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
Now, a lot of times the insurance companies denies the MRI. You have to fight the insurance company. So they delayed your care, delayed your ability to go from person to person. They deny the coverage of the care, okay? And now the last shoe to drop is you finally get the MRI. You finally get the surgery approved. You go out, you interview clinicians.
You find the best and brightest surgeon in your geographic region. This is a spine surgery. It's not something you take lightly. You find the surgeon you want. You set your date for surgery and the insurance company says, no, you're not allowed to use that surgeon. That surgeon is not on our preferred plan. You've got to use this surgeon over here. So you're not getting the best surgeon for you.
You're getting the best surgeon for the insurance company's pocketbook and what they could negotiate the rate down to the cheapest reimbursement rate. And then where insult comes to injury, after you've paid all that insurance in all these years, You typically on a surgery have a $10,000 copay or deductible to scare you out of doing the surgery. So imagine being a 26 year old kid.
You're miserable. You've been on opioids. Your genitals are on fire. Now you finally get a surgery done by a doctor. You didn't want to do it. And you pay $10,000 out of your pocket that you're on the hook for. That's why the number one reason for bankruptcy in America is health care.
They've essentially made the hospitals, the MRI centers, the surgery centers, any of the touch points in the ecosystem, subprime mortgage lenders. You don't have a choice as a hospital. You're taking UnitedHealthcare. What are you going to do? Turn around, turn away thousands of patients a month. That's your lifeline to keep your doors open.
So you eat the bill of the $10,000 and do your best to get the patient to pay. And so for that patient, now you get your surgery. And in this particular instance, the guy supposedly botched the surgery. He had bad outcomes. And those bad outcomes can lead to permanent erectile dysfunction. It can lead to permanent neuropathic pain.
Not to mention, you know, anywhere from 40 to 50% of patients who have a spine surgery will go back under the knife within 18 months for another spine surgery. Yep. And so you are caught in this feedback loop system where you're perpetually in pain, perpetually prescribed drugs and hoping that you can just get an answer and you can't ever get an answer.
And this is the loop that these American people are trapped in. And this is why people are so angry and so frustrated, you know, when their cancer treatments are denied or whatever, whatever it is, is denied. And that's a whole racket, too, even in oncology. What people don't realize is anywhere from 60 to 70% of an oncologist's income comes from marking up your chemotherapy drugs.
So every part of the system has incentivized people to make money off you being sick. And so then we're sitting here shocked. I heard Russell Brand go, oh yeah, it's shocking, America. Like you're all in awe over the fact that you're perpetually sick and that profits are at an all-time high, but you've built a system to have all-time high profits and make yourselves perpetually sick.
As crazy as that sounds, it's the truth.
What's crazy is you're also describing the American health care system. That's that's where we've gone to because because it's all insurance based, the average clinician has six minutes with a patient even. And so another example is I owned blood labs and I went out and I educated clinicians across the country on the importance of getting proactive and predictive. What do I mean by that?
The diabetes you develop in your 30s started in your 20s, right? The atherosclerosis that manifests in your 40s started in your 30s. The cancer you get in your 50s started in your 40s.
If we get proactive and predictive, if we start by taking a look under the hood, if we truly do a deep dive into you at the biological level and create checks and balances like you would in a business, like you would in any other aspect of life, you like to go, hey, am I headed towards my goal? And Peter Atiyah talks about this.
If your goal is to live to be a happy, healthy centenarian, which I think is a great goal for most people, if you could be physically healthy and lift your grandkids and enjoy life and go on hikes, we have to assess you periodically and gauge, are we trending the right way or the wrong way? And the system's not built to do that.
The system is built to push you in, push you out, monetize your chronic disease and profiteer off of the drugs. And doctors are nothing more than an unwitting patsy in the process.
So, I mean, I can tell you real world, the doctors care. They're exhausted. There's a massive shortage in primary cares. A study done by Harvard said there's going to be 30% less primary cares in the next five years. Most primary cares, when interviewed, said they are not happy with their job and they don't want to be doing it in three to five years. It is an exhausting beat down of a job.
And it's because of this pace. They're not. It's the pace. It's that you don't allow them to solve problems. It's that it's been corporately captured. Most primary cares in America are now part of big conglomerates. So even let's go back to big insurance. Blue Cross Blue Shield went out and bought Kelsey Siebel. Kelsey Siebel is one of the biggest primary care practices in the country.
It is owned by the insurance companies. Okay, when I owned a blood lab and I went out and educated clinicians on the importance of running that comprehensive blood work annually, and my clinicians started running that, thousands of clinicians around the country, within months, they all got letters from the insurance carriers saying, what are you doing? We don't want you running this blood work.
It costs us money. Go back to running a basic lipid panel, knock on the knee, look in the ear, test their eyes and look at a basic lipid panel of triglyceride cholesterol, which tells us minimally nothing, right? Because you don't have the full range of what's going on. And that's the challenge. We can't get proactive and predictive and preventative if we aren't able to look at
And the existing insurance ecosystem in America will not allow the clinician to look.
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