting rich are the parasites, right? They're not providing any actual service. And then in certain states, clinicians have the right to earn into and make profit off of things. And so because the insurance companies have gotten so dirty and have cut the reimbursement rates for clinicians, clinicians are now looking for ways to make money. And so oftentimes when I say corporate capture again, it's the word of the day. But when I say it, either it's one of two things. Either your doctor is an employee of the hospital and

works for the hospital, which is directly controlled by the insurance company. Okay. And so they're essentially an employee of the insurance company or your clinician owns the hospital or surgery center and then they dictate to the hospital and surgery center the protocols and procedures. And in those instances, they're oftentimes having to bill out of network, which is a whole nother racket

because when you bill out of network, you get paid a third of billed charges. So that's why when people go, what the hell? My MRI was $6,000. It's because they know that they're only going to get paid a third of what they bill United or Cigna. And so they have to inflate their bill by threefold. But the insurance company sets you up for failure by saying you have to go after the patient for any short pay. So this is where people get into these medical bankruptcy issues. Because if I go to United Healthcare when I owned a blood lab and I say, United, I want to be in network. Their answer is fuck off. We don't want you in network. We don't need you. We've got blood labs that we have

browbeat for 20 years and we've got them negotiated down to a dirt cheap price. We don't want another in-network lab. So I either lay everybody off and go out of business, go to a cash model, which is what I do now, or you do what's called billing out of network. And if I were to, I'm going to use blood as an example. If I were to bill, the panel we run at Ways to Well, if you were to walk into a quest, I've, and it's happened because I've had UFC fighters that are our clients and stuff walk into quest and they give them an insurance card and they quote them $3,000 for our blood panel. And they'll call me and go, Oh my God, dude, they're quoting me. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Give them our code that it's a $300 deal. And they bill me. They don't bill you. Like I got it. And they're like, how can it be $300 when they're charging 3000? And so it's because once you've billed a panel

at a rate by law in the contract, you have to bill the patient for that rate. And so if I take insurance at a blood lab and I'm out of network and I bill the insurance $300, they're going to pay me a hundred. I can't run, I'll lose money. I insurance $300, they're going to pay me a hundred. I can't run, I'll lose money. I'd lose $200. So I have to bill them $900 to get paid $300. Does that make sense? And then in the instance that the insurance denies, one of the denied to pose, you know, if they deny, I am in my contract required by law to go after you for the additional money. I have to chase- Meet a patient.

Yes, I have to chase you down. But I never wanted $900. All I wanted was the $300 you owed me in the first place. That was it. But I can't get that because you won't give me a contract. And that's what's happening with surgery centers, MRI centers, hospitals. There's in-network and there's out-of-network. You, the patient, oftentimes pay for out-of-network. You, the patient,

oftentimes pay for out-of-network benefits and coverage. And then the insurance company tries to deny it and make it impossible for you to get that. And oftentimes clinicians are out-of-network. Like the biggest, baddest, best, brightest minds for orthopedic surgery in the state of Texas, arguably is University of Texas, UT Medical School. UT Medical School is kicked off of Optum and UnitedHealthcare's plan. So if you're, let's say you blow an ACL, you know, the Texans, Rockets, Astros, Team Doctors, all those guys, for the most part, are either at Methodist or UT. Well, you can't get to those guys

because they're out of network for you. If you have an out-of-network plan, you can use it and pay a bigger co-payer deductible to get to go see those guys. Does that make sense? Yes. But they have to bill them out of network and they'll get paid a percentage of the billed charges.

The cash model that you operate under, is that the future? I think what I tell people is the same way these insurance companies are using AI algorithms to deny coverage, they are going to use large language models and AI to obstruct your ability to get care. The last person in the world you want digging through your underwear drawer is the federal government. But the second is the insurance companies. You don't want them to know your blood work. You don't, unless you need a procedure or something that's coming up that's catastrophic,

because they're going to use it and use AI to screen you out of their system. Right? And if they think you're headed towards a catastrophic event, like a heart attack or surgery or cancer, they're going to want to get you out of there before that manifests. And the average person is employed or insurance comes from their employer. And so if I'm a CEO at United, and I know you're headed towards something catastrophic, I can delay your ability to uncover that through putting these obstructions on things that don't make

me money. Oh, come on. You think they would do that? And you have, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Like diabetes is a prime example. Wait, wait, hold on. You're saying that health insurance companies would intentionally keep people from knowing

about a catastrophic illness? That's why they don't allow you to get comprehensive blood work. That's why they delayed women's care. Like the OB-GYN initiatives were saying that we should be screening for certain genetic disorders in your 20s. And the insurance company said, no, we think that number should be 35. And all the clinicians go, okay, the number's 35. And so now women don't get that screening to see if their child's gonna have a genetic issue

unless they're over the age of 35. And there's hundreds of examples of this. So I think what happens is I'm an executive at United. The whole system's built for quarterly earnings, quarterly profits. I gotta hit that number for Wall Street. Let's just say I'm managing 100,000 patient lives. Every day, month, week, I can delay those individuals

is another day, week, and month that I don't spend money on a surgery. And if I deny those surgeries and only 10% of them come back and fight me on it, step one is to deny. Delay. Step two, deny. Now I've obstructed your ability to get to that. And an example would be a chronic disease like- Wait, I'm sorry. I'm just fixated here. And to note the obvious, so what you're saying is that they don't want you to know that you could develop a life-threatening illness. They don't want to treat preventative. And so anything preventative is proactive. But like pancreatic cancer, for example, has a survival rate that's in the single digits, but if caught early, it is survivable.

And there's many other examples. So here's an example. They will say these things are expensive. So the screening tools we use in healthcare are dated. This is why we have moved to a cash pay. Our clinic weighs too well. Like we've become a big name because of Joe. Like we helped Joe.

We helped Aaron Rodgers. We're in the Aaron Rodgers documentary. But everything we do pretty much is not covered by insurance. Almost everything we do wouldn't be covered by insurance anyway. And it's not that it's crazy expensive. It's that it's just not part of their ecosystem. Our job is not to push drugs. Our job is to have an intelligent conversation with patients,

to do the deep dive, to uncover the root cause, and to explain to the patient what is happening with their body and why, and to give you, the patient, sovereignty and autonomy over your health. And so an example would be a cancer screening. You know, at our company, our cancer screening looks at you at the cellular level and can diagnose over 200 different types of cancer at stage zero. 99% survival rate at stage zero.

We know that a large majority of firefighters and first responders will develop cancer in their lifetime. At a minimal, why would we not be pre-screening all of our, because they're exposed to toxins, chemicals, fires, smoke, smoke inhalation. A lot of our military because they're exposed to toxins, chemicals, fires, smoke, smoke inhalation. A lot of our military personnel have been exposed to, you know, Agent Orange and all these different, you know, compounds in the battlefield. They disproportionately have a higher cancer rate. And we could be screening those individuals with real world science and preventing cancer.

But we don't. There's a lot of money made in chemotherapy. Did you know that the majority of an oncologist's income comes from marking up the medication itself? The chemotherapy itself is a profit center for the clinician that prescribes the chemotherapy. And so- So that would suggest that if chemotherapy

is a profit center, then, I mean, I would assume it's overused. Well, that's what you're going to see with everything. GLP-1s, the weight loss drugs. Well, I believe that. It's become a frontline defense. And I have a different, I'm buddies with Callie, I'm buddies with Joe, I'm buddies with Jillian Michaels. They hate Ozempic. My thing about it is, I don't hate it.

I'm pragmatic. It's a tool in the tool belt. And when utilized appropriately, it can change and save lives. Yes. But it is not a first line defense. Yes. And it should not be used in children and prescribing Ozempic. That's not sensible. Yeah. Prescribing Ozempic without first talking about diet, lifestyle, and nutrition is like brushing your teeth while eating fucking Oreos. It's delusional. And that's what we're trying to do. And you go, well, wait, why? I told you why, Tucker. They're printing fucking money off these medicines. The insurance

company loves Zympic. The pharmaceutical industry loves Zympic. Is there a big benefit to it? Absolutely. It can help reduce the risk of chronic disease because the number one risk for almost all of these chronic diseases is metabolic disease and obesity. And we are chronically ill and obese as a society. And so if we can get that weight off, great.

But if we don't talk about diet, lifestyle, nutrition, we're just putting a bandaid on it. We got to get to the root cause. And then if we're not going to address the food issue and we're not going to fix our food issue, you know, it isn't a matter of people eating bad or good. Like it clearly is like diet is very, very important. It's the most important thing. But I want to be clear, even if you try to eat healthy in America, it's hard. It's, I mean, we have, we have over, so, and I think it was the 80s, we had 700 FDA approved ingredients in our food. Now there's thousands and thousands, I think it's over 10,000 ingredients.

In Europe, it's 700. There's over 10, petrochemicals, everything in our food sources, preservatives, food dyes, all of it. And they're all causing an increase in metabolic disease and these problems. They're making our food more processed, more addictive, more abusive. And then we're getting chronically ill and chronically obese.

And then that leads to being chronically on medications. Yes. And then that leads to trillions of dollars. Like when we talk about big pharma, chronically on medications. Yes. And then that leads to trillions of dollars. Like when we talk about big pharma, the insurance companies made $1.5 trillion last year. Trillion. Pharma is still in the billions.

I think it was six or 700 billion. It's still an insane amount of money in revenue. But the insurance companies are two and a half size, the size of big pharma size and at least the pharma companies make something yeah i mean they do they may not have enough r&d and they make you know addictive drugs and that's all bad but they do make things yeah i don't know so but just i i'm

i just want to clear this up do you think it's possible it sounds likely maybe that chemotherapy is over prescribed i think every drug on the market is probably overprescribed. Antidepressants. I mean, why are we prescribing antidepressants? They barely, there is a place for every compound. I don't want to paint something that's all bad. But should the amount of people be on antidepressants? It's really simple.

As a non-physician, non-college graduate. Let me just say, if the suicide rate goes up, they're not working. And the suicide rate has gone up. So like, it's just, there's kind of no getting around that. That's just very simple. And there are alternatives to that. Again, at our practice, we have a product called Wave Neuroscience. We scan your brain.

We assess where neurons are misfiring. This is all stuff that's not covered by insurance, but it has an astronomically higher success rate and over 80% at helping depression, anxiety, and insomnia. It's not covered by any insurance company because they force you back to SSRIs and you have to fail two or more SSRIs to get treatment. But why, Tucker? Which is more effective for rescuing people from despair and suicide, taking SSRIs or getting a dog? Super simple.

Exactly. 100%. It's provable. Yes, I believe you. Yeah. No, it's a national tragedy. Yeah, it's a lot. If you, I just know from years of know from years of covering mass shootings on television, if you ask the question, was the shooter on SSRIs? You get shouted down immediately. You get called into the office.

Ooh, conspiracy theory. Then what's the answer then? Yep. And the answer is all of them are. Yeah. Joe had a quote. Rogan had a quote. We don't have a gun problem.

We have a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem. Yeah. Well, we have a drug problem that's have a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem. Yeah, well, we have a drug problem that's causing a mental health problem, in my opinion. Yep. But yes, no, people, you know, I don't even take Advil. I feel great. So that's my feeling on it.

Yeah. Sorry, I know you own a pharmacy, but I just go. No, and my thing is medications should not be the solution. No. They're the last option on the table. Yeah. We first have to take the time to deep dive and understand. And when you say, walk me through a patient life,

a 40-year-old woman comes into a clinic, she's tired, she's exhausted, she's raising a family, she's working a job, she's trying to be superwoman, be everything to everyone. That's right. She goes in there, she's gained weight, she's tired, exhausted, doesn't sleep well, riddled with anxiety and stress. She's going to leave there on four or

more prescription medicines because that's how the system was built. But if you were to come into a practice that is proactive, predictive, and preventative, that is truly trying to help you, you're going to spend an hour with that clinician. We're going to do a deep dive. We're going to look at your blood work, your biomarkers, your hormones. We're going to do an EEG to assess your brain health, your neurons. Is there anything going on here that's causing the noise, the static, the stress, the anxiety? We're going to talk to you about magnesium and supplements that maybe are deficient in your diet because our food sources are crap now.

And we're going to help dial all those things in. I can't tell you how many patients we've helped just through supplementing products like magnesium and zinc. We're all chronically deficient on so many minerals. It's not about a drug. Like magnesium, zinc, sunlight, and sodium can probably solve a huge amount of our anxiety in this country. I totally believe that. But I also think that they're big. And nature.

Well, that is absolutely true. And dogs. But there are structural problems, too. If you're a mother of a bunch of small kids and you have to work to support your family, there's something wrong with our economy. I mean, that's totally unnatural. It's totally unnatural. And by the way, no person can pull that off adequately. I don't care what anybody says, and I'm, that's totally unnatural. It's totally unnatural. And by the way, no person

can pull that off adequately. I don't care what anybody says, and I'm sick of lying about it. It's absolutely impossible to have a full-time job and be a full-time mom to small kids. It's just not enough time. It doesn't matter how hard you try, how brilliant you are. I think there are a lot of super hardworking moms, but there's just not enough time in the day to pull that off. So that was not the state of play the year I was born. People who had kids, you know, and were married, they could get by on one income. A hundred percent. And it's the system, the system has failed Americans in so many ways. And even the, even the healthcare cost portion, so many people go, well, man, I don't, I can't afford preventative care.

And to get a comprehensive blood panel and an hour on the phone with a clinician is 500 bucks. And I'm not trivializing, that's a lot of money. But how much do you spend on beer? How much do you spend on your car? You're in your car a few hours a day. You get one body. 400 trillion to one is what I told the Senate. 400 trillion to one are the chances that God gave us this life today. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to let these people ruin it and riddle you with chronic disease and illness and your family? It's not about dollars. It's about memories. It's about moments. It's about having the life you've always wanted and living into your elderly years, being healthy and not chronically ill and not on four or more fucking drugs. But the only way we can do that is if this fucking government gets off its ass and starts

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I think what needs to happen is if you get rid of the pharmacy benefit managers, you get rid of a huge profit center for the insurance companies. You take away their incentive to keep you on prescription drugs. Now they're de-incentivized because you're costing them money. If they don't get those rebates, they're losing money by you being on prescription drugs. So they've done a secret deal that you don't know about as a patient to steer you towards certain drugs and away from other drugs. Absolutely. And they even have a safe harbor with the federal government. The federal government doesn't, this is insanity, Tucker. The federal government does not have line of sight

into Medicare and Medicaid and why the prescription drugs are costing them that much. So what the insurance companies do- What does that mean? So I'll explain. Let's go back to insulin. Let's, I'm gonna use, we'll just make up a drug. Drug A is, let's say the insurance company

tells the people the average wholesale price in America for this drug is $1,000 a month. They A is, let's say the insurance company tells the people the average wholesale price in America for this drug is $1,000 a month. They never paid the thousand. They paid 500. They tell us because the rebate, they tell us it's a thousand. Okay. Now they've set the average wholesale price because they're the ones that set it. Then they negotiate for Medicare, Medicaid with the federal government. And they say, hey, federal government, since you're our buddy, we'll give you a price break. We're going to sell it to you for $800 a month. Better than anywhere in the country. You're getting a $200 price concession per month on this drug. They didn't pay $800. They paid $500. They made $300 off of the federal government every month. And who paid that? Me and you. And federal regulators don't

know that? There is a safe harbor and that's what people are trying to peel through. They're trying to get rid of this safe harbor. And I think the Senate had a investigation they launched, I think two years ago on the cost of insulin. And so when we talk about people celebrating the death of this CEO, it's terrible, But I'm trying to get people to understand where this anger and animosity comes from. Well, I think it's a fair question. People are catching on to the magic trick. And they're going, wait a second, you are screwing us. And the reason my cost of healthcare is so expensive and I can't get my surgeries and

my kid's addicted to opioids and my wife is dying of cancer, and I'm fighting with you to get this coverage is because you are literally printing money off of chronic disease. It is not about patient lives and patient outcomes. It's about profits, and they're killing it all the way to the bank. So if I'm a health insurance lobbyistist and I'm trying to convince the administration or the Congress not to get rid of pharmacy benefit managers, what argument am I making? They're going to come in and say if there's no pharmacy benefit managers, we're an advocate on behalf of the people. We negotiate down the cost of prescription drug care. Federal government, if you look at this and add the numbers up, the average wholesale price of every drug in America times the amount of patient lives in America, and then I say I'm giving you a 30% price concession on all of the average wholesale price, I can make the math look good. But like I said earlier—

But the wholesale price is fake. It's fake, yes. Like I said earlier, there's liars, there's damn liars, and then there's statistics. So they control the baseline so they control the outcome of the equation. Bingo. bingo. And then they control the co-pays and deductibles which drive the behaviors of the patient. So, you know, if I'm some guy working on oil rig

and I'm working my ass off and I'm exhausted and I'm on four more meds and one med is a $20 co-pay and addictive and abusive with side effects, but the other med is a $100 co-pay, what do you think those people are going to take? And you know, I think y'all covered this with Callie and Casey, who are my buddies, but you know, the third leading cause of death in America is medical

misuse. And that's with us reporting less than 2% of adverse events. Well, exactly. How many people die of acetaminophen every year? A lot. Thousands. Many thousands. Right. It's just an over-the-counter drug that is, by the way, useful. I'm not attacking it, but even a drug as simple as that can kill you. And there's so much we could get into with the FDA and all that. I mean, I don't want to, we could go all day. There's a lot. There's a lot there. Do you have confidence that Bobby Kennedy will get confirmed? And if so, can sort some of this out? I hope he gets confirmed. You know, I'm not super political. I didn't get political until this. And it's ironic.

Bobby, I think, cares. And Bobby, you know, RFK reached out and met with me. And the two politicians that I've ever reached out and said, I want to talk about this in my adult life were Tulsi Gabbard and RFK. And I've gotten to know both of them, and they're amazing humans, and they're good people, and they care about people, and they care about this country. And what I've seen Trump do so far has me more excited. I mean, I talked to Joe about it. We were texting, we're like, we're back. America's back. I am excited that there's hope, but I do give this with a caveat to the American

people. Do not, it will take years for the government to overhaul and fix these things if we can do it. Do not wait for them to get it. If you want to know who is sincere about fixing the corruption, they're the ones who are going to have trouble getting confirmed. Yeah. Right. Yep. So the people who are no threat at all, you know, who are just supporters of the status quo and who are in effect supporting the corruption, they're fine. Yeah. But, you know, they hate Tulsi Gabbard.

Boy, they really hate Tulsi Gabbard. So if you're wondering if Tulsi Gabbard's sincere, look at the reaction she's getting. She's sincere. And same with Bobby. I do think Bobby has such a huge national constituency at this point. I did a couple of Trump events before the election and Trump got the biggest applause, of course, it was a Trump event, but Bobby got a pretty close second. Yeah. I mean, he's not just some random guy. He is a national leader. So he has a lot of knowledge about litigation and that's what it's going to take to be able to,

well, that's true to get through to carve through the bullshit and get to the point and i will say this he even since he's uh secured the nomination or the been nominated he's called me to say hey walk me through this to explain this to me i want to and he's put me on the phone with people like he's he truly cares and is interested can we fix it i mean we're talking about a major, I mean, you're- I agree. Again, we're back to, yes, it's big pharma. Yes, it's big insurance, but who are their puppet masters?

You know, I mean, you're talking about the biggest companies in the world, the richest entities in the world. Can we change this? And so I tell people, hey, for $500 a year, you can take all these people out of the equation, and you can take sovereignty and accountability over your health, and you can at least begin to get proactive, predictive, and preventative on your own. But one of the things Callie and I have talked about is if we could reform our healthcare

system to focus on preventative, to focus on proactive, to force the insurance companies to address metabolic disease rather than pushing weight loss drugs and diabetes medication. Yeah, short-circuiting your pancreas instead of like not eating Taco Bell. It's crazy. And so there's ways to address this and reduce chronic disease and reduce the cost of healthcare, but they don't want to do that. Okay, so as I said at the outset, I've opted out of the system just through negligence and craziness and just not going to the doctor, which I'm sure I'll pay for at some point. Um, I'm just too mad to go to the

doctor, but, uh, but let's say you were saner than I am and, you know, wanted to go to the doctor, but didn't want to participate in what's clearly a corrupt, uh, and distorting system. What would, what are your options? Uh, I tell people, man, if you can find a cash pay clinic in your area that practices preventative care, somebody who is not part of the captured system, you will have your mind blown at the level of care you get. Because you can sit down with that clinician and have a deep dive, right? If you were to come into our clinic, we're going to sit down with you and we're going to talk to you about family history,

what medications you're on. What genetics matter. Oh, absolutely. There's genetics and there's epigenetics and your epigenetics are there. So think of the epigenetics are the bullets in the gun, right? Your diet, lifestyle, and behavior

are what pull the trigger. We can help guide your diet, lifestyle, and behavior, but it starts with having a discussion. And it starts with showing you physiologically what you're headed towards. And we can get proactive and predictive. Like I said, I can tell you seven years in advance if you're headed towards cancer. I can tell you if you're headed towards diabetes, metabolic disease. I can use a DEXA scan and a VO2 max to assess your cardiovascular health. And the future that I think is going to happen is I think we're going to drive down the cost of healthcare astronomically. Because what we're doing is we're using large language models and

algorithm-based medicine to tie all these data sets together to truly drive health span. Because if you want to know the difference, like this has been a big hot button, I think Callie even posted it. Japanese men are living 10 years longer on average than American men, right? And who cares if you live to be 90 if you're sick and riddled with disease and on five drugs. So the goal is to drive health span. And if you look at the difference between somebody who dies at the average American age and a centenarian, somebody who lives to be 100, the only difference is the onset of chronic disease. And so if we can delay the onset of chronic disease, which we can absolutely do, if we get proactive and predictive and develop a strategy and a game plan, think of it like a business. If I know I've got to generate X amount of revenue in Q1, then in Q4, then I can

follow the trends to see am I leading towards that goal or initiative? If we work you through an assessment at Ways to Well and dig in, we know your bone mineral density, we know your visceral fat, your subcutaneous fat, we know all of your biomarkers, we know your genetics, your epigenetics, your family history. We put all that into the algorithm and we begin to get proactive and predictive. We've got a slow bone mineral density loss. One of the biggest risk factors over the age of 65 for women is a fracture, right? We know how much bone mineral density you're going to lose a year. This isn't rocket science.

I am not that smart and I can figure this shit out. How can fucking guys from Harvard, Stanford, you know, John Hopkins not be doing this? It's because all of them are captured in this broken system and everyone has plausible deniability. What does it cost to get that assessment done? A DEXA scan, a VO2 max is literally like a hundred something dollars combined. And then blood work is, you know, with us and an hour with a clinician is $500. I mean, so less than a thousand dollars, you could have a full workup, including an EEG, a brain scan, AI guided, everything done. And then you've got a blueprint.

And then we load that into the AI algorithm. And what we're launching is aware of it ties into wearables. So we have those data sets, but then our AI is tied into a wearable. So we know your REM sleep, your deep sleep, your heart rate variability, and we're cross-referencing all of these data sets and proactively warning you if you're starting to head towards something that could be catastrophic. But that's where I go back to, we do not want this shit in the hands of the insurance companies. We don't. They're too corrupt. I actually didn't plan this interview to be like an ad for your business, but this sounds really interesting. Where do you get this? Well, I think a lot of people are doing this. So it's not unique to us. I don't want people

to think they have to go to us. I would implore people, if you've got the budget at minimal, like I know Dr. Hyman's doing comprehensive blood analysis. There's a ton of companies out there. And so the main thing is to truly, you and I were talking about carpentry earlier and our obsession with woodworks and like making sure you curate the right, you know, aesthetic. So important. People spend so much time and energy.

And if they are going to remodel their house, they'll interview five or six contractors. If they're going to get a car built, they'll go interview three or four mechanics. Why are you not doing that with your body? You only get one of these and not all doctors are created equal. And if they're in that captured system and you're just blindly following the prescriptions and the drugs this person's telling you to take, you're doing you and your family a disservice. You need to do a deep dive and we need to make healthcare approachable

and fun and understandable where patients want to be a part of the journey, but the systems beat them up and spit them out. And so our thing is like, can we make it fun again? Can we gamify it? Can we have, we compete against our friends where you can show, hey, Tucker's biological age has moved backwards over the last year Tucker's biological age has moved backwards

over the last year, while your biological age has gone forward. He's beating you at the game. He's aging backwards, because there's linear age, right? Like I'm 44. That's my linear age. But my biological age based off biomarkers is 35. I'm nine years younger biologically, physiologically than I am in a linear age capacity and that's all calculated by the AI algorithms so I'm basically walking around like a healthy 35 year old and that's how we prevent chronic disease we quit fucking around with writing a bunch of prescription drugs and we get proactive and predictive and we could save billions trillions I mean 1.5 trillion dollars is what we spent last year.

Last question, why wouldn't you cover that? Could you have a federal health insurance cover that? That's the hope. Or would that destroy it? No, that's what Callie and myself, and that's what I wanted to talk to Bobby about. You can't let the insurance company capture it, and we don't want the insurance company to have this data because it's dangerous. But could the federal government mandate that the insurance company capture it, and we don't want the insurance company to have this data because it's dangerous. But could the federal government mandate that the insurance company gives you an allowance a year? Let's just say it's $5,000 a year to use to see a nutritionist, to see a dietician, to get proactive and predictive and go to whatever clinic you prefer.

The insurance reimburses the patient for it, or there's some sort of tax incentive to incentivize us to get healthy. Congress requires the insurance companies to cover all kinds of things. So this is the opposite of a free market. And my fear with that, though, is if the insurance companies get that,

do they demand the data? You don't want them having access to this. But this is where we're headed anyway. That's the scary part. That's the part of the equation. So HIPAA protects nobody, really, it doesn't sound like. Yeah, well, the insurance, no, because the insurance company is going to claim medical necessity and they're going to need to evaluate you. In the model we have now, they go, well, I don't think there's

medical necessity. I need to see this patient's records. And then they've got some primary care that they're paying, that's a consultant, to get on the phone and come up with creative ways to deny your claim. It's complicated. Well, it's complicated consultant, to get on the phone and come up with creative ways to deny your claim. It's complicated. Well, it's complicated, but it also, the big picture makes absolute sense. If we drove metabolic disease, like Callie said, if we focused on preventing metabolic disease,

we indirectly prevent all the chronic diseases that are killing so many Americans. The number one risk factor for the big five killers of humanity is smoking, right? And the second is age, but age isn't considered a chronic disease. So if we take out age, the number one risk factor, smoking. The number two, metabolic disease and obesity.

So even when we talk, somebody had, after we testified in front of the Senate, I think it was, I don't even want to give them, the Atlantic, those scumbags posted, you know, woo-woo caucus. These people are idiots. What do they know about healthcare? They're claiming that diet impacts cancer. Yeah, you moron. It is literally the second most crucial thing

to driving your cancer risk rates. Why would it be important for the Atlantic, which works on behalf of the CIA, in fact, but why would it be important for the Atlantic, which works on behalf of the CIA, a fact, but why would it be important for them to lie about something like the link between diet and cancer? Because there is, yeah, this is funny. Yes. Well, multiple reasons, but one is they are also captured. If you look at who previously owned the Atlantic, it was a lobbyist for all of the pharmacy benefit managers. Did you know that? I didn't. Yeah. And then they sold to Steve Jobs's widow and she

supports Michelle Obama and Kamala and she was involved in that. And it was more of, oh my God, if RFK stands for this and RFK backs Trump, we got to discredit these people. And again, that's what I said to the Senate. This is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democrat issue. This is a humanity issue. Stop with your party bullshit. Like nobody cares. Stop trying to fuck us and help us fix this problem. I don't care who wants to get behind this, Republican or Democrat. I welcome it with open arms. Let's put our egos aside and work together to fix this. People are dying. It's insane.

But as we peel back the layers, we went on Joe, multiple articles came out. Joe and I pulled him off on Rogan. It was, I think, a week after I went and testified in front of the Senate. Joe and I on the podcast go through and methodically look, Monsanto, Monsanto. Multiple hatchet job articles were funded by Monsanto. Then I don't remember who wrote a hatchet job. Of all the things you could attack that people say, why would people be angry at you for saying this? It's just interesting to me. Yeah. Well, it's because the funding for those articles come from these lobbying groups that are funded by big pharma, big food, big ag, and they're terrified.

I was a magazine reporter, and I know what it's like to be told by your editor, you know, you should do a piece on this. And you have to think like, well, I'm probably being used in some way to settle some score or whatever. But if someone said like attack someone for saying that there might be a link between what you eat and your health, I would say, I'm not going to do that. Do you know what I mean? Like all the villains in the world, why am I attacking the guy who's pointing out?

First of all, one of the wildest Tucker and we went through this on Joe too, but it was, so I own these pharmacies, right? Yeah. We make a lot of the glp1s and weight loss drugs for pennies on the dollar because it is let's be real this is not an

obesity drug it is a diabetes medication yes and diabetes disproportionately yes and it disproportionately impacts poverty stricken communities minority communities yeah they can't afford this fucking price and they don't have insurance in a lot of those communities. So our goal is to bring cost-effective prescription medications to the masses to make this affordable for every human. And Jillian Jo, everyone was asking, why are all of these articles coming out about compounding pharmacies saying that it's dangerous for compounding pharmacies to make these drugs. And I explained it to him. Why is there a huge backlog? There's a huge backlog because one, it's being overprescribed, but two, because Eli Lilly got several of its facilities shut down via a whistleblower. Eli Lilly had a whistleblower that blew the whistle. And that was the only reason the FDA went into their facility. And what they found was unsterile conditions,

people working barefoot. They were lying and misrepresenting the dosages and the amounts. I mean, there's a whole article on it. You can go through that Reuters did that breaks down what happened. So the FDA hammered that facility and shut it down. And so that created a backlog where Lilly didn't have it. Here's where it gets dark. They are paying the media outlets that they fund $8 billion a year that Big Pharma puts into the

advertising with these media outlets. They are paying them to do stories indirectly, to do stories, hatchet job articles, scaring people away from cost effective alternatives like compounding pharmacies. Shut up and take your Ozempic. All the meanwhile. So one of these articles came out. I don't even remember who it was. It wasn't the Atlantic. It was, I don't even want to give them the credit. Anyways, the article at the end is an advertisement for Eli Lilly. And by the way, Eli Lilly's cutting the prices of Ozempic. They wrote an article about a recall one of my pharmacies had on 28 vials. 28 vials.

We ship over, we've treated over a million patient lives. We recalled 28 vials proactively. We didn't know for sure if there was a discrepancy, but in an abundance of caution, we recalled it. 28 vials. Made national news. Why? That's insanity.

That should not be national news. And we know the answer why. We know the answer why. And meanwhile, the whole time, the FDA has been in my building three times in 18 months. There are over 2,000 manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities that the FDA has not been in in five or more years.

Lilly and Pfizer have moved a huge amount of their manufacturing facilities overseas to third world countries like India. And they put them in rural areas where when an FDA inspector goes out there, they got to stay in a shithole hotel that has no water and shit. And so they don't want to go there.

And if they do go there, they have to give them a three months heads up because they've got to get visas and green cards and or whatever they call them over there, all these things and negotiate with the country to go in there for months at a time and so i just say all that because the narrative that's being delivered in the direction it's headed anything that's fda approved and these pharmaceutical companies are not making these super safe products there's in in in week ago for hours i. Well, I certainly don't take it. No chance. But one of the things Trump did,

and I'll wrap it up, but Trump, right now, already, Trump said we need to break up the PBMs. He's dead right. Spot on. Good work. He said, we need to move manufacturing

from overseas back to the United States. That would clean up all of these facilities that these big pharma companies are hiding. And then they're also hiding the dollars, the tax dollars over there, you know, because they're able to hide those dollars overseas and realize those revenue streams overseas. And bringing all that back and putting them right back in this country gives Americans jobs. It creates better oversight. I mean, several of the ideas that they have already floated out are phenomenal. Yeah. I mean, it's one thing for, you already floated out are phenomenal. Yeah, I mean,

it's one thing for, you know, Ozempic to be made abroad, but, you know, antibiotics are necessary and those should be made here. Yeah. Just for reasons

of national security. Absolutely. Brigham, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. I know it was a lot. That was the best. I'm going to, you're going to affect my sleep,

but I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Thanks, man. Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to TuckerCarlson.com to see everything that we have made. The complete library.