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Nov. 10, 2025 - Owen Shroyer Live
01:00:05
Dr. Drew Explains Why Health Care Costs Are High And How Politicians Help Big Pharma
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Well, good morning to our friends on the West Coast.
And I guess, well, it's just good afternoon for you now if you're on the East Coast.
This is Ask the Doctor, brought to you by the wellness company.
Our guest today is Dr. Drew.
And I think a lot of people are going to want to talk about insurance, why their insurance prices are soaring, what's going on.
Of course, now it looks like Congress is ready to sit down and sign a bill.
I think that's because they saw the airports starting to get backed up more than anything.
I think that might have been the motivating factor there.
But nonetheless, insurance is a big part of this.
Obamacare, all of this coming into play.
People have questions.
They're seeing their premiums about to skyrocket.
All of this is going on.
Dr. Drew is going to weigh in on this.
We're going to take calls from the audience as well.
Another issue that a lot of people are talking about, which is near and dear to the wellness company, is that now that these Democrat governors are starting to get into power, we're worried about a blue wave in the midterms as well.
What are people going to do if they take some of these drugs off the shelves and make them unavailable, like ivermectin?
We've seen politicians do this before, specifically in the pandemic when people really needed it.
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All right, Dr. Drew, let's try to lay into this.
Let's try to make sense of this insurance debacle as I might call it.
Now, you might have seen what I saw really last week and then this weekend: people opening up their insurance bills and they're seeing their primaries go from $200 to $800.
They're seeing their annual bills go from $20,000 to $50,000.
Dr. Drew, what is going on with this?
Well, what's going on is reality is coming to bear.
And here's the, from my perspective, there are a couple fundamental things to keep in mind.
One was Obamacare should have been insurance reform and it was not.
And insurance is interposed between the medical delivery system and the patients.
And 60% of it is administrative and nonsense.
It's money taken away from your healthcare.
On top of that, and this is the bigger issue for me: insurance was in healthcare, is designed to be insurance against catastrophe, not a complete entitlement to everything you should wish from the healthcare system.
Why should you have to pay for food and not have to pay for some health care?
Yes, you shouldn't be wiped out by healthcare costs.
There should be insurance against that.
But high-deductible insurance is not expensive.
And we have to educate people.
And by the way, you could, many people could do it themselves with a medical shoot, I'm blanking on what they call the saving, made a medical savings account.
You can do that yourself, but the distortions and all private market stuff, right?
I mean, the American people should have that option.
And let's not get into the social security thing, but to me, it's the same principle, right?
It's saying, I will save my money.
I will decide how much money I want for health care or retirement.
I don't need the government in here deciding what it is and then doling it out for the rest of the people.
Right.
And let's face it, there are people that can't do that and need the support of government for sure.
That's not everybody, nor should it ever be everybody in this system.
The problem is people get very uncomfortable with any ideas about two-tiered systems, a public system and a private system, like they have, say, in Great Britain.
And we should get very used to that.
We should have multiple tiered systems, as far as I'm concerned, where you can, this is, this is America.
You should be able to pick and choose what you want.
But keep in mind two things.
The relationship between the physician and the patient is your most efficient unit.
Anything you put on top of that, anything.
encumbers it, makes it less efficient, more costly.
And this is where TWC came in.
I know you've interviewed Dr. Kelly Victory before.
She said something to me a couple of years ago.
She goes, you know, if we were talking about getting people ready with these emergency kits so they could have antibiotics on hand and telehealth backup, if you'd been telling me, you know, had this as a notion six, seven years ago, I would have thought you were crazy.
And then she said, but now I think you're crazy if you don't do this because we have seen what the government can do.
We've seen what the public health system can do.
They don't take risk reward into consideration.
They have a totalitarian instinct that is disgusting.
And it's the ultimate interference with healthcare.
And now I think also, once again, people are feeling like the government lied to them, disenfranchised them.
A lot of people are opening up these bills and they're saying, wait a second, this is not affordable health care.
This is the exact opposite.
Now they're wondering how they're even going to be paying for it.
I mean, do you think I'm really quickly?
I just want to say people have this misconception that the providers are the major cost.
We are not.
It's the hospitals and the pharmaceuticals.
And those are encumbered with massive amounts of administrative infrastructure.
It's all encumbrances taken away from you and the doctor.
Listen, you know, just left to the private system, I get like $60 per visit through Medicare, right?
And Medi-Cal is even significantly lower, Medicaid.
And I can literally be saving someone's life, be spending an afternoon in the ICU.
I might get $150 from the government.
The insurance might pay me $250.
A plastic surgeon spending the same amount of time doing a road procedure, not that plastic surgeons aren't well trained and had to go through a lot to get there, but it's a fairly simple matter to do some of the procedures they do as compared to the complexity of decision-making and the dangerous circumstances of ICU care or making medical decisions in that outpatient setting.
They don't get twice what I get paid.
They don't get 10 times what I paid.
They get between 100 times and 1,000 times what I get paid.
That's the distortions in this system.
It's a mess.
It's a complete mess.
But the enemy is the administration.
The enemy is everything that's between the doctor and the patient.
Well, and I think you just honed into something here that maybe you can shed a little more light on because, and some people might have experienced this throughout their lives going to a private practice or even to a chiropractor is the first time they might hear about the insurance scam because a lot of these chiropractors are very, you know, they're against insurance too.
They'd rather have you cut them a check for a penny than go through the insurance company.
It's such a mess.
You mentioned some of the administrative costs, some of the bureaucratic costs that go along with, I guess, running the hospital and everything.
How much of that is inflated because, I don't know, like a no-bid contract situation?
Like, are the hospitals interested in bringing down these bills or are they interested in keeping them as high as possible?
Well, they've got it pretty good right now.
So I don't imagine that they're highly motivated to massively change things.
But, you know, it's another thing.
I was working with the Kaiser system lately, which is a sort of an HMO style system, which is what you would end up with if we had a single payer system.
You don't understand how these systems work.
They work by restricting access to care.
And I had this experience with Kaiser recently where they will hold off on your care until you die because then you're no longer their concern.
So their motivation is to delay access as much as possible.
Now, the other thing that we need to keep in mind is we could save probably $500 billion if we had a more rational approach to end of life care.
Something like 40, 50% of the healthcare expense is all administered at the end of life, and most of it is fruitless services.
We have to come to terms with death and dying in this country, and we have to make it a part of life, and we have to make it a dignified process.
I'm not talking about assisted suicide.
I'm talking about not putting somebody in the ICU on a ventilator who has zero probability of survival.
We do that all the time.
Well, I've never really heard this before.
You're talking about the bulk of the bulk of the expenses being towards end of life care, which the majority of it is fruitless.
I mean, that's when during RFK Jr.'s hearing, I don't know if you watch that hearing in front of the Senate, but there was one senator, there was one senator that was talking, was not talking nonsense.
They were all talking nonsense, except this senator from Rhode Island who brought this up and he said, you know, Secretary, I want to work with you on this.
It is an insane thing that we do this.
It is a waste of money and we have to come up with a way to manage this.
And RFK said, RFC Jr. said, 100%, let's go do it.
Call my office.
Let's get on it.
And we have such discomfort.
There's so many things in medicine that we have an unrealistic expectation of.
And curative care when it's not possible is one of those areas.
And aging and death and dying is a part of life.
We have denial about being biological in this country.
We're going to prevent a respiratory virus from infecting people.
That's massive denial about the basics of biology.
That can't happen.
We're going to vaccinate our way out of this.
That's a denial of reality.
It's all some sort of weird, wishful thinking that we can conquer biology.
No, biology is just a giant probability equation embedded in the first and second law of thermodynamics, and nature wins.
Entropy always increases.
We break down.
That's the way it goes.
Prepare for it, minimize it.
There are ways you can fight it back.
But once it comes, plan for it and don't waste everything in your family's coffers or the government's coffers at the end there for just misery, frankly, for just suffering.
That's the only thing we accomplish.
So we're talking about, I think this is going to be maybe the biggest story this week.
It was a huge story last week.
It kind of got a little bit of a distraction mechanism because of the air traffic control issues, which I think they're going to try to get figured out this week.
But eventually this issue with the healthcare costs and the raising premium prices that are going to hit in January, eventually this thing's going to take over the news cycle.
Eventually, this thing is going to dominate the news cycle for a week.
I don't know if it's going to be this week or I don't know if it's going to be next year when this thing starts hitting.
So you kind of got into maybe one issue here.
We're dealing with administrative costs.
We're dealing with the bulk of the costs being towards end of life care instead of getting ahead of things like pre-care.
And number three, not being an entitlement.
You're not entitled to embedded in that entitlement issue is actually a philosophical problem where people expect medication and healthcare to make life better.
That is not what we're for.
Ordinary misery is good.
It builds resiliency and it builds problem solving.
Ordinary misery is good.
But if there's a disabling problem or a life-threatening problem, that's where we come in.
That's where medicine comes in.
But everything up to that point, that should be an out-of-pocket expense.
It's very, look, we do it for next to nothing with the wellness company.
There are creative ways to do basic health care that is extremely inexpensive if they allow us that freedom to do it.
Yeah.
Well, and also I'd say taking care of yourself.
I mean, so much of healthcare has become a response mechanism instead of a, hey, are you exercising?
You know, what are you eating?
There are certain things that you can do in your life that might make it easier for yourself and whatever health issues you might have in the future.
And, you know, one other thing you mentioned to me, the biggest, the biggest crime when these people talk about entitlements, and I do view it as a crime, is there's one, there's a, there's a question that never gets asked.
And it's conveniently left out, this question, which is, so are doctors supposed to work for free?
What is this concept that people are somehow entitled to health care?
Or, you know, the buzzword is free health care.
Of course, they move it and they say, well, it's affordable because nothing is free.
And I always wonder, I always wonder the people that promote these ideas in a nation now that is maybe the most sick nation on the planet.
We're the most obese nation on the planet.
So we're going to have the health issues.
It's like, do you expect doctors to work for free?
What do you think is going to happen when you have all these people coming into the hospital with all of these issues and you don't have the doctors anymore?
There's no such thing.
We're already there.
We are there.
People don't understand this, that my field, primary care, you have to be out of your mind to go into it.
Across my career, 30% of what I did was for free across my career.
And now, like I told you, it barely covers my cost of running a practice, barely.
Unless you work incredibly long hours, where you're working six hours after office hours where you can start to make some living.
It's like I said, if you're a plastic surgeon, it's a thousand times better.
And at minimum, a hundred times better.
And many subspecialties, a hundred times better.
So who's going to go into these fields?
Well, I think it's actually been designed that way.
I think they're trying to push physicians out so they can use something called physician extenders, which are nurse practitioners and PAs and things, which are who are actually quite good these days.
But when I remember, I was sitting at a roundtable.
You know, I did CNN for 10 years.
I was at a roundtable with Anna Navarro and Anderson Cooper.
And I used the term physician extenders.
And they all went, oh my God, what are you talking about?
I said, what am I talking about?
You're not going to see a doctor in the future because the doctor is going to sit three rows back and administer over dozens of other people who are actually doing the work.
And of course, it's impossible to do that effectively.
Again, this is all fantasy in terms of what good health care is.
So when you talk about the, it's a necessity because there aren't enough doctors is what you're saying.
I'm saying the market forces they put in place, you're not going to, you're going to have primarily physicians assistants and nurse practitioners and not doctors, because why would you go into these fields?
You just wouldn't do it.
Why would you train for 16 years to go into something where you can barely make a living?
It makes no sense.
Now, my hope is that what Oz is doing in terms of his suburban or rural care, that $50 billion, I think that's going to entice primary care people out into the rural areas where they could make a living possibly.
He understands, you know, he's been practicing medicine as long as I have, and he understands so many of the problems in this system.
Well, I would see that as the only outcome.
Eventually, you know, doctors are going to want to do what's best for them.
And if they think that, you know, going into one of these clinics where they're going to be working for free most of the time, tired most of the time, and then they see, as you point out, let's say a plastic surgeon who's making 10 times what they make.
No, no, no, not 10 times, 100 times or 1,000 times.
That's the thing.
It's an insane amount more.
Is that because of the clientele or how does that?
How does that end up that way?
Because it's just the market.
They allow the market to come to bear and the people that did just what the market bears for those services.
Now, you know, when I go into a plastic surgeon's office, I just think to myself, oh, this is what rich people do with their money in 2025.
So they are definitely serving a certain clientele, but it's what the market bears.
That's just what the market bears.
Now, I'm not saying that internists should be making 100 times more than they do, but twice, three times would make a huge difference, huge difference.
But there's no movement in that direction.
Well, maybe in this, maybe in Oz's new plan.
I don't know.
I haven't seen it yet.
Well, then, I guess I would wonder, how is it that we as a country spend the most money on health care and end up with the least healthy country?
I think that these issues are somehow tied to one another.
Well, it's multiple, multiple issues, right?
You know, first of all, we simultaneously under-treat and over-treat.
We get it exactly wrong, right?
So, on one hand, we tell people they're entitled to this, all the answers are in the healthcare system, which they are not.
We are here for disabling and dangerous conditions.
And then we are not, as you mentioned, but Maha's getting at this, which is teaching people how to live healthy lives and what it is to be healthy.
But the one, the part that we have not gotten into yet is the mental health piece, which is massively out of control.
Our mental health in this country is just abysmal.
And again, there too, we both undertreat and over-treat.
And so much of what's done in terms of the over-treatment side is people go to a primary care doctor who has six minutes per patient, so maybe three minutes per patient, and who is not going to do psychotherapy with you, not even ask many questions, maybe give you an anxiety or depression inventory, and then open their prescription pad.
And again, everything's in a pill now.
Everything, everything, everything.
So massive over-prescribing of psychotropic medication.
I worked in a psychiatric hospital for 30 years.
I was always interested in psychiatry.
And after about five years of working there, I had accumulated a certain amount of expertise in psychiatry that I knew the average internist did not have.
And I thought, wow, I know a lot now.
And I know I don't know shit.
I don't know shit.
You have to have a psychiatrist consult.
We don't have enough psychiatrists to do the proper care right now, which is another massive thing.
And we've dismantled the mental health system completely.
That's why you have all the people in the streets.
Do you know the story how that happened?
Are you talking about when we shut down the insane asylums?
You say insane asylums.
You know, look, Ken Keese wrote, one flew over the cuckoo's nest in 1959.
That's 70, it's coming in on 75 years ago, nearly 100 years ago.
You don't think psychiatric care has changed since then?
Psychiatric hospitalization is beautiful and humane and socially modeled and outdoors and tons of caring people.
And we can do a ton, and we are refusing to do it.
We are refusing to do it.
And, you know, what happened was people believe that it was Ronald Reagan that dismantled the public health system.
It was not.
John F. Kennedy, his last signature before he went to Dallas, his fateful trip to Dallas, his last signature was on the Community Mental Health Act, which was explicitly designed by the directors of the National Institute of Mental Health, by the way.
They used him all the way along because of his concerns about the overdeployment of psychiatric interventions because of his sister Rosemary, who had a frontal lobotomy.
It was psychiatry has been out of control many times.
Sometimes I work, I walk past the Scientology Museum of Horrors they have there, and I think to myself, no, they have a point.
It's horrible things that have been done in the home of psychiatry over the years.
Not anymore, but then.
And he signed the Community Mental Health Act, which was explicitly designed to put the delivery system that had taken 150 years to develop, some of which was bad, some of which was excellent, dismantle it and be replaced by community mental health centers who were designed to, quote, prevent mental illness.
There is no such thing.
We don't know how to do that to this day.
And the community mental health centers were an abject disaster.
And Reagan closed the last community mental health centers.
Not the hospitals, the community mental health centers.
And the really hideous part about it was the patients, the hundreds of thousands of patients that were let out of these institutions where they needed services, they were released to the street, the prisons, and death, and the streets.
And that's it.
And there they have remained.
The fact is, some people need custodial care.
Lots of people need sort of care what they're urged into, not kidnapped and put in services.
Just your brain isn't working right.
Come with me.
Let's help.
If dementia, you're required by law to intervene.
Schizophrenia, you're not allowed to touch them.
Same symptom complex.
One is privileged.
One is required.
How does that work?
What are we doing?
Yeah, most people have probably never even heard this.
And, you know, it's always been a bit of a taboo.
And, you know, they coined the famous funny farm phrase because they were working on farms, which is a good thing.
You put people to work.
They're working with their hands.
It can help them get their brain improving.
There's even been science with touching soil and the different elements in there.
Well, that's how Kennedy got sober.
RFK Jr. got sober at a farm like that.
And he has actually supported several of these over the years and has sent many hundreds of people into treatment.
And he wants to open a lot of them around the place, around the country.
Good idea.
Problem is, we've let people deteriorated so much that they're not in any shape to go to places like that.
We're going to have to stabilize them and spend months and months getting them medically and psychiatrically stabilized.
Yeah.
And we were kind of talking about that before because I live in Austin, Texas.
And, you know, I mean, it's not rare.
You can drive around, walk around Austin.
You'll see one of these cases.
It's really heartbreaking.
I mean, we can have a laugh.
You know, it's, you know, sometimes it's funny to see what they're up to, but it's actually heartbreaking that these people are in such a state of mind.
And, you know, the taboo, I don't know if there's a, there's a movie came out about 10, 20 years ago that kind of highlights this taboo.
And it's more of a suspense drama.
It's called Shutter Island.
And the whole, the whole point is like, is what they're doing on this island really that bad?
Or is it all this like kind of rumor and innuendo, but they're really helping people?
But I had, you know, Dr. Michael Savage, who I've been a fan of my entire life, he kind of reframed this.
And it's exactly what you said.
And it made me rethink the whole idea of the mental institutions, which is that, and this is the reframing that I think we need in this country.
This is, it is care.
It is, it is, you could even call it health care, but more importantly, it's humane.
It's humane.
You have to, I have to re-emphasize that even further.
Brains get sick.
Brains get sick just like hearts get sick.
Brain is an organ.
It gets sick.
Okay.
Medical problems, they get sick.
And if the significant percentage of those brain disorders are progressive and they progress to death if you don't intervene.
Again, strangely, one of the ones that we can't change the course of is dementia.
That's the one we're required to jump in on.
Schizophrenia.
Unless you're the president of the United States, unless you're Joe Biden, then it's okay.
Yeah.
But if you jump in on schizophrenia early and often, they do very well, but you let it go too far.
They're irretrievable.
Opiate addiction is a progressive disease that ends in death, no matter who is administering the opiate.
This, oh, we give them the drugs.
They'll have a nurse go give it to them.
Doesn't matter.
It ends in death.
It progresses in all cases and all settings.
And people can't get this through their head that brains get sick and these are progressive illnesses left untreated.
These people die.
So these are two, we're talking about two issues that the administration is about to come head on with.
And that is, what are we going to do with the mentally ill people on the streets?
Because if President Trump is serious about cleaning up the streets, that is an element, right?
That is an element.
And it may be a smaller element, but it is even an element of the violent crime.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, and this in Southern California for sure.
It's a lot of books.
And by the way, 95% of all the fires set in this town are set by homeless.
And they're like something like 12 a day or something that the fire department's out on.
And some end up being huge, massive.
Of course.
But the problem is the, you know, the Constitution does not specify that the federal government should involve himself in mental health services, which is why we had the state hospital system that was dismantled by John Kennedy.
The extent to which that constitutional division, that divide needs to be maintained.
I don't know.
I worked with Ben Carson the whole time during the first Trump presidency, and he was struggling mightily to figure out how to do this.
And if you don't get the state on board, if you don't get the laws changed, there are laws that prevent us from helping that you're not going to get anywhere.
That's crazy what you just said.
And you know what?
Maybe we should expand on that.
And I do want to get kind of back into the issues that people are going to be looking at with their insurance bills.
And then another big issue that I'd like to get your take on, and that is the insurance fraud issue.
Oh, yeah.
Which I think is another big one that's happening now as well.
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All right, Dr. Drew.
Oh, and wait, before you go, the other thing is we talk a little about, we haven't really focused on longevity.
We skated around the issue of staying well and being well.
The wellness company has some really good products around longevity and stuff too.
I'm a huge nicotinamide rhythm fan.
So take a look at some of that stuff too.
There are things you can do now that prolong wellness and prolong life potentially, certainly long wellness.
What is that one?
Let me pull this up.
They have one called Just Longevity.
It's a good one.
I like that one.
I'm looking at all you guys' steaks now.
You know, you guys love to talk about your health products because you're all proud of them.
You're all doctors.
But I mean, you guys are butchers now, too.
I didn't know.
I didn't know you guys are selling.
But the food sourcing, right?
That's part of health.
People are interested in digging.
My diet has been so off point lately.
I've been thinking a lot about their meat products.
I got to get back into that.
You know, well-sourced beef is an outstanding nutrient.
It just is the best.
And by the way, let the taste buds savor here.
We'll put all the meat cuts on the screen for them.
And if you can get bone in, eating close to the bone, there are nutrients there that you can't get any other way.
So don't worry about the fat.
It's high linoleic acid.
Fat is, it's not all the enemy.
It just isn't.
Yeah.
See, now you're now you're talking my language.
Now you're talking my language.
And isn't it so funny?
And I guess, you know, we can tie this right back into the conversation we're having about healthcare.
It's like, you know, I've had people, and I'm, and I'm a big, I'm the science.
I'm a big, I'm the science type of a guy, right?
And so just because something works for me doesn't mean it might not, it might work for you.
It might, it might not.
But I'm a big believer of, hey, I'm the science.
And I see this happening a lot.
What do you mean, I'm the science?
What does that mean?
What does that mean?
So let me give an exact example.
Because I have a whole, I have a whole, my, my anal tone goes up when you talk about science because I'm a, I want, I always want people to define what science is because we don't teach it.
We don't teach it anymore.
But let me, let me explain in my, in my example of what I'm using here.
When I saw, um, I see people attacking the health benefits of raw milk or attacking the health benefits of eggs or even steak.
And I just say, okay, you know what?
It might be bad for one person.
It might be good for another person.
From my experience, when I, when the, when the, which is kind of where I'm at now, most of my diet consists of beef, eggs, and I do drink raw milk.
I've never been healthier.
I've never been healthier.
I can't say I've had any negative side effects.
Maybe if you drink too much raw milk in one sitting, you know, you might get a little gassy.
All right.
That's about the extent of any side effects that I've had from.
Listen, I was on carnivore for three years.
I'm thinking about going back to it.
It was a very effective, very useful diet.
I just got palate fatigue after a while, but I miss it.
It is a great way to eat.
It really is very, very healthy.
And so that's when I say, when I, when people say, well, raw eggs are bad for you or whatever, I'm saying, look, I've been drinking raw eggs for almost five years.
I've not had a single negative side effect, not one.
Yeah.
Again, we live in a world, we're like scared natives.
You know what I mean?
We're just like, and they were believing the nonsense that comes in from a system that has revealed itself to us.
It's shown us how adulterated it is.
It's shown us how totalitarian their instincts are for no reason other than gratifying.
It seems like their own instincts.
It is nothing based in science.
So let's, I want to say something, a quick story, if you don't mind, about science, because Brett Weinstein got on me about this.
He was like, you're so right about this.
We need to tell people.
So I've been saying this since, which is when I, when I came out to interview for medical school in 1980, at the end of my interview, this one doctor asked me, what's the scientific method?
And I sat down and I described the scientific method as I had been rigorously trained in.
And he goes, you know, in 20 years, you're the first candidate that has been able to tell me what the scientific method is.
And I thought, oh my God, we are in big trouble.
The scientific method is something elaborated by Francis Bacon hundreds of years ago.
It's a delicate instrument.
It's a way of probing the environment, probing nature for some ascension to the truth.
You must always have humility.
You must always assume you're wrong.
There should be rational uncertainty to everything.
And it's fundamentally, it is this structure.
You come up with a hypothesis, you observe nature, and you come up with a hypothesis.
You design an experiment to test that hypothesis.
You put into that experiment a null hypothesis.
This is not true, what I believe.
You do the experiment.
You do a statistical analysis on the experiment.
And the null hypothesis is either informative or non-informative.
That's it.
That's it.
And beyond that, you know nothing.
And that news to be reproduced many, many hundreds of times.
I don't know if you know, but Jay Bhattachari has just recently taken a great stance where he said, it can be no longer where you are published.
It must be that these things are reproducible.
That becomes the standard of science.
And he's absolutely right about that.
But the scientific method has not been trained.
We're sort of in a world of data analysis and things that are useful for probing reality, but that is not science.
The scientific method is a delicate instrument that has to be applied just so and has to be repeated in its way of probing the nature.
Or what about these studies that we get?
And they like to use these studies to push an agenda, but people don't realize that the agenda was in the study.
The agenda was hooked into the study with the people that funded it and wanted to get a particular result.
How much of that is into our system?
Yes.
And that's and well, and then look, even well-meaning objective scientists have bias.
So this is this is where we're getting into trouble.
And then there's an editorial process that was superimposed on top of that that is clearly out of control.
So yes, our science has been adulterated.
And Bhattachari is the guy to solve that.
He's in there working on it very hard.
So I'm so delighted.
Yeah, there's no doubt that the team over there in the Maha movement, I would like to see more movement if I could.
I'd like to see a little more movement, a little fat, but yeah.
You know, I interviewed Robert Redfield a couple of days ago and he's now got a book out about how what a mess everything is and the bureaucratic.
He said to me, he goes, you know, the ACIP, everyone's all worried.
That's the vaccine assessment committee.
He goes, most of those people, the majority of them were appointed a year ago.
It's not some magical group of soothsayers.
They were just appointed and they showed themselves to be biased.
They need to go.
That's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The firing, the firing mechanisms in the administration is one I'd like to shove a bunch of coal in and light a match and let's just get it going here.
But that's just me.
I don't know.
You know, that's just how I'm doing it.
I'm not different.
I always dreamed of a time when we could eliminate 20% of the federal government.
Seems like a good idea to me.
You're nice.
You're a nice guy.
20% is like an hour of work if I was in there.
Let me get one more question for you and then maybe we'll take a couple of calls if anybody wants to ask you a question.
All right.
So one of the big issues, and this goes well beyond just healthcare, I think it's the whole government, but even in healthcare, we've had recently Dr. Oz just last week came and said that I believe they found $6 billion of fraud, I think in three or four states.
I forget that the numbers are all kind of scrambled in my head.
The point was they found massive fraud is what they found.
They found massive fraud.
And I think that Dr. Oz, with a wink and a nod, he didn't want to make it political, but I think with a wink and a nod, he was like, these are Democrats.
I think that's what he was saying.
He didn't want to say it.
He's, you know, because he's just trying to do his job and be a neutral arbiter of what's going on here.
But he kind of, with a wink and a nod, said, these are all Democrat states.
I'm not going to name the states, but they're all Democrat states.
How do, Dr. Drew, how do we get to a point of billions of dollars in healthcare fraud?
I mean, these are astronomical numbers that really could change the entire, it could change the entire field if we didn't have all of this fraud.
We all have known this is going on.
It's about time they got to it.
You have to remember the people that are so interested in centralized authority and government solving problems are somehow afraid of competition.
And they don't understand when you take huge sums of money and hand it over and you don't have forces in place and accountability and efficiencies.
And somebody checking to where the money went, it will go to bad places.
It's just inevitable.
And so, of course, that's happening.
Of course, it is.
You have to find ways to either account for stuff or create competition and forces that take care of it with the invisible hand, one way or the other.
And it's so weird to me that people that are afraid of competition go, oh, these fat cats are finding their way to make profits.
Yeah, yeah, very efficiently, very carefully to benefit you, the customer.
While on the government side, it's inefficient and just loaded with grift that is inevitable.
It's just inevitable.
And then, and it's like once you get away with it once, the people are like, oh, okay.
Then it becomes a racket.
It's not, they don't do a one-off.
They figure they reach into the honeypot one time and they get a jar of honey from the bottom.
You'd be amazed.
You'd be amazed.
When they finally expose the system, it's going to be elaborate.
There's going to be attorneys involved.
There's going to be physical therapists involved.
There's going to be rehab.
The amount of churning that can go on in the system when no one's watching is unbelievable.
It just is inevitable.
Is that really what it comes down to?
Nobody was watching?
Was it really that?
Just no.
Well, because it's shocking.
The same thing happens with foreign aid, everything.
No oversight.
It's exactly right.
And the answer is the simple answer is yes.
But smart people find out little wrinkles where they don't think they're really breaking the law and they can get away with it.
And then it sort of expands and we kind of loses, gets out of control.
And it's those, what do we call those things where people are taking advantage of the system?
They find little ways to take advantage.
This is a bigger problem in this country.
We've lost character.
We just don't have character anymore where people just should not know better than to do that.
Well, how does it go?
The true test of character is what you do when no one's looking.
Exactly.
And I guess when you've got all of these entitlement programs and nobody's looking, I mean, I think, again, you can go into these entitlement programs, like, you know, a big debate happening about SNAP, and it looks like they're going to reopen that and the, you know, six or eight billion dollars a month that goes to snap.
And, you know, I'm sitting here and I even believe this, and you mentioned this earlier.
I think I actually think conservatively as a as a political value, conservatism does have a tiny welfare state, a tiny welfare state.
Sure, of course.
You take care of it.
You're not into this notion that you're interested in harming people, having people suffer.
I mean, I thought I was libertarian until I've met some real libertarians.
They sometimes don't have to.
They don't mind.
Yeah, they don't mind if you suffer.
That's right.
That's not me.
That is not me.
I wanted to take care of people that cannot do it on their own.
But this, again, the entitlement side of it is where we get out of control.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And again, I think that this, this goes well beyond just whether it's healthcare, whether it's foreign aid.
It seems like all of this stuff that goes out for entitlements when there's no oversight.
I could tell you crazy stuff about SNAP.
I mean, I know I've seen the industry work because I used to work in the inner cities in St. Louis.
I used to do some youth development and they would go with their snap and they'd buy a bunch of junk food and then they'd stand in the street corner and sell it for four times.
Oh, sure.
Oh, sure.
They bought it for a store.
But this is the thing.
This is the thing that people don't get is, you know, research has shown over and over again in the setting of employees.
If there's an opportunity to steal or take advantage of the system, there's a 100% probability that it will happen.
100%.
That's the way it goes.
That's what humans are.
Now, I understand if we had better character, it wouldn't happen as much as it does, but it happens a lot now.
Yeah, I've been saying this phrase a lot more than I anticipated.
And that is a high trust society, a high trust society.
It's really nice when you can exist in a high trust society.
Yeah, well, yeah.
And honor.
That's the other part.
You know, you have to have some sense of, you know, your word means something that you live an honorable life, that you have character.
You know, this, this is lost completely.
Certainly, we're not.
Yeah, I was going to say, we're not talking about the political world now.
That seems to be beyond rare in the yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, really, it, you know, it's Kant's first, what was his first law, which is that just essentially the way I think of it is.
conduct yourself as though there's a camera going at all times and you could defend your behavior, whatever your choice was.
That's all you got to do.
And by the way, the reality is these days, there pretty much is a camera going.
I was going to say, we're actually in that world.
Yeah.
Now, now we're actually in that world.
It might be a little different of application as far as how you're thinking about it.
But yeah, I'd say it's pretty, it's fair to say we're in that world.
All right.
I'm going to give out the phone number.
I'm going to ask you one more question to chew on here while I get the phone line open here.
What can people expect?
Everybody's looking at their new premium costs going up, their new deductibles.
It looks like January is when it's really going to hammer people.
And we're talking about, there's really no other way to phrase this.
We're talking about life-changing charges.
We're talking about life-changing budgetary concerns with how much it's going up.
What can people anticipate for that?
And I'm going to put the phone number on the screen if anybody wants to call in as Dr. Drew takes us.
The reality is I don't know because they've been very circumspect about the specifics.
So, you know, it's clearly going to be a sticker shock.
Be prepared to shop around.
You're under no obligation.
Medicare is, I'm shocked at how much I pay to get Medicare.
Shocking.
But I'm sure that's going to go up too.
Find ways to get high deductible.
It's really easy to use a healthcare system cheaply.
Use telehealth.
Use services like TWC.
There's lots of things out there that you can get your basic healthcare needs for extremely inexpensively.
But if you get into the hospital or you have a serious illness like a cancer that has fancy medication, that can destroy you.
And you've got to make sure that coverage is complete.
Yeah.
And you guys, if you guys go to TWC.health slash Owen, you can go look at all the medical emergency kits.
I mean, it's just, it's crazy all the options you guys have.
And, you know, when I say that.
We're about to get really expanded that.
I'm a meeting with them this week.
We're trying to look at how we can help people get healthcare.
Just think, this is one thing you should keep in mind.
When you go to an urgent care, you are paying for all that equipment and all that real estate and all those employees by walking through the door.
So on average, you're going to start at about $1,600.
You could easily see a physician or a nurse practitioner for about $35 through telehealth.
It's easy.
That's ridiculous that we're using urgent cares and emergency rooms.
That's insane.
And people are not educated to understand that's what they're doing.
Yeah.
Well, and so people understand this too, because I'm actually choosing to ask these questions.
When I had Dr. Drew on before the show, I said, hey, here's what we're going to do today.
And he was like, hey, I just want to talk about what you want to talk about.
I said, hey, somebody's got to pay the bills around here, doctor.
Somebody's got to pay the bills.
Listen, thankfully, it's an organization that I love dearly, which is TWC.
So have at it.
But I also want to talk about things people want to talk about, whatever that might be.
But my suspicion is you're going to hear questions about the mental health side because that's where people are absolutely lost.
And it's not their fault.
The reason I bring that up is because, you know, I was following this stuff really closely.
And if folks want to call in, the line is open now, 747-2005-60.
It's on the screen.
747-25560.
You know, I was paying attention to, I mean, really what they tried to do to us with COVID was bring us into this medical tyranny, this idea that there needs to be a global approach to health, right?
Yeah, and so to me, I think it was a big eye-opening experience for a lot of us, probably in the healthcare field.
And my guess is, because I'm looking at what you guys are doing at the wellness company, and this is why when I went independent, I reached out to you guys and we formed a relationship.
When you guys were doing this stuff originally, were you kind of like, was part of it like, how has nobody done this before?
It's like, how is this?
Because, well, first of all, telehealth got loosened up where you could do telehealth in all the states.
So that was Trump with the executive order to cross state lines.
Yes.
And then secondly, it has been anathema to healthcare to put the caretaking into the hands of the patients.
And I was a little uncomfortable with it at first because you were supposed to be at least collaborative.
And we have found that by giving, empowering patients in the setting where the entirety of their involvement in healthcare is being taken away from them is a crucial, important move.
And these are all medication people have used before.
They know how to use.
And we have backup.
We are there.
We can help you.
We can help you deal with this.
It's just really ready to hand.
Have these things ready on hand.
So you're not running into urgent care.
You're not spending crazy amounts of money.
And you're doing simple health care on your own with the collaboration of the system.
The fact that the patient was some sort of a, I don't know, some sort of pawn that these centralized authorities are going to reign over, that is as far from healthcare as we could possibly get, in my humble, humble opinion.
Well, and also when we saw all of this go down as well, there's the mindset, right?
I mean, the biggest thing that I'm watching here is I could understand if maybe you don't take your health very seriously, all right?
You're just, you're not somebody that's really thinking about your health too often, okay?
And now you have the TV and the numbers and the red alert and the emergency and stick.
And then you get sick and you're thinking, oh, well, gee, you know, maybe I am dying.
You know, maybe I do need to go to a hospital.
You got to remember during COVID, most people believed that the fatality rate from COVID was around 50%.
Right.
It was somewhere around 1%.
You know, and it's interesting having- that's right.
And it's interesting having worked in a pandemic in the early part of my career where the fatality rate was 100%.
That was an entirely different situation.
And believe me, having been through that experience with my peers, it colored how we looked at this one.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's take a phone call here.
Go ahead on the line with Dr. Drew.
What is your name?
Yeah, we're good.
Yep.
What's your question for Dr. Drew today?
For Dr. Drew, it is really the answer to everyone's predicament.
It is deception detection technology that you actually touched on for the first time.
It actually would solve all of these problems that everyone has and any societal problem.
It is deception detection, and that is through the fMRI technology that has been squashed.
They keep pushing things like polygraphs, which they know are trash.
But deception detection by way of fMRI is by far like 99% accurate.
You will know who is lying.
You will know who is not.
And that's how you implement the Constitution by having every person, just like they did earlier this year, to vet other people and consistently do for the FBI, CIA, and all the three-letter agencies.
They take them through a deception detection regimen.
And that's a must.
And it needs to be done.
And you should probably invest the money yourself.
Oh, and have it part of your show.
Let's see who's you wanna you wanna take your bat you want to talk about reality?
Let's hook them up.
Let's wire them up.
And this of SMRI, there was a unit called No Lie MRI.
I talked to this guy.
He's in California and he was just so like beside himself because he couldn't sell his technology.
He couldn't make any money off of it.
Right, right.
All right.
Are you familiar with this?
I'm familiar with these types of things.
And I do believe that they will be enhancements in the future.
But it needs a lot more research.
I mean, because just look at the research on eyewitnesses.
Do you know eyewitnesses are extremely unreliable?
They're one of the most unreliable sources of evidence.
And so the human element in this is pretty complicated, but he's on to something there.
I'll grant him that.
All right.
Let's take another call.
Next caller, you are on the air with Dr. Drew.
What's your question?
Hey, good morning, Owen.
This is Don from Orange County.
I just wanted to touch base with Dr. Drew.
I wanted to tell you just a little bit of a story about my brother.
My brother, I was a caregiver for my brother in 2023.
He got bladder cancer and diagnosed in 22.
He, before he was diagnosed, he got really sick.
He had like a bladder infection really bad.
And my sister, this was before I knew anything about ivermectin or anything.
And my sister gave him some ivermectin before he was diagnosed.
And it just like completely turned him around.
I mean, he just like, he even asked my sister, he goes, wow, what was it that you gave me?
And he felt strong again.
It's like he recouped.
And she said, it was ivermectin, but I don't have anymore.
So, you know, long story short, he went in, he went missing because my brother was homeless.
So we had to go looking for him.
He went missing.
We found him in the hospital.
I found him, as a matter of fact.
And I walked in and he was like laying there in the ER across these chairs.
He's like, he looked like he was half dead.
He was like real ashy.
And he had a really bad bladder infection.
And that's how they found the cancer.
So my point is this, after they gave him the antibiotics to cure his UTI, he started gaining weight again.
He started looking good and healthy.
You know, his skin color was back.
You know, everything.
I was like, God, this, my brother doesn't look like he's got cancer.
It doesn't look like he's, you know, going through anything.
And then they went to, they told him, we have treatments for you, but we can't operate on it.
It's stage four.
And, but we have chemo, so we need to do a biopsy.
Okay, so I told him, I said, I said, I don't know about that biopsy, bro.
And he goes, he goes, well, he goes, he goes, what would you do?
I said, well, I kind of throw the kids a sink at it, but I'm afraid of that biopsy.
Because to me, I think a biopsy, if once you pick at it, that opens it up, man.
And it just spreads.
There's actually no, people have looked at that very people have looked at that very carefully, and there's just no evidence of that.
And I'd be very careful with oncology.
When I was in training, I never could not understand why anybody went into oncology.
It was like, everybody dies.
Why are you doing this?
They can't do anything.
Now oncology is miraculous.
There is so much we can do.
The majority of cancers are either curable or can be rendered to chronic illness, the majority.
In fact, opiate addiction has a worse prognosis than most cancers.
And yet we don't treat opiate addiction at all.
We allow that to die on our streets.
But cancer, the ivermectin is for only after you followed traditional therapeutics.
It's an adjunct if everything else has failed.
Do not turn away treatments that work.
We have unbelievably effective treatments for cancer these days.
I work with the, I have prostate cancer.
I'm 14 years post-surgery.
I've had some radiation about two, three years ago.
And I work with the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
And cancer is smarter than all of us.
It is nature evolving in real time.
When you push on it, it evolves.
It evolves to get around it, to survive, which is why you need very advanced techniques to deal with that biology.
It's unfortunately, again, we're not teaching biology in this country.
It is terrifically complicated, but we are breaking that code actively.
Let me expand on that a little bit.
And I don't know, are you aware of the Scott Adams story from a couple of weeks ago?
Yeah, I've been with it since the beginning.
Scott's a friend.
So, you know, I'm looking at this and I'm thinking in Trump's first administration, he signed, I think it was the Right to Try Act, which is basically saying if you're in a situation where you're, you know, you're slated to die, you can decide to have an experimental health health care.
And I mean, it seems like that would be common sense.
I don't know who would be against that.
Exactly.
And then, and then you saw the story with Scott Adams.
And I guess, you know, he was kind of shouting into the abyss, like, hey, can I get this experimental drug?
Can I get this experimental drug?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
It's not an experimental drug.
It's a standard treatment.
But he was in Kaiser, where they restrict access.
They restrict access until you die.
Therefore, they don't have to pay for this very expensive treatment.
I was trying to, this treatment was only available in Australia a couple of years ago, and I was trying to get him there then because this treatment is extraordinary.
And unfortunately, he's talked a little bit about, you know, some of the efficacy of it.
He hasn't really been explicit about the biology of it.
But again, the cancer is brilliant and it finds ways around even this.
What this technology is, is we've discovered that on every cancer cell with prostate, only prostate, there's something called the PSMA protein on the surface of the cells.
We created a ligand, a protein that binds at that PSMA site.
And with that, we tag it with a radioactive isotope.
So you literally kill every single cancer cell, each with its own isotope.
And the problem is that the cancer eventually figures out, so to speak, how to down-regulate those PSMA receptors.
So we also have to find ways to block that mechanism and probably even a third way to whatever, however the cell adapts to that.
But this is all the active area of research.
So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There's a lot we can do in medicine, but stay healthy in the meantime and do what you can to reduce your risks for sure.
And by the way, something no one talks about anymore is there are testing you can do, the cheek wabs you can do to see whether you have some of the risk factors for DNA repair abnormalities, what puts you at risk for cancer.
I'm a Lynch syndrome.
I didn't know it.
I have something called MSH6.
And so my risk for stomach cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, which I got very high.
So guess what?
The insurance company pays for my colonoscopies every year to take away that risk.
So we should be really more sophisticated in our healthcare.
We really need to be.
Am I misinterpreting this?
It sounds like what you're saying is the health insurance companies are willing to let you die before giving you access to a therapy that works because it's expensive.
I will tell you a story.
This should not be astonishing or bewildering to you.
This story happened in about 1993.
A friend of mine, an excellent physician, became an administrator during the heyday of the HMOs.
And I was running an addiction recovery program in a psychiatric hospital.
And his patients, his alcoholics in particular, were coming into our unit and leaving three days later.
They were just terminating their insurance after three days.
And I called the administrator.
I said, look, you're demoralizing my staff.
This is a waste of time and energy.
I'll tell you what.
You name your price and I will take care of these people across all of our services.
We'll find a way to do outpatient care.
We'll find it.
And he goes, no, I just want a three-day detox.
I go, dude, do you think that a three-day detox is going to do anything?
And I will never forget this conversation as long as I live.
Do you think a three-day detox is going to accomplish anything?
He said, no, I really don't.
But if they do that three times, then they lose their job.
Then they're no longer my concern.
There you go.
That's how insurances think.
Get them off the books.
They're a risky.
You know, if there's, if there's one story like this, there's probably 100.
And if there's 100, there's probably a thousand.
Restricting your access to care.
This is how Canadian government runs their business.
If you have a serious illness, they're hoping you die before you get to the event.
They put you on a six-month, 12-month waiting list.
And most people do die along the way.
By the way, Owen, that's one way of dealing with the excesses of the end-of-life care.
It's just don't do it.
Now, I am not advocating that.
I'm saying we do it rationally and with dignity and better and not with all the suffering that we're bringing to bear now.
Yeah.
And I'm hearing stories that are similar to that coming out of Europe, specifically the UK now as well.
Yeah.
Well, but now you're thinking of, you may be talking about assisted suicide now, which is another way they get people off the books.
Like they start offering you assisted suicide early before they even.
I was going to say, how do you do so?
Oh, yeah, they would never do that.
Like, oh, they would never do that to try to get you off the books.
They do it.
I talked to a woman who had a transverse myelitis from a vaccine and she was really suffering and needing lots of services and lots of care.
They immediately started talking about assisted suicide.
You might want to consider this.
You seem to be suffering.
Here's a way we can put an end to it all.
Yeah, just get you out of the way.
All right.
Before we finish up here, I've decided what I want to do when we conclude these broadcasts is just one piece of health advice.
So I'll give my piece of health advice and then you can take it or not.
And then we'll get Dr. Drew.
My piece of health advice for those listening, get whatever sun is left.
I don't know how much sun is left out there.
The winter months are coming, the clouds, the cold.
If you get access to any sun, just get as much as you can.
Just let your skin get that sun.
It's good for you.
It's healthy.
Get that remaining vitamin D before it all goes away.
Dr. Drew, what's a parting health?
I don't disagree with that.
Even though if you see, I have a giant scar on my head from a big cancer that was just removed a couple of weeks ago.
But you deal with it when that comes.
Sun is also good.
I would say from a health maintenance standpoint, lift up weight, lift weights, resistance training.
That is the number top three ways to age well and stay alive longer.
Sarcopenia, loss of muscle mass is the enemy of aging, both from a metabolic standpoint and from a disability standpoint, falls and whatnot and mobility.
Lift weights.
Start young.
Do not stop.
And that is number one, two, and three, important intervention for well-being, health, and longevity.
Well, there you go.
A tasteful amount of sun and a healthy amount of weightlifting.
We just did it.
If you can take these two pizzavits of advice and fit them into your week, I think you'll find you'll have a good week.
Helps your mood, helps everything, helps your metabolism, helps everything, both those things.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
And by the way, folks, you did hear about the caller talking about ivermectin.
There are ivermectin tabs available at twc.health slash owen coupon code owen.
We'll get you $20 off, but you can go to the TWC.health website, folks.
The store is really incredible.
I can't even believe Dr. Drew says that are even expanding it.
They're going to find a way to expand it somehow.
I don't know how they're going to do that.
But hey, if he says it, I believe it.
Dr. Drew, appreciate your time today.
That is going to do it for the Ask the Doctor show today.
We will be seeing you next week.
That's right.
We will be seeing you guys again next week with our next great doctor guest, Dr. Drew signing off for now.
Owen Schroeder signing off for now.
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