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
Like, 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. Met Forman cost me, I'm going to use ballpark numbers, roughly $2 for a month's supply. I would have sold you the Met Forman 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 seven dollars 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 chain 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, it 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.
Oxycontin.
And what 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 American's 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 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 boldface lie.
And then that individual went to go work for Purdue Pharma 18 months later when they left the FDA. That's shocking. Shocking.
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. And women got addicted to Valium all over the country. Incredibly dangerous drug, yeah. 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 health care costs.
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.
Showing 961–980 of 1,533 · page 49 of 77
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