Brigham Buhler
speaker
1,533 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 27 Feb
Brigham Buhler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Why? How did we end up there? It's a long, twisted road. One of the things I've talked about a lot is, you know, in medicine, if you're going to understand or treat a disease state, you have to find the root cause. And if we go to find the root cause of the broken health care system in America, it runs deep and it's insidious and it's widespread.
So it's a lot to unpack, but it starts with our food, our diet, our lifestyle, our nutrition, our food sources. What you and I were talking about right before we went on the air is all the contaminants in our food, all the ingredients in our food.
You know, a good friend of mine, Bonnie Hari, has been beating the drum on all these media outlets lately, exposing like in the United States in the 80s, we had 700 approved ingredients in our food. Now we have 10,000. In Europe, it's still close to 700. Why in America do we have 10,000? One set of ingredients for Americans in the same factory and a different set of ingredients for Canadians.
whether it's Froot Loops or whatever it is, but that's one component of the issue. Then we go to the checks and balances. Like if we have a primary care in America that only has six minutes with a patient and they're controlled by what the insurance companies do, the main message that I have for people is it comes down to corporate capture.
Like if you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes. And our entire incentive systems in this country are based off monetizing and capitalizing off chronic disease. It's all about quarterly earnings, quarterly profits. Nowhere in anyone's business school or any of these executives is their priority to drive healthspan or to cure chronic disease.
Yeah. And health care is definitely one of those. And so throughout the system, the checks, the balances are. All of that has been ripped out, even with the collusion of our three-letter alphabet organizations. Whether we're talking about the FDA, the NIH, the CDC, all of these various entities have also been corporately captured.
A lot of their funding, a lot of their goals and initiatives are based off of helping these giant institutions that are monetizing these things.
You know what's wild is I was telling Joe this stuff like five years ago. And one day, Rogan's like, come on the podcast. And when I went on there... Nobody was talking about some of these things, like especially the insurance part. The insurance is one of these hidden monsters that people just don't know. And even to this day, they don't know.
And even after doing some of these bigger platforms like yourself, you know, now the message is getting out. And I've had people like Bobby Kennedy reach out and I went and sat down and even a guy said, who's been in the trenches, who's battled big pharma, who's battled these big corporate captured institutions. When I brought up PBMs, he said, I don't, what are you talking about a PBM?
I don't have a PBM, I have insurance. And that's the feedback most people give me. I don't know, I don't have a PBM. And so I have to like methodically walk them through what a PBM is, how it's hurting America's health. So if we look back to this whole profits first model, We talk so much about big pharma, big pharma, big pharma.
The big five insurance companies made four times the revenue of the biggest five pharmaceutical companies last year. Four X the revenue. They control every surgery, every drug, every treatment, when, where and how you can access health care and treatments and preventative care.
I think it's well, I never condone violence. And obviously what happened is terrible and tragic. But so are the 1.7 million people dying every year of chronic disease in this country. We spend more on health care than any other nation. But we're one of the fattest, sickest and most chronically ill societies in the history of the world. More people are dying every year.
You brought up SSRIs in the very beginning. More people are dying every year. of deaths of despair in the United States than ever before in the history of the world. We have more people dying now than during the Great Depression of suicide and deaths of despair. Why? What we're doing is not working. People have a hard time. Even what that guy Luigi did is terrible and it's tragic.
Terrible way to deliver the message, right? Nobody's condoning that. But it's also equally terrible and tragic to delay, deny, and depose people's ability to get the care they so desperately need. When people pay their hard-earned paycheck every month, and all they expect is to have you there when you need it, and then you don't allow them to access care. And I can explain why.
And I broke this down before. These insurance companies, right? They've made four times the revenue of the big pharmaceutical companies. Ask yourself how? How? They don't have a product. Their product is to be there in a time of need and provide you with care. And insurances were started right in Texas, at Baylor in Houston, Texas, where I was a device rep for literally 15 years.
And Baylor College of Medicine realized we need to be able to help people finance essentially preventative care and protect their bodies. Let's build in a monthly fee and then we'll allow them accessibility to stay healthy. But that eventually became a profit center.
And as these big insurance companies came in and acquired all the middlemen and all the checks and balances, 60% of the revenue of UnitedHealthcare last year, which was $361 billion with a B, 60% of it came from prescription drugs via an entity called a pharmacy benefit manager. Here's why this is a problem. You have now incentivized the insurance companies to put you on drugs.
The average American's on four or more fucking prescription drugs. Why? We're not lazier than we've ever been. I don't buy that. Do we have some lazy people? Yeah, we do. But there's no way. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Did we get chronically ill and chronically obese and then became lazy? Or did we become lazy because we were chronically ill and chronically obese? I don't know.
But we do know we're chronically ill, chronically obese, and probably a little lazy. I thought there was supposed to be caps on insurance company profits. Is that not the case? I'm unaware of any caps. The way that this is structured is, so PBMs were established in the 80s, and the premise was this.
The federal government here in the United States, as capitalistic as we are, realized we had a problem. And they said, look, these pharmaceutical companies are out of control. Their profit margins are through the roof. We've got to make medications affordable for the average American consumer and patient.
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