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Nov. 16, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender
59:56
Broken Health Insurance System with Brigham Buhler

RFK Jr dissects America's greedy, misguided health insurance system in this episode with Brigham Buhler.

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Hey everybody, I'm very excited about the guest that we have today, Brigham Bueller, whose career journey began as a drug rep for the pharmaceutical companies.
He spent 15 years in the medical department, Supporting the nation's leading surgeons with Eli Lilly and Stryker products.
That journey showed him about the disastrous impacts of our broken healthcare system on actually patient care.
He founded Ways Too Well In 2018, to provide low-cost preventative wellness through in-depth lab analysis, giving patients access, education, and solutions to manage their current health status based upon lab diagnostics.
And, you know, I'm really interested in talking to you because, you know, I spent some time with you on a recent campaign trip And I just was fascinated about the level of knowledge you have about the deterioration of the healthcare system and how it actually is incentivized to make people sicker rather than better.
And then, you know, your insights about how to fix the system, which were wonderful.
Tell us about your journey, about how you became disillusioned with Absolutely.
I'll make a short story long.
I started out bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, green and naive right out of college, and I ended up falling into a big pharma job.
And it didn't take me long.
As naive and as young as I was, within a few years, I started to see the dark side of Big Pharma, where they would bring in speakers and teach us all about off-label uses of drugs.
These are thought leaders that we're paying.
As a young kid, they would teach us how to promote a drug off-label, but then turn around and have us sign compliance documentations to button up their legal recourse, saying, we won't talk about these things, but yet you are teaching me about all these things and then setting me free but yet you are teaching me about all these things and then setting me free into the public to meet And it was a tragedy.
Like what I saw is the average clinician in America, I'm sure you've covered this before, the average clinician in America has seven minutes with a patient.
The days of healthcare are dead and gone.
It's really sad.
We've pivoted to a sick care system that is about quarterly earnings and quarterly profits, not about patient outcomes.
And the average clinician in America It's just trying to survive.
And they've got a limited time and scope with the patient and even if they wanted to do a deep dive between the big pharma presence and the big insurance presence of pharmacy benefit managers and the insurance companies, there is a tremendous amount of pressure on a primary care clinician To get you in and out of that clinic and to not do a deep dive.
They don't want to uncover a sickness or a disease state that costs that insurance money.
Because the insurance companies...
So as I progressed through that, I left being a drug rep, moved to being a device rep, and then left and stood in surgeries with some of the best and brightest surgeons in the country doing any minimally invasive procedure.
And I saw the same thing as I moved to that market.
It was insurance reimbursements dropping, surgeons doing more and more surgeries to try and produce revenues for the hospital system, making less per surgery, but still wanting their big fat cat salaries and to make sure that they're producing enough profits for the hospital.
So it's a cut first, ask questions later system.
And the patient's the one fitting the bill.
And from there, I left and said, I became an entrepreneur and started a retail pharmacy.
I talked about this a lot on Joe Rogan.
I lost my brother to the opioid epidemic and he was 27 years old and got caught up in it and he died.
At that time, I was already looking at buying a compounding pharmacy to make non-abusive, non-addictive treatment options for patients post-op.
And what I found really quickly was The insurance companies weren't going to have it.
If it cost them a few bucks more than putting somebody on an opioid, they are going to lean on that physician and put pressure on that provider to write the cheapest medication possible.
And any high profit margin medication, they've gobbled up the pharmacy space and tried to force those prescriptions to their mail order pharmacies.
Which is essentially bankrupting and undercutting the lifeblood of America.
Small mom and pop pharmacies really don't exist anymore.
Yeah, and I'm not sure what you're saying that the insurance companies themselves run mail-order pharmacies?
Correct.
So a lot of people don't realize this.
In the 70s, the federal government set up or requested for an entity called a Pharmacy Benefit Manager, a PBM. And these PBMs, the goal, like anything in the beginning, was to help the patient.
Medications were, the costs were rising, new medications were making it to the market every day, and the government couldn't keep up.
And so pharmacy benefit managers were supposed to be a middleman that drove down the cost of prescription drugs and made the average prescription drug affordable for the average American.
And who is paying them?
Well, this is where the plot thickens.
I'm glad you asked that, Robert, because what happened is within a decade, the big insurance companies, United, Cigna, Aetna, who are making billions in profit, went out and bought the PBMs.
So now you have the insurance companies deciding when, where, and how you get treatment.
You have the pharmacy benefit managers that they own negotiating with Big Pharma, and they pivoted.
They quit negotiating for the people of America, and they started negotiating for their pocketbooks.
And this is all documented.
You know, the state of Idaho sued the pharmacy benefit managers and uncovered $260 million in fraud in one year alone.
And that is going directly to the big insurance companies.
And who's fitting the bill?
The average American, the American that can't, your grandma that can't get her prescription meds.
And the example I can give you, and when I had this epiphany, Robert, was I owned a retail pharmacy.
If your grandma came in and had a metformin prescription, My cost on metformin was $2 for a month's supply.
I would have sold it to her for $4.
I would have made a great profit.
She would have gotten a great efficacious medication to help with her diabetes, but that's not how the system works.
As soon as she gives me an insurance card and I swipe that card, I have a gag clause.
I can get sued if I disclose to your grandmother that she should be able to get the med for $4.
I can't tell her that.
I have to tell her your co-pays $10 and that the big insurance company covered the rest.
But that's not the truth.
The truth is that medicine should have cost her $4.
She overpaid by...
Six dollars.
I don't get that money.
At the end of the month, the big pharmacy benefit managers that were hired to drive down the cost of health care, claw that money back and put it in their pocketbooks.
So the way I explain it to people is pharmacy benefit managers are not doing what's right for the American citizen and the American people.
And they're covered by safe harbors, even with the federal government.
The federal government has struck deals with the pharmacy benefit managers, protecting them with safe harbors and disclosures.
And so in the state of Idaho, they had 30 auditors to go in and uncover the 260 million in fraud.
That's one state, one year.
Imagine that across the country.
I don't understand how the fraud works because the example that you just gave to me is probably not a typical example because it's very unusual to have a month-long prescription that only costs you $4.
Those month-long prescriptions, in my experience, cost well over the $10 copay.
Absolutely.
That's a cost-effective drug.
I don't see how through that flim flam that you just described, they could have generated $260 million in ill-gotten gains.
Well, because here's where the plot thickens more.
So I like to say the margins are made in the mystery.
If we do not force these PBMs to open their books and disclose to the federal government, the American people, and like for me, for instance, I have 260 employees.
How do these pharmacy benefit managers that were supposed to be for the people generating billions in profit?
They're doing it in three ways.
They're buying drugs cheaper by negotiating rebates from Big Pharma.
So they've gone out and instead of reducing the cost to the patient and to the federal government, what they've done is negotiate rebates on every drug.
And if I were to do that, we would call that a kickback and I would get federally indicted.
But if big insurance does it, it's just business as usual.
And so What they've done, for instance, insulin.
Insulin is now $600 to $800 a month for the average American.
Why?
30% of that is held at the PBM through rebates.
The PBMs have negotiated for big pharma to give them a rebate on the drugs.
So they show one cost that is not their real cost because they're getting a rebate on the back end.
They don't pay the pharmacies, the mom and pop pharmacies, the dollars they're claiming.
And then you say, well, what about Medicare and Medicaid?
How would they have gotten that money from them?
What they do is they say the average wholesale price of insulin, big government, It's $800.
We're getting it for you for $600.
We saved you $200 net per insulin prescription.
But they really didn't because they never paid anywhere close to that $600, right?
Who's fitting the bill for any high-profit margin drug is the employer, the federal government, and the patient.
And then the insurance companies are pocketing the gap.
The difference between...
Yeah, I still don't understand because, you know, I have seven kids and I get to buy a lot of prescriptions at various times, but I've never dealt with a PBM. Where do you run into the PBM? Is that when you get it through work?
No.
No, every single insurance, if you look, so you may think you have UnitedHealthcare, and you do.
UnitedHealthcare covers your hospital, all that.
Pharmacy benefit managers only cover drugs, and they are a subsidiary of the insurance company.
And it's basically a holding center for profit that insurance companies have been able to manipulate.
So any insurance, 80% of the prescriptions filled in America are influenced by the three big pharmacy benefit managers.
Blue Cross Blue Shield owns one.
United owns one.
CVS Caramark owns one.
Those three entities control 80% of the drugs filled in America.
They decide what drug gets put on formulary, what drug gets reimbursed, what the reimbursement rate is.
Now, the federal government couldn't get to all of these different medications and sourcing them and uncovering why they cost what they cost.
So they've outsourced our governmental payer programs to the big five insurance companies.
So they're not only controlling the private payer sector, they're controlling the governmental sector, the Medicare, Medicaid patients.
And the reason that's even more important is because a lot of these a lot of these Medicare plans have a donut.
And I don't know if you're familiar with that, where the patients essentially going to have a gap in coverage once they've burned through the dollars.
And now they've got to come out of pocket again to cover those medicines.
And they're going to get charged a retail price that's not the real price.
And so the example is, let's use a drug like insulin, because it's way more expensive.
You should be able to buy insulin for under $100.
It costs about $40 to manufacture a vial of insulin.
Why is it costing the American citizen over $600 for a month's supply?
It is because there's somebody making money every step of the way.
And Big Pharma had to negotiate rebates with the middleman, the PBM, in order to get on insurance formularies.
And those rebates were supposed to go to the American people, but they don't.
They keep those rebates to pad their pocketbooks.
What's the solution?
I mean, you know, if you were president, would you abolish BBMs overnight or what?
I think at minimal, a baby step would be to at least force them to have full disclosure.
Because where I was going with this, Robert, is as an employer of 260 employees, I have insurance, and it costs me a lot of money.
And every year when I go to renegotiate health insurance with the insurance carriers, they look at my previous year's spend, which is an artificially inflated spend, and then they mark up my rates.
Then they mark up the patient's co-paid, deductible, and out-of-pocket liabilities.
And then they hammer Big Pharma to cut their costs every year.
And so they're making money off the gap across the board.
Billions of dollars.
The big five insurance companies are Fortune 30 companies.
These are some of the biggest juggernauts in the world now.
And they decide whether you get covered for surgery, whether you can use an ambulance, whether you can go to a specialist when you're diagnosed with a disease state.
And so a true story, honest to God, when I owned a blood lab and we began to go out and educate clinicians on the importance of preventative care.
Don't let these patients fall into the sick care system.
What we've got to do is get proactive and predictive and personalized.
We cannot wait any longer for one of these chronic disease states to manifest and put somebody in this broken system because they're headed towards something colossally disastrous.
And so the way I try to explain it is think of your insurance, your health insurance, They've reclassified how they even describe it.
The insurance don't call it health insurance anymore.
If you look at the fine print, they call it managed care.
And what are they managing?
They're managing your prescription plan, your drugs, and your treatments to maximize their profits, not to drive your health outcomes.
And so if you start to pivot that paradigm shift as an average American and say, this is a catastrophic event insurance, like car insurance.
I don't expect the car insurance to rotate my tires to change my oil.
And if I did, I'm gonna blow my motor out and I'm gonna have a big problem on my hands.
The number one reason for bankruptcy in America right now is healthcare bills.
They're crippling the average American.
I heard in your speech where you said The average American is two flat tires away from something catastrophic.
They can't afford this.
I know so many people who are desperate for health care and they can't go to the doctor because they're terrified of what bill they're going to get.
And it's shrouded in secrecy.
There should be disclosure and upfront disclosure on what this is going to cost me.
It shouldn't be a guessing game or a shell game where I don't know what my insurance is going to cover or not cover.
And so I say all that because when I owned a blood lab, one of the first dark, separate from my pharmacy where I saw that dark side, now we get to the parent insurance companies, United, Cigna, Aetna, Blue Cross.
I would go educate clinicians on the importance of maintaining the car.
Let's get comprehensive blood work on someone annually.
If we have that comprehensive blood work, statistically, we can help through lifestyle change, diet, nutrition, and non-pharmaceutical interventions drive down the risk factors that are killing Americans.
The four horsemen.
Which is neurological decline, diabetes and metabolic disease, cancer, and atherosclerosis, heart attack.
We can drive those down.
They're all lifestyle related.
But we gotta start with taking a look under the hood.
And what happened, Robert, is as soon as a clinician would begin to pre-screen all their patients annually, the insurance companies would send threatening letters to the doctors.
They would tell the doctor, If you continue to run up the cost of healthcare, we will revoke your contract.
And if I'm a primary care in the state of Texas, and I lose Blue Cross Blue Shield, I'm unemployed.
You're talking about the two flat tires away from a disaster?
That's all four tires going out for that clinician.
And so they're terrified.
And I don't think it's that primary cares or internal medicine doctors don't have the patient's best interests at heart.
They do.
But they're trying to operate and navigate within a broken system that doesn't give them the autonomy to make clinical choices that benefit the patient.
Every choice that clinician makes along the way It's just another avenue for the insurance companies to find a way to monetize that body.
And so they would bully and intimidate doctors into not pulling comprehensive blood work.
You know, I was in Northern California this week, and I did a fundraiser.
Women physicians came.
They were from different parts of the state.
They didn't know each other, but they both had large pediatric practices, and they were essentially off the grid.
They don't take insurance.
They have 100% in both cases, 100% of their patients are unvaccinated kids.
And, you know, they talked about how the kids never get sick and they can have thousands of families in their practice because, you know, they're not doing these wellness visits where the kids come in to get their jabs.
And that the kids don't, you know, get...
They also try to reduce the number of antibiotics.
They don't use antibiotics to treat earaches.
And they say the earaches go away when you don't do that.
And anyway, it was interesting talking to him, but do you think, I mean, is that always going to be a niche, the physicians who can afford to operate outside of the insurance system, or is that something that you see happening more and more?
I definitely think that's the direction of the future.
I don't want to make this about my companies, but I did start a cost-effective compounding pharmacy.
I realized the only way I can make the average patient's medications affordable is to cut out everybody.
I don't work with Big Pharma.
I don't work with insurance.
I don't work with any of those formularies.
And for most medications, I can provide patients a treatment option cheaper than their co-payer deductible.
They could pay cash and have a medication mailed to their doorstep the next day.
And that's what Mark Cuban is trying to do.
There's dozens, if not hundreds of pharmacies throughout the country attempting to provide that exact model.
And Ways to Well, my other company, is an effort to get ahead of chronic disease.
And I have a saying, if you live the average American lifestyle and you eat the average American diet, you're going to head towards the average chronic American disease.
And you're going to end up in the sick care system.
If we can diagnose cancer early, we astronomically increase your chance of survival.
If we can prevent metabolic disease from manifesting, this is another example.
That's very, very close to home for me.
Diabetes.
My dad's diabetic.
My brother's diabetic.
Diabetes is in my family.
And it's a multitude of lifestyle and genetics.
But I would ask you this question.
Why would a big insurance company not help prevent a patient from becoming diabetic?
What I mean by that, Robert, is we know through blood work, if you are headed towards diabetes, Years before you become diabetic.
If we do pull comprehensive blood work, I know years in advance if you're pre-diabetic and headed towards one of the four horsemen of death in America, diabetes.
And I can intervene.
However, in an insurance model, your insurer will not cover preventative care 90% of the time.
Here's where the plot thickens.
We know that when you transition from pre-diabetes to diabetes, it is a seven-fold increase in your health care costs for the rest of your life.
Why would you, as a big insurance company, not want to prevent that chronic disease that's going to cost you later?
And here's the answer.
The average American switches jobs every two to three years.
If I'm united and I'm a board member or a CEO, I look at that and go, we can spend millions if not billions of dollars preventing these diseases or I can deny coverage, punt the ball down the field and wait until this patient becomes somebody else's problem.
And then eventually becomes the American people's problem because they're going to end up in the governmental payer program at some point.
And we know that Medicare and Medicaid are headed towards bankruptcy is what they're saying.
And we have an obesity epidemic occurring in the United States and chronic diseases and a rapidly aging population.
It's not good.
And the people who are benefiting the most are the big insurance companies and the big pharmaceutical companies.
Yeah, you know, I asked this question of a friend of mine who's in the insurance industry because, you know, I was looking at data actually from vaccines and saying, you know, seeing that the chronic disease rates among vaccinated kids, like allergy rates, were 30 times among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.
I was saying to him, look at this data.
You're going to do better if you don't vaccinate because you reduce chronic disease.
He said, the truth is that sick patients are better than the insurance companies than well patients.
And I said, how's that possible?
You're going to end up spending more money on it.
And he said, think of it this way.
If you're Lloyd's of London and you're insuring boat, you know, people against maritime liabilities, boat accidents, essentially boat sinking, is it better for you if there's one boat that sinks a year?
or is it better for you if there's 500 boats that sink a year?
My initial answer to that is one, of course, because then you only pay one liability.
You said, no, it's better if there's 500, because the insurance rates then go up, and more people demand coverage.
And you're really, the insurance company is living off the friction.
And so the more money that pours into the system, the more money they make.
So you can't look at it as binary, that if people are healthy, they're going to make money.
It's actually the sicker the society is, the more they make.
And you described a moment ago, The mechanism that they use year by year to adjust to profit on sickness because they're coming to your business with your 160 employees at the end of the year and saying, here's what you spent last year.
We're now going to adjust your rates.
To reflect what you spent.
Got it.
You got it.
If you only had one guy got sick last year, they're not going to make any money.
But if you have all 160 of your employees got sick last year, they're going to make a lot more money on that.
Absolutely.
And what they've done is, so not only are they making money off the co-pays, the deductibles, the increased rates to the employer plans, and the increased out-of-pocket burden to the patient, they're making money off the big pharmaceutical companies.
So the higher margin drugs that are out there, the bigger the profits.
So when you were saying all your children and how you're used to a bunch of prescriptions coming in just because of a big family, you're a cash cow to those guys.
They look at that and go, OK, the more they can keep everybody in that system, the bigger the profits.
And you can look at it.
Look at every year the American people get more and more sick.
We have some of the worst health of any evolved country and yet the profitability goes up.
And the main thing I talked about on Joe was the system's not broke, the system's rigged.
And the American people are the ones fitting the bill.
And time and time again, big pharma, big insurance and big medicine Trade patient outcomes for quarterly earnings.
And we can do the same thing with big pharma.
And so as I'm fighting this fight and I'm trying to build cash pay alternatives and I call it building a life raft.
I think there's going to be a day where people desperately need a life raft.
And what I've been preaching is try your best to stay out of the sick care system.
Find a local clinician in your area that is a cash-pay clinician that is not bought and paid for by big pharma or by big insurance that's not stuck in that ecosystem where they can drive the decision and the autonomy on what's best for you and your healthcare outcomes.
Because, Robert...
Medicine in the 80s was a doctor with a leather bag that would come to your house and they knew your family and they knew your kids.
That's not our system anymore.
These doctors are barely surviving.
They have to see a patient every seven minutes.
How in the world can I be proactive, predictive and comprehensive when I have seven minutes to go over all your prescriptions and so they've changed it from That's where I was like, it's no longer healthcare, it's managed care.
And they're managing their profits.
They're not managing your health.
Yeah, you know, these two doctors, these physicians that I ran into, I said to them, how long do you spend with your patients?
And they said, we have a minimum of 30 minutes that we spend with every patient.
So I said, that is pretty extraordinary.
That's what you wanted doctors to do.
And they said, that's why we went to medical school, to actually practice medicine.
And that's not what most physicians are doing.
Most physicians today are glorified drug reps.
Yeah.
They're working for pharma and for the insurance company and for the shareholders.
It's really sad because you have all these talented people who wanted to become healers and they're not in a healing trade anymore.
They're in a sickening trade.
Let me ask you something else because you mentioned that you run the formulation pharmacy.
I'm stunned by what FDA is doing now.
It's come right out of the closet.
And it's not only allowing all these dangerous drugs to get on the market, but it actually is shutting down anything that can make you healthy.
Anything like vitamins.
I mean, in Canada, they just shut down all nutritional products.
It's just insane.
And the FDA, there's so many of these, all the chelating drugs that were so valuable that were recovering children who were injured by metals, a lot of those are now banned.
What's that new drug, that new nutraceutical?
Oh, yeah.
NMN? NMN. Yeah.
And people, you know, I was talking to people about that.
I don't know much about it, but people were talking about people who really focus on their health.
We're talking about the extraordinary results of it.
And I wanted to get some.
I got one bottle.
And I finished them and then I found out it had been illegalized by the FDA. And then stem cells, all of these things where people, you know, American citizens, smart people are reporting extraordinary results.
And the physicians are being persecuted.
They're being chased out of the country.
They're being de-licensed.
It's really, you know, it's a war on public health.
It is.
And I listened to your Jack Carr podcast, which was great, by the way.
And you said something that I had never heard.
You brought up Eisenhower's speech and how the second part of that speech, he pivoted From the military industrial complex to the scientific industrial complex.
And I went back and I read that speech and it gave me chills because he was 100% right.
I am telling you, I am living it.
I own a compounding pharmacy that ships to all 50 states.
We try to make cost-effective medications mailed to your doorstep.
And what happens is, so there's two ways that big pharma makes life really hard.
When we allow, there's an article that came out that's called Google Has No Moat.
And it's in regards to Google's artificial intelligence, and that AI is only as good as the data that comes in, right?
And I would say humanity is only as good as the data that comes in.
We see the world through the lens of what we're taught and we learn.
And so if I'm the FDA and the only people I'm giving a platform, time and energy to is big pharma, then I'm going to act in accordance with the thought processes and belief systems of big pharma.
I just think it's impossible not to, even if there is no hidden agenda.
You know, 14 out of the last 15 heads of the FDA went to go work for Big Pharma, right?
Is that not a conflict?
There's a lot of spit being swapped between private industry and governmental programs.
And so the example I can give you most recently is sweeping out of the blue, they're banning peptides.
What is a peptide?
It's a short chain amino acid.
It is found in nature.
It's millions and millions of years old.
It is not dangerous.
These are natural treatment options that we provide in efficacious doses because our food is stripped.
The average carrot today is one-eighth as nutritious as a carrot 20 years ago.
BPC, for example, is a short-chain amino acid that's found in protein sources like meat.
Because our meats are no longer free-range, grass-fed, and everything is hormone-optimized, we don't have as much BPC. And BPC is what helps heal tendons and joints.
We've been using it for over five years.
You know how many adverse events we've had?
Zero.
It's an all-natural...
So when I look at it, I go, why would the FDA make this decision?
And I have to say, it's got to be because they're being influenced and pressured by big pharma.
Because if you notice what peptides did not make it on the ban list, it's the GLP-1s.
What are the GLP-1s?
Wagovi?
And semaglutides, which are both weight loss drugs that are patented by Big Pharma, okay?
And Big Pharma's making buku bucks off of these.
So they pressure the FDA to ban peptides they can't patent and make money off of, limit compounding pharmacies' abilities to make these life-changing peptides for patients, and then turn around, and while I'm on the GLP-1 The FDA released a list every couple of months of back-order drugs in America that the average American is desperate to get.
And that list is basically a plea for help for compounding pharmacies to compound these drugs.
And a lot of these drugs are life-saving drugs, crash cart drugs.
When you go into the hospital or you're in an ambulance, they need compounding pharmacies to make these to keep people alive.
Well, anybody who has been making these GLP-1s, which are a peptide, it evolves in nature, naturally.
This is not a drug.
Big Pharma has now used its powerful influence and its ability to push the judicial system To basically sue and try and bully and intimidate compounding pharmacies out of making drugs that are on the shortage list.
This is a drug that we have a nationwide shortage on.
It's not really a weight loss drug.
That's what it's being marketed as because some of them are off-label marketing it for what's going to make them the most money and widen their patient population.
If you really look at what these drugs are indicated for and meant for, it's for diabetes patients, which we know disproportionately affects minority and poverty-stricken communities.
So why in the heck would Big Pharma, there's a shortage.
They can't make enough of it to treat the American people.
So why would they be suing, bullying, and intimidating compounding pharmacies out of the marketplace?
I mean, I think it speaks for itself because they did it in Africa in the 80s.
When people tried to make generic HIV treatments, Big Pharma sued and locked up compounding pharmacies and alternative solutions.
Big Pharma was charging $14,000 a year for life-saving HIV treatments.
The people of Africa could not afford that.
So compounding pharmacies and generic companies began to lobby and try to provide cost-effective solutions that cost $40 a month for the same medication.
And Big Pharma sued.
They got together and they sued and they delayed the people of Africa from getting HIV treatments for three years.
This is nothing new.
This is business as usual for big pharma.
And the sad part is, I don't want to sit here and say I think the FDA is good or bad.
I think the FDA's lens is skewed.
They're getting bad information, and bad information leads to bad choices, which leads to bad policy.
I think there's some bad people at FDA, too.
I've sat down with Peter Marks and shown him data and left that meeting with him having no counterargument, no pushback, agreeing with everything I said, and then making decisions based upon not what he knew to be the truth, but on data.
What's best for pharmaceutical companies that's cost thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people their health, their lives, etc.
I think at the upper levels of those agencies, you have a lot of people like that.
I can name who they are.
People like Frank Stefano at CDC, Colleen Boyle at CDC, Anthony Fauci at NIH, Francis Collins at NIH. These are people that are genuinely corrupt to the core.
I don't think you're wrong.
It's tough because you do your best to navigate a very difficult marketplace to try and provide patients with a cost-effective solution.
And the biggest battle I face is the federal government.
Why should I be having to battle the federal government for bringing cost-effective solutions to To patients.
And I look at it and I say, Robert, okay, it's one of two things.
Either you, the federal government, truly thinks peptides are dangerous, and if that's the case, then why are you allowing GLP-1s and insulins a peptide?
There are 7,000 peptides, okay?
They've been here since the dawn of time.
This is biology, right?
It's not medicine.
It's not drugs.
It's literally chemical compounds that comprise the fuel of life.
And so a peptide is a short-chain amino acid that becomes a protein that becomes a tissue, right?
And so it is the smallest form of essentially the body of life is what I would word it as.
And so, do you think that that natural product is dangerous?
And I don't think that's the case.
So then the second question becomes, do you think that I am incapable of manufacturing these products and that my protocols and procedures are dangerous?
The highest paid person in my building, I pay him twice what I pay myself.
It's my compliance and regulatory guy who used to work for the FDA, but he is there in my building every day.
We independently third-party verify every product that comes through our pharmacy.
We send it off to a lab for analysis.
We take the strictest of protocols.
So in one breath, you tell me that it's It's dangerous for compounding pharmacies to be making peptides.
But then in the next breath, you asked me to make peptides that are on backorder nationwide because your big pharma buddies can't make enough.
Because why?
Their facilities can't pass FDA inspections.
This is staggering.
There are 2,500 big pharma, and I can send you all these articles and studies.
I can send it to your team so they can have the references right at their hands.
People know this isn't me just pulling stuff out of thin air.
There are 2,500 manufacturing facilities that have not been inspected by the FDA in five or more years.
Do you know how many times the FDA has been in my pharmacy in the last 24 months?
They've been in my pharmacy three times in 24 months.
We are clearly following the rules and the protocols and doing our best to provide patients with efficacious, safe treatment alternatives.
And I cannot say that for my big pharmaceutical counterparts.
Earlier this week, I don't know if you saw yesterday, a news article broke.
Thousands upon thousands of people experienced injuries from eye drops with metal particulates and contaminants made by Big Pharma.
You go back again to the 80s and the AIDS epidemic.
I don't know if you know this, but Bayer attempted to make a hemophilia drug and Yeah.
up cross-contaminating hemophilia medication with HIV.
And they actually infected 7,000 people with the HIV virus.
Yeah.
Over 1,200 people died.
And these are the guys that we're going to listen to?
I mean, their safety record speaks for itself.
And it's beyond misleading the efficacy of the product, right?
We know they do that.
They mislead the safety data on products.
And then the third pillar that nobody's talking about is their manufacturing facilities aren't just enough.
And I said, I'm going back on Rogan in December, and I'm going to offer...
Eli Lilly, Pfizer, any of you, come tour my facility with a camera crew.
But all I ask is you let me come tour yours with a camera crew.
I know for a fact they've outsourced almost 30% of their manufacturing overseas to China and India.
Why?
Because now the FDA has to give them a three-month heads-up to get over there and inspect their facilities.
In India, they've put facilities in the most rural areas of India where there's no running water, there's no hotels close, and if I'm an FDA agent getting paid $50,000 a year, do you think I want to get on a plane, fly to India, and drive out into a rural area where there's no healthy water?
Or a hotel with air conditioning to inspect your facility.
And there's a book called Bottle of Lies, a brilliant investigative journalist who's uncovered so much of this corruption, where when the FDA showed up with their three-month notice, the facilities are burning.
These manufacturing facilities are literally burning their evidence of the crimes they've committed.
Literally burning their records.
But the FDA has been in my building three times and we want to pretend that compounding pharmacies are dangerous.
And the FDA is not saying that.
Their big pharma buddies are saying that.
When Lilly sues or Pfizer sues a compounding pharmacy like mine, they use their PR branch to make sure it makes headline news.
They make sure that it's in CNN and MSNBC and anywhere they can get it that Eli Lilly, Sue's Compounding Pharmacy.
And their narrative is that these are dangerous alternatives to our healthy and safe alternative, good old pharmaceutical America.
And it's an absolute lie.
Yeah, I mean, and the whole role of the FDA, you know, we saw exposed during COVID where they have now become, taken on the responsibility that a physician is supposed to have.
So the FDA should be doing factory inspections and it should be doing quality assurance, quality control, making sure the ingredients are what, you know, are what in a particular product are what the manufacturer claims is in that product and doing the things that the average person cannot do and giving us then the information to make informed choices about our lives.
but they shouldn't be banning medication That may be helpful to some people, even if it's dangerous to others, as long as you disclose that we live in a free society and people can make good judgments about the risks that they want to accrue with those that they want to avoid.
And, you know, what the American people need is good information.
To tell us that they're going to ban a product.
And, you know, they don't give any reason for that.
For peptide, you know, I've taken peptides a lot.
I've got a lot of benefits out of peptides.
Now it's hard to get any.
They're safe and they are safe.
They are efficacious and they do work.
Every adverse event that they cited, and this is the tragedy of it, if you shut down compounding pharmacies and doctors from prescribing these medications, because I can tell you, I talked to my buddy who's chief of surgery over at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, and he's a huge believer in peptides.
The hospital met with him and said, no, you guys are not allowed to write peptides anymore at all.
Because it sets us up for litigation.
Now that the FDA has released these statements, we are scared to prescribe something that could set us up for a future lawsuit in the random occurrence that somebody has an adverse event.
And again, this is all natural.
The only adverse events I've ever seen with these peptides is an inflammatory response at the injection site.
Everything else that the FDA put in their discovery documents where they're saying why they banned this is in reference to black market peptides.
What is black market?
It's peptides coming from China, from Canada, from non- FDA inspected facilities.
These are not compounding pharmacies.
So if you make it impossible for the average American to get these treatments through a clinician and through a sterile, safe and compliant pharmacy, where do you think they're going to get these medications?
They're going to turn to the black market.
You're going to do the same thing you did with the opioid crisis.
You create the problem.
Then you over-regulate the problem.
Then you force people to the black market.
More people have died of opioids in the last 12 months than ever in the history of the United States.
And it's not because they're getting them from pill mills anymore.
It's because they're getting heroin.
Yeah, they're getting fentanyl and all that.
As you said, they got a whole generation addicted to oxycodone.
Yep.
And then they banned oxycodone and cracked down on it, and all of those kids went over to, they figured out you can get fentanyl.
And now, you know, 106,000 died last year from fentanyl, double the number of kids that we lost during the Vietnam War over 20 years.
It's like two Vietnam wars in one year.
There's a fentanyl addiction.
Well, these are not kids who were like bad kids or whatever.
They just, you know, they were.
But as you say, the overregulation, the loose regulation, because they were corrupt, followed by overregulation, forced, channeled all of this, this whole generation to illegal drugs.
And I don't know, have you ever talked, I don't know if anyone's talked about the opioid crisis and the Sacklers with you on the podcast, but...
We talk about, you know, that all the time.
So you know the head of the FDA that approved that went to go work 18 months later?
For who?
Yeah, Purdue Pharmaceutical.
And that's the story.
And that's the big narrative that I've learned being behind the curtain that terrifies me.
You are spot on with your assessment of the government.
And it's scary because what I saw in the healthcare space separate from the FDA and Big Pharma's influence on the FDA. Let's go back to the pharmacy benefit managers.
I saw something absolutely terrifying, Robert.
When I was in the healthcare space, billing insurance carriers, they would come in and Blue Cross Blue Shield would say, I would ship a million dollars in drugs to their patient population in a month.
And they would send an email and just say, we're not paying you.
Well, what do you mean you're not paying me?
I shipped these meds.
I already gave your patients the Medicaid.
We don't think you collected co-pays or deductibles.
Okay, I have all my records.
I collected 92% of co-pays and deductibles.
How soon can we clear this up and can you have an auditor meet with me?
Oh, we have a three-month wait.
What?
I'm a mom and pop pharmacy.
I can't ship $3 million in revenue on drugs and not get reimbursed by you.
And so you cripple me.
Then what do they do?
They come in and say, hey, we hear the pharmacy business tough right now.
We'd love to acquire your pharmacy.
And so they're gobbling up all the mom and pop pharmacies.
They're cutting their legs out from under them.
They're bullying and intimidating them.
Then they're pulling levers to push high profit margin drugs to their own telemedicine virtual pharmacies that are mail order.
So any high profit margin drug, they'll send to their mail order pharmacies.
Here's where this fits getting crossed with the federal government.
This is a true story.
I hired the former Department of Justice prosecutor for the Northern District of Dallas to come be my compliance guy and help me build out my programs.
And what I found was terrifying.
He told me the pharmacy benefit managers Get to meet with the Department of Justice once a month.
And when he started his job at the DOJ, he came into a meeting where some guys in suits were yelling at him and his counterparts with a stack of papers on doctors, pharmacies, blood labs, DNA labs, that they wanted these people to go federally indict.
Because their narrative to the DOJ was these guys shouldn't be doing all these blood tests.
They're running up the cost of health care.
They're the reason the system's bankrupt.
The problem with that is when you allow one side of the narrative, just like the FDA does with big pharma, the DOJ is doing with big insurance.
And big insurance and private industry has turned the DOJ into their attack dog.
And people say, well, if you didn't do anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about.
No, because when only half of the facts are presented, and I'm a young DOJ prosecutor who a month earlier was focused on drug cartel cases, and now you pivot me to healthcare fraud, and I'm supposed to understand a very nuanced, complicated, multifaceted healthcare space that has a lot of gray.
So let me give you the example.
When I owned a blood lab, I needed to make at least $350 to cover my cost on that blood draw and the processing and the scientists and the time with the patient.
I go to Blue Cross and I say, I would like to be in network.
I want to be part of your program.
Blue Cross says, take a hike.
We're not accepting any more blood labs.
I, at that point, either close my doors and lay off all my employees or I have to bill that insurance carrier as an out-of-network lab.
If I bill them as an out-of-network lab, they pay me one-third of billed charges.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
So now to get paid my $350, I have to bill them $1,000.
They're only going to pay me $350.
But then what they're going to do is take that $1,000 bill, multiply it times every patient, and go sit down with the Department of Justice when the number gets big enough and tell some kid who was prosecuting drug charges six months earlier, This guy's committing healthcare fraud.
He's billing us $1,000 on a drug test.
So that person at the government level, it's not their fault.
They don't even have the full story.
They're operating with partial troops.
And that person has pressure to put hides on the wall, to build a reputation, to get asset seizures, to make a name for themselves so when they finish working in service to the public, they go work for who?
The pharmacy benefit managers.
They are hiring most of the FBI agents and the DOJ agents when they come out of that sector and they go into the public sector.
And so there is so much cross-contamination and so much misleading action going on to where they're essentially rewriting law through enforcement.
And so here's another example of the same storyline.
And I tried to explain this in a way people can understand.
I'm a believer that truth will prevail and innocence will prevail.
I really am.
But what I saw, that was not the case.
Innocent people got federally indicted because of the actions of these pharmacy benefit managers and these big insurance companies.
And they are doing it to intimidate and bully clinicians into not running these tests.
And to not running up the cost of health care, right?
You've got to now have belt and suspenders and five layers of justification for any test you run, for anything you do, or you're going to end up on a DOJ prosecutor's desk.
And that's the last place you want to be.
Because for most Americans, they don't understand how the system works.
You don't get to present your side of the case.
It's the DOJ presenting the narrative that was given to them by the big PBMs and the insurance companies.
And those guys are savvy.
They've hired away former DOJ guys that were at that office a year earlier.
Brushing elbows with their buddies, and they come in and present the case and hand it over on a silver platter, and some young buck takes that case and tries to nail a hide to the wall.
And the point of the matter is, it isn't about right or wrong.
It's not about justice.
It's not about the truth.
It's about making money, building careers, and putting hides on the wall.
And that's terrifying.
They dehumanize people.
They make up their mind that you're a bad guy before they ever meet with you.
And so when I saw all that happening, Robert, I said, I'm done.
I am not going to ever build an insurance carrier again.
I'm not going to play this game.
I'm going to create cash-effective solutions for patients.
And so I went out and bought my own blood lab.
I went out and I created my own telemedicine company.
I went out and I built my own compounding pharmacy.
I vertically integrated an entire ecosystem in an attempt to drive down the cost of healthcare for the average American.
For less than a couple hundred dollars a month, you can get treatment from a cash-paid facility throughout the country.
I'm not the only one doing this.
And you're going to get astronomically better care, and you're going to get taken out of that sick care system.
But how to fix it is we've got to elect guys like you.
We've got to start changing the way we think.
It can't just be left versus right.
We've got to start thinking independently and freely and voting for what's best for the American people.
I really believe that.
Brigham, we're out of time, unfortunately, because this is fascinating, but just tell my listeners how they find you or somebody like you if they want to get out of the gerbil wheel, the toilet drain that they're circling around, if they're stuck in that insurance and pharmaceutical paradigm.
Absolutely.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of cash pay mom and pop medical practices throughout the country.
The main thing is, take it serious.
If you're going to get your car repaired, you interview two or three mechanics.
If you're going to have work done on your house, you usually bid it out to a few contractors.
Go out there and take the time.
This is your flesh vessel.
This is your one chance at longevity and driving a healthy, happy life where you can play with your grandkids and live to be old and healthy and happy.
Let's drive HealthSpan.
And the only way to drive HealthSpan is to take yourself out of the sick care system, to take accountability and solventry, And my company's weighs too well, weighs the number too well, but I am just one of hundreds of companies throughout the United States.
And our model is predictive, proactive medicine, a personalized approach.
We're going to deep dive into you at the biological level, and we're going to begin to address and prevent chronic disease before it ever manifests.
The last thing I'll say is, your uncle had a quote, and he said, the time The time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining.
And that resonates with me because that's what I'm trying to preach with healthcare.
The time to get well is when you're not sick.
Don't wait for chronic disease to manifest.
Take action.
Take accountability.
Take yourself out of the system.
There's tons of companies out there.
We're just one of many.
And we're here to help.
We're here to be a resource if people decide we're the right company for them.
Are you in 50 states?
I will be in 50 states in January.
My pharmacy is in 46 states.
My telemedicine company is in Texas.
And we will be in all 50 states in January.
Okay.
And is there a list of all the people in this area that people can go to?
I will try and have my team compile a list of some other cash wellness longevity clinics.
Those are the key buzzwords.
Look for a wellness, preventative care, longevity-based clinic.
But it's crucial that they're cash paid because if they're not, unfortunately, the insurance companies are going to have their claws in those guys.
Not that they're bad guys.
They're going to be fighting the battle with both hands tied behind their back.
Do you have a flat fee or do you have a fee plus expenses?
How do people pay you?
The way ours works is a consult with a clinician, which is a 45-minute virtual phone consult.
We send a mobile phlebotomist to your house.
We pull your blood work.
We'll have that back in a few days.
The other problem with the system is they tell you you're normal.
When they look at your biological markers and your ranges, because we're in this sick care system, they're basing it off the average American's health.
Well, the average American is chronically ill.
We can't base it off that.
So our model is we show you what is clinically normal, but we try to get you to clinically optimal.
Where would you have been in your 20s on over 70 biomarkers?
And let's take intervention.
And most of the time, it's not pharmaceutical.
Most of the time, through peptides or magnesium or supplementation or diet and lifestyle, we can begin to optimize your levels because those are the leading indicators that tell us where you're headed.
And so, we don't have enough time to get into all of it, but we love to do a DEXA scan annually to look at your bone mineral density, your lean muscle mass, your visceral fat.
That is another huge indicator of VO2 max.
And we're rolling out artificial intelligence that will analyze all of these things combined and begin to project for you an A, B, C, or D rating on your longevity score.
And so you will know that you're headed towards something chronic and catastrophic years before you ever get there.
And that's the way to practice medicine.
Get these people out of the system where they're not going on these drugs.
They're not battling chronic disease.
They're not pre-diabetic.
Let's get people healthy again.
That's the goal.
The last thing I want is for people to be on medicines.
Brigham Mueller, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, thank you so much for this opportunity and for all your time.
And I love everything you're doing and you've got my vote.
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