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
We're going to establish these pharmacy benefit managers that will go out and negotiate on behalf of companies, corporations, and the little man. And they will fight for us to drive down the cost of health care. And so they did.
For a period of time, they went out and they negotiated with big pharma and they got big corporations and companies together to lobby and put together our buying power to drive down the cost of a prescription drug, making it affordable, you know, for grandma and grandpa. Those were captured in the late 80s by the insurance companies.
And so what you saw, and one prime example I use all the time is insulin. Why does Eli Lilly make the same exact profit margin on insulin almost 30 years later, but the price of insulin has forexed? Where's the money going? It's like, where's the money, Lebowski? Where's the money? And when you peel back the layers to the onion and you look, the money is going to the insurance companies.
And so it's a little tricky to explain. So I'll walk you through it as seamlessly as I can. Insurance companies say, hey, there's these middlemen. Let's go buy them. They bought the middlemen. At that point, they controlled the negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies. And rather than negotiating down the price of the drugs,
They said, aha, what if we negotiate up the price of the drugs via rebates and what we would call kickbacks in any other industry? So they negotiated rebates on almost every major pharmaceutical product. And if you want to be on UnitedHealthcare's plan, you got to pay to play. If you want to be on Medicare, Medicaid, that is all an illusion. Medicare and Medicaid are outsourced to who?
the big five insurance companies. And so throughout the chain of checks and balances and the system, they are now monetizing chronic disease. They're incentivized for you to be on more and more medications because it's a profit center for them. And so to explain how that works, people go, wait a second, why would an insurance company mark it up? Because they're the ones paying for it. Bullshit.
They don't pay for it. Insurance companies pass that bill on at the end of the year to your employer. And 92% of people's insurance are from their employer. So most people never realize. And then they also have what's called gap pricing. So the only reason I know all this, just to take people to walk through history on me, is I had the touch points. I was a drug rep and I went from that.
I launched Cialis in North America, the Viagra competitor, which was a blast. It was fun. Everyone loved it. Nobody was complaining about Cialis. But then I got pivoted to antidepressants and antipsychotics, and I saw the dark side of big pharma.
And within eight months, I was out of there, and I was left to go be a device rep where I stood in surgeries with the best and brightest surgeons in the world, and I saw those problems. And then from there, I became a serial entrepreneur in healthcare where I attempted to work within the insurance framework. And what I saw was so eye-opening it made it all finally make sense.
I was like, oh my God, this is what they're doing. And once you know the magic trick, you can see it over and over and over again. And so the magic trick is we push people to medications and prescription drugs. A real world example would be the opioid crisis. What nobody realized, and an article came out maybe two months ago, I think in the New York Times,
30% of the money and revenue generated from opioid abuse in this country went to the big insurance companies. Never did they get indicted. Never did they get questioned. Never did they get sued. They skated scot-free, but they had negotiated rebates on opioids. Why that's important is I owned pharmacies that offered alternatives to opioids.
I would go out and educate clinicians on the importance of not prescribing opioids because I lost my brother to opioids. They pushed it into the market. They let Big Pharma ramrod it via a deal with the FDA. The head of the FDA then went to go work for Purdue Pharma, who brought that drug to market. for a big, huge, fat salary three years later.
Purdue Pharma, who created the volume crisis in the 70s, then perpetuated the opioid crisis in the 2000s, in the 90s. And then all of that was profiteered by big pharma and big insurance.
So opioids are very hard to get at this point. However... the equivalent to a 747 jet worth of people are dying every day to opioid related deaths because now that they cannot get opioids via clinicians, they've turned to black market. You've already created and perpetuated the problem. Now you've cut off the source and these people are turning to, you know, uh,
products from Mexico that are indirectly coming from China that are cut with fentanyl. And that's candidly what killed my brother. And so it's tragic. And then the most frustrating of all is Purdue Pharma's new blockbuster drug for opioid abuse.
They are now selling the cure to opioid abuse, which is a new product that does help reduce opioids and has way less side effects, but it is also addictive. So you're giving a new addictive product to an addict and now monetizing and perpetuating the problem you created.
And then they're also trying to obstruct the ability to products like Ibogaine in the United States, which is a one-time treatment and has over an 85% success rate. Getting people off. Yes, getting people off these drugs.
So what happened with opioids? How have they been pulled? So opioids, they put a lot of restrictions in place to make it harder. It's called triplicate. Clinicians have to document, document, document, and then prove they can justify and their license is at risk. And people went to prison because they were over... Protecting against overprescription. Correct. Because what happened is...
Like any boom, unfortunately, where there's a lot of money, there becomes a lot of bad actors. And that's what you're seeing today with even GLP-1s and weight loss drugs. You know, I mean, it's popped up on every corner. Every single freaking telemedicine company is candidly prescribing GLP-1s. And I'm not against them because we prescribe those at our company as well at Ways to Well, but...
Are they being overutilized, overprescribed and inappropriately utilized? For sure.
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