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
well since the 1930s but it got captured in the 80s and became uh 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 all
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 ahold of our healthcare institutions and took over,
they begin 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 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 owned the pbm it's like scooby-doo so you pull the mask off it's like oh it was mr rogers all along so pbm stands for pharmacy benefit man pharmacy benefit manager and 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.
Drugmaker 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 are politicians they don't understand this and they don't get it and i'm trying to 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 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 is 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... 600 million dollars and you look at these uh big insurance companies they did two and a half that in revenue 2.5 times that in revenue they did 1.5 trillion dollars north of one point they're projecting that they'll do 1.9 trillion dollars in revenue by 2029. so
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, and 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. 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 bill and work within the insurance framework. So if you or 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?
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.
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