Danny Jones Podcast
#374 - Ex-Pharma Insider Exposes the $368 Billion Health Insurance Scam | Brigham Buhler
27 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is Brigham Buhler's background in the pharmaceutical industry?
Brigham. Thanks for coming, bro. Man, thank you for having me. Dude, of course. I'm so happy that Jesse Michaels was able to introduce us back in July when I was in Austin.
Oh, I love your show. It's funny. We were talking right before I listened to you and Jesse and Joe Rogan kind of broke me into this whole world, but I love your podcast, Jesse's podcast. They're phenomenal.
Yeah, dude. Thank you so much. And it's been awesome to get to meet you over the past few months and chat with you about this crazy stuff. You have a wild backstory. And to start this thing off, I think you should let people know the industry you came from and what you were doing for work back in the day, which led you down the path to where you are now with Ways to Well.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a wild story. There's a Steve Jobs quote that talks about when you look back at your life and connect the dots, you'll realize that you were always exactly where you're supposed to be. And I don't know how to explain it.
Even the bad things that have happened in the history of like where I was, everything put me in a position to know the things I know today that have allowed me to help like with the government and the lobbying and the fight against the corruption in the healthcare system. But I started out as a drug rep right out of college. like bright eyed bushy tail.
I went to University of Houston, they offered me a job to launch a drug that hadn't been announced yet. And I'm like a 20 year old kid and they're like, can you get out? Can you graduate in the next couple of months? So I like took 24 hours in summer school, did a bunch of stuff to try and get out of college early. And I got to launch Cialis in North America for a company called Eli Lilly.
So I started out right out of school, thinking that we were gonna, at the time, you gotta think I'm 45. So this was 25 years ago, which is crazy to say. I thought- That's insane. I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna help people and I'm gonna be a drug rep and I'm gonna educate doctors on like cutting edge treatments and we're gonna change the world.
And you get into that and we can get into it, but that's not at all what that was. And so within a couple of years, I figured it out pretty quick for a kid that this isn't gonna work for me. And I jumped out of that into MedDevice.
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Chapter 2: What are the primary issues with the American healthcare system?
And I spent almost a decade working in the operating room with some of the best and brightest surgeons in America. And I got a look behind the curtain of the surgical market and the hospital systems and the insurance systems and how all of this is an intricate network that's intertwined.
um and during that time frame is when i lost my brother to the opioid crisis which then led to me starting a pharmacy that build insurances and worked within the insurance framework trying to provide non-abusive non-addictive opioid alternatives to the american people a no-brainer like it's safer it's better it's cheaper and what i saw like just shocked me
And from there, I evolved into realizing I wasn't going to be able to stay alive as an entrepreneur in an insurance model. And so it led to me finding a farm, building a pharmacy, breaking away, starting a cash pay pharmacy almost a decade ago, which was at the time, nobody did that. Like nobody had cash pay farm. People like, what are you doing? You're going to sell meds. Everyone has insurance.
What do you mean we're going to pay cash? Right. because that whole COVID event hadn't happened yet. And the movement towards preventative care hadn't happened yet. And I've been talking about preventative care, predictive medicine for almost a decade. And the reason I was doing it was candidly, like to paraphrase all of it, I saw that the ship was sinking
And I knew the only way to fix this was to build a life raft. And in my mind, the life raft was to get proactive, predictive and preventative. You've got to take yourself out of the broken health care system because under every rock I looked under in that system, there was another rattlesnake.
It was terrifying what I saw from the surgical market to the drug rep market, to the care that patients got, to the collusion of industry, to the power that they had over the hospitals.
people think that if they have insurance and they trust the system that they're going to be taken care of and it's unfortunate because i've said this before but like if you use insurance and you go to the average primary care in america and you get the average blood work and you get on the average medication don't be surprised when you die of the average chronic disease right
The system's not built to prevent, it's built to monetize and profiteer off chronic disease. And that's just the facts.
Yeah, I've noticed that just from all the podcasts I've listened to over the past however many years it's been, listening to smart people and doctors talk about different types of metabolic health and- exercise and like vitamins, like the importance of all these things that your primary health physician doesn't really know much about.
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Chapter 3: Why should patients consider self-paying for prescription drugs?
There has never been one single autopsy. There has never been the ability to quantify serotonin levels in the brain that statistically show that antidepressants are working at a chemical level. So you go, wait, then how did they come up with that? Pfizer developed a questionnaire alongside one of their consultants who at the time ran the American Psychiatric Association for America.
And they tasked him with a questionnaire about depression. All of these are diagnostic tests that are question-based. There was never, it was a theory that got written into history as a reality. But the reality of the matter is we have no evidence that it is a serotonin related issue.
That's insane. That's like taking a questionnaire to figure out what your cholesterol is. Exactly.
Yeah, that's my, and so furthermore, even to this day, exercise and sleep outperform antidepressants. Somebody, if they just go for a walk, it's going to astronomically outperform antidepressants. Yeah. Here's the trends on all.
I mean, and it's a growing market and it's a booming market and it's a market that has been marketed and perpetuated and beat into the heads of primary care since they were in med school.
Yeah.
And they think, and I'm not saying your doctor thinks they're doing wrong. Your doctor believes in the system that trained them. But who built that system and who funds that system? And where does their continuing education come from? It's all bought, paid for, and developed by the very companies that have the most to benefit by you being on a prescription drug.
And that is why you've seen a boom in prescription drugs. Today, the average American's on four or more prescription drugs. The average American is on four or more prescription drugs.
So explain to me how that downstream works or that stream, the incentive. The players. So you have the physician on the bottom floor. Then there's you, you're collaborating with the physician or meeting, taking them out to dinner and stuff like that. And then you work for the pharmaceutical company that's selling these antidepressants.
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Chapter 4: How do insurance companies influence medication prescriptions?
Here's an antidepressant. Okay, and I'm just throwing whack-a-mole at you trying to fix the problem and I got to get off and get into the next room. And that's how that whole system has been built over the last 30, 40 years. Wow. And so the problem with that is it's going to lead to more and more Prescriptions, which is great for Wall Street. It's great for the big pharmaceutical companies.
It's not great for the patient. And so like today, if somebody were to come into a practice like Waze Dwell, or any practice, any cash pay medical practice, on average, we spend 45 minutes with a patient. We do a comprehensive analysis that usually at minimal includes blood work, a DEXA, and a VO2 max. None of those things would be allowed in a traditional healthcare system.
Even blood work, people go, no, no, my primary care pulls blood work. Or women will go, no, no, my OB-GYN pulls blood work. No, they pull a minimal panel. And the way I know that is I also owned a blood lab where I went out and I marketed to primary cares in Texas. And I educated these clinicians in Texas on the importance of doing comprehensive blood work.
Because if you're going to put somebody on a medication, shouldn't we at least know where they stand physiologically? Shouldn't we uncover if there's some sort of hormonal issue that could be causing the depression or anxiety? Right. And the answer is absolutely yes. But when they try to do that, the insurance company go, whoa, what are you doing?
No, no, no, we don't want you pulling all that blood work. No, you're allowed to pull five panels. Go back and pull five panels. If you keep pulling comprehensive blood work, we're gonna terminate your contract.
And so clinicians throughout the state of Texas got nasty letters telling them, if you continue to pull blood work, we will fire you as a clinician for Blue Cross Blue Shield or Cigna or Aetna or United. And the problem with that is most Americans are covered by their employer and five insurance companies cover 90% of the coverage in America for the average American.
So five insurance companies are controlling all access to what gets tested, what gets looked at. And that is not based off what's best for you. It's based off them hitting their quarterly earnings and quarterly profits.
I just don't understand why they would be so hesitant to want more blood work, because if they got more blood work, wouldn't that just be more opportunity for them to prescribe more shit?
so things like is it just because it's too expensive well think about this you if the blood blood work surgeries a lot of these things are costly to the insurance companies right right right and if i'm an executive at united healthcare and i look at it and i go hey uh brigham is pre-diabetic i know that if brigham progresses to diabetes on average it's going to cost us seven to eight times the cost annually to keep him alive and functioning you would think wow
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the new stem cell treatments from Japan?
You got rid of the silver bullet that was preventing the cascade effect of decline. Now they go on an anti-estrogen, I mean, on a... osteoporosis drug, but that doesn't fix the hot flashes. So now you got to put them on a hot flash drug.
And now they're on a hot flash drug and an osteoporosis drug, and now they're having hot flashes, osteoporosis, vaginal dryness, no sex drive, all of these other issues. Now they're depressed, now they're on antidepressants, and now it's this cascade. And then you can rapidly see how did they get on four or more prescription drugs, right?
Because we've now built a system that has cut off the lifeline for these women. And it was a tragedy and it happened and it was real. And it was the same thing with testosterone. It became dogma, that dogma was manipulated and utilized. And it wasn't until the 90s when big pharma decided it was gonna sell testosterone.
When you were asking about that earlier, Pfizer launched a testosterone cream into the market that changed everything. And that's when all of a sudden they started looking and going, wait a second, This study is kind of bullshit. What are we doing here? And it took 30 years for that. I mean, not even longer than that. That was 1997, I think.
So we're literally talking almost 30 years before the FDA changed its stance on testosterone.
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Chapter 6: How do Muse stem cells differ from traditional stem cells?
That's scary. To match the data.
Explain to me what you've been doing, because you've been working with Bobby Kennedy, right? As far as like pushing these peptides, trying to get these fighting for the peptides. Yeah. And you kind of like been helping him and educating him because he can't pay attention to all this stuff. There's too much stuff going on. Yeah.
And I know there was a lot of skepticism about Bobby Kennedy before the election happened, like even leading up to when he was trying to get confirmed, right? Like there was people like the Cali Means and his sister, Casey, who were going on Tucker Carlson, going on Rogan, talking about the hyper processed foods.
And because, I mean, Bobby has historically been known for the guy who wrote the books about the vaccines, who called out Fauci. He was like the vaccine guy. A lot of people labeled him as this conspiracy theorist. And, you know, right before he was getting confirmed, he kind of, he kind of like, wasn't talking about vaccines. Now it's all about hyper processed foods.
So like people were like, I had a, I did a debate on this podcast with, I don't know if you saw it. It was, uh, Callie Means and Jack Cruz. And he was like, what's going on? He's like, what is this pushback to the vaccine? People were thinking that the vaccine companies had gotten to Bobby.
Yeah.
Right. And that's the only reason.
I think that was political strategy.
I think it was too.
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Chapter 7: What advancements are being made in the field of psychedelics?
Getting initiated. Yeah, and so I think it was a strategic move that made great political sense. Stay silent on a topic that could be polarizing. Give yourself time. Live to fight another day. And the plan worked because now Secretary Kennedy has been able to fix the vaccine schedule and bring it back to the right to choose. Right. That's what's crazy about all that.
To me, if you want to vaccinate your child, vaccinate your child.
Right. If you want to smoke a cigarette, smoke a cigarette, but know what the fuck it is. Yes.
And all Secretary Kennedy has done is provide a pathway for people to have what option they think is best for them and their personal situation. That's it. And get rid of the mandate.
If you're trying to get, or I completely understand, I think any rational thinker could understand, any reasonable person can see, if you want to get through, get into, initiate into this system, this political system where you're surrounded by people whose pockets are lined by pharmaceutical companies, you're not going to get through the door saying vaccines need to be abolished. Correct.
And made illegal because- Because you also got to think you've got to get through all these other politicians and these politicians have been lobbying and these politicians have been indoctrinated into a system that they believe in. Right. And all the things we talked about, like I said, so many people go, it's not FDA approved, bad.
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Chapter 8: How do regulatory challenges impact healthcare innovation in the U.S.?
It is FDA approved, good. Right. And it's not that black and white. It is not that binary. It's not zero or one. It's both in every instance. What is the tool in the tool belt? What is the patient? What is unique to this individual? It should be a choice. I am a huge proponent of freedom of choice. It is your choice. It is your job to take care of your body and your family.
And I've listened to Cali take bullets over focusing on food and they say he ignored big pharma and he did this and he did that. And it's just not true. I think Callie is trying to shoot the alligator that's closest to the boat. And my experience with Callie Means and Casey Means is they are stewards of the American people and that they're fighting for truth.
And Callie and I have collaborated on a lot of different things and work together. And his focus and his history is in the food beverage industry, right? And so he's intimately familiar with the tactics. He was a lobbyist for that stuff, right? Correct. for Coca-Cola. And so he knows where the bodies are buried. He knows the secret to the game and he knows how corrupt it is.
And I'm sure he broke down for you how most of the big food companies are now nothing more than shills that were acquired by the big tobacco industry. And they implemented that same lobbying and that same strategy in that sector. But if you look at what's actually happening at this point in time,
Whatever Callie and Bobby did was right because not only have they freed up the freedom of choice on vaccines, we've already began to overhaul the food system. There was an announcement made again with the food pyramid and they flipped it upside down and everyone's like, well, that's not that big of a deal. And it's like, no, but what you don't understand is this isn't just a guideline.
Right.
this guideline and framework is literally what influences school food programs our welfare food programs our governmental payer programs our military food programs and it establishes precedent and that precedent will cascade throughout the rest of the united states and what we feed our children in schools will lead to the diet lifestyle and behaviors they carry into adulthood
And when we were feeding children ultra-processed foods and Cokes, and most of the food stamps were being spent on soft drinks, which is nothing more than diabetes in liquid form. They're still doing that at my kid's school. Are they really? Yeah. It's so crazy. I testified in Texas for the food bill, the Maha food bill. And literally in my testimony, the lady opens a Coke and goes ā
Right into the mic and takes her drink. And I was trying to explain to them, do you know what, like, let's just put all your ego aside. Put this as like, this is a battle between me and you. Let's just look at it pragmatically. The difference between a chronically ill, dying human being of diabetes and a healthy human being is less than a teaspoon of sugar in the blood at a time.
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