Brigham Bueller is a former drug rep for Eli Lilly and Stryker and a founder of Ways Too Well, a company that provides low-cost preventative wellness through in-depth lab analysis and lab testing. He also spent 15 years working as a medical sales rep for the nation's leading surgeons, supporting the nation s leading surgeons. His experience in the medical industry led him to believe that the current healthcare system is broken and needs to be fixed. In 2018, he left the pharmaceutical industry to start his own company, which has since become a multi-million dollar business. In this episode, he shares his story of how he became disillusioned with the broken healthcare system and how he turned it all around. He shares his insights about how to fix the broken system and what he believes is the best way to fix it, and how to make things better for the patient. You can expect weekly episodes every available as Video, Podcast, and blogposts. Please don t forget to subscribe to our new bi-weekly newsletter! Subscribe and comment to stay up to date with our newest episodes and stay informed on the happenings in healthcare, business, and politics! Timestamps: 1:00 - What s going on in the healthcare industry? 4:30 - How bad is it getting worse? 6:15 - What is the future of healthcare 7:00 What s the problem? 8:00- What can we do to fix healthcare? 9: How can we fix it? 11:15 12:30 15:10 - How do we can fix the healthcare system? 16:40 - Why we need a better healthcare system 17:20 - How much money can we pay? 18:20 19:30- What is a patient s better than a patient care plan? 21:40 22:50 - How can I fix the system 27:40- How do I fix it better? 26: What s a patient be a better patient care machine? 29:00 | How do you know what s a good patient care system ? 32: What are you going to get a good deal? 35:00 + 33: What do you want to help me? 36:30 | What s your answer? 37:40 | How can you help me help me improve my life? 39:00 ~
00:00:00.000Hey 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.
00:00:11.000He spent 15 years in the medical department, Supporting the nation's leading surgeons with Eli Lilly and Stryker products.
00:00:21.000That journey showed him about the disastrous impacts of our broken healthcare system on actually patient care.
00:00:32.000He 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.
00:00:53.000And, 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.
00:01:15.000And then, you know, your insights about how to fix the system, which were wonderful.
00:01:19.000Tell us about your journey, about how you became disillusioned with Absolutely.
00:01:36.000As 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.
00:01:50.000These are thought leaders that we're paying.
00:01:53.000As 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.
00:02:17.000Like 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.
00:02:26.000The days of healthcare are dead and gone.
00:02:31.000We've pivoted to a sick care system that is about quarterly earnings and quarterly profits, not about patient outcomes.
00:02:38.000And the average clinician in America It's just trying to survive.
00:02:42.000And 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.
00:03:07.000They don't want to uncover a sickness or a disease state that costs that insurance money.
00:03:15.000So 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.
00:03:28.000And I saw the same thing as I moved to that market.
00:03:31.000It 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.
00:03:49.000So it's a cut first, ask questions later system.
00:03:52.000And the patient's the one fitting the bill.
00:03:55.000And from there, I left and said, I became an entrepreneur and started a retail pharmacy.
00:04:01.000I talked about this a lot on Joe Rogan.
00:04:03.000I lost my brother to the opioid epidemic and he was 27 years old and got caught up in it and he died.
00:04:11.000At that time, I was already looking at buying a compounding pharmacy to make non-abusive, non-addictive treatment options for patients post-op.
00:04:22.000And what I found really quickly was The insurance companies weren't going to have it.
00:04:28.000If 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.
00:04:41.000And any high profit margin medication, they've gobbled up the pharmacy space and tried to force those prescriptions to their mail order pharmacies.
00:04:49.000Which is essentially bankrupting and undercutting the lifeblood of America.
00:04:54.000Small mom and pop pharmacies really don't exist anymore.
00:04:59.000Yeah, and I'm not sure what you're saying that the insurance companies themselves run mail-order pharmacies?
00:05:08.000So a lot of people don't realize this.
00:05:10.000In 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.
00:05:25.000Medications were, the costs were rising, new medications were making it to the market every day, and the government couldn't keep up.
00:05:33.000And 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.
00:05:47.000Well, this is where the plot thickens.
00:05:49.000I'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.
00:06:04.000So now you have the insurance companies deciding when, where, and how you get treatment.
00:06:10.000You have the pharmacy benefit managers that they own negotiating with Big Pharma, and they pivoted.
00:06:17.000They quit negotiating for the people of America, and they started negotiating for their pocketbooks.
00:07:49.000At 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.
00:07:59.000So 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.
00:08:08.000And they're covered by safe harbors, even with the federal government.
00:08:12.000The federal government has struck deals with the pharmacy benefit managers, protecting them with safe harbors and disclosures.
00:08:20.000And so in the state of Idaho, they had 30 auditors to go in and uncover the 260 million in fraud.
00:08:33.000I 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.
00:08:48.000Those month-long prescriptions, in my experience, cost well over the $10 copay.
00:08:57.000I don't see how through that flim flam that you just described, they could have generated $260 million in ill-gotten gains.
00:09:10.000Well, because here's where the plot thickens more.
00:09:12.000So I like to say the margins are made in the mystery.
00:09:17.000If 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.
00:09:28.000How do these pharmacy benefit managers that were supposed to be for the people generating billions in profit?
00:09:38.000They're buying drugs cheaper by negotiating rebates from Big Pharma.
00:09:43.000So 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.
00:09:53.000And if I were to do that, we would call that a kickback and I would get federally indicted.
00:09:58.000But if big insurance does it, it's just business as usual.
00:10:02.000And so What they've done, for instance, insulin.
00:10:05.000Insulin is now $600 to $800 a month for the average American.
00:11:09.000Yeah, 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?
00:12:03.000Those three entities control 80% of the drugs filled in America.
00:12:08.000They decide what drug gets put on formulary, what drug gets reimbursed, what the reimbursement rate is.
00:12:15.000Now, the federal government couldn't get to all of these different medications and sourcing them and uncovering why they cost what they cost.
00:12:24.000So they've outsourced our governmental payer programs to the big five insurance companies.
00:12:30.000So they're not only controlling the private payer sector, they're controlling the governmental sector, the Medicare, Medicaid patients.
00:12:40.000And the reason that's even more important is because a lot of these a lot of these Medicare plans have a donut.
00:12:45.000And 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.
00:12:55.000And now they've got to come out of pocket again to cover those medicines.
00:12:59.000And they're going to get charged a retail price that's not the real price.
00:13:04.000And so the example is, let's use a drug like insulin, because it's way more expensive.
00:13:09.000You should be able to buy insulin for under $100.
00:13:12.000It costs about $40 to manufacture a vial of insulin.
00:13:16.000Why is it costing the American citizen over $600 for a month's supply?
00:13:22.000It is because there's somebody making money every step of the way.
00:13:26.000And Big Pharma had to negotiate rebates with the middleman, the PBM, in order to get on insurance formularies.
00:13:34.000And those rebates were supposed to go to the American people, but they don't.
00:13:39.000They keep those rebates to pad their pocketbooks.
00:13:45.000I mean, you know, if you were president, would you abolish BBMs overnight or what?
00:13:50.000I think at minimal, a baby step would be to at least force them to have full disclosure.
00:13:55.000Because 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.
00:14:03.000And 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.
00:14:17.000Then they mark up the patient's co-paid, deductible, and out-of-pocket liabilities.
00:14:22.000And then they hammer Big Pharma to cut their costs every year.
00:14:27.000And so they're making money off the gap across the board.
00:14:33.000The big five insurance companies are Fortune 30 companies.
00:14:37.000These are some of the biggest juggernauts in the world now.
00:14:40.000And 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.
00:14:52.000And 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.
00:15:02.000Don't let these patients fall into the sick care system.
00:15:06.000What we've got to do is get proactive and predictive and personalized.
00:15:11.000We 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.
00:15:23.000And so the way I try to explain it is think of your insurance, your health insurance, They've reclassified how they even describe it.
00:15:33.000The insurance don't call it health insurance anymore.
00:15:35.000If you look at the fine print, they call it managed care.
00:15:40.000They're managing your prescription plan, your drugs, and your treatments to maximize their profits, not to drive your health outcomes.
00:15:49.000And so if you start to pivot that paradigm shift as an average American and say, this is a catastrophic event insurance, like car insurance.
00:15:59.000I don't expect the car insurance to rotate my tires to change my oil.
00:16:03.000And if I did, I'm gonna blow my motor out and I'm gonna have a big problem on my hands.
00:16:08.000The number one reason for bankruptcy in America right now is healthcare bills.
00:16:13.000They're crippling the average American.
00:16:15.000I heard in your speech where you said The average American is two flat tires away from something catastrophic.
00:16:23.000I 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.
00:16:33.000There should be disclosure and upfront disclosure on what this is going to cost me.
00:16:39.000It 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.
00:16:47.000And 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.
00:16:59.000I would go educate clinicians on the importance of maintaining the car.
00:17:04.000Let's get comprehensive blood work on someone annually.
00:17:08.000If 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.
00:17:34.000But we gotta start with taking a look under the hood.
00:17:38.000And 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.
00:17:49.000They would tell the doctor, If you continue to run up the cost of healthcare, we will revoke your contract.
00:17:57.000And if I'm a primary care in the state of Texas, and I lose Blue Cross Blue Shield, I'm unemployed.
00:18:04.000You're talking about the two flat tires away from a disaster?
00:18:08.000That's all four tires going out for that clinician.
00:18:19.000But 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.
00:18:28.000Every choice that clinician makes along the way It's just another avenue for the insurance companies to find a way to monetize that body.
00:18:38.000And so they would bully and intimidate doctors into not pulling comprehensive blood work.
00:18:44.000You know, I was in Northern California this week, and I did a fundraiser.
00:19:05.000They have 100% in both cases, 100% of their patients are unvaccinated kids.
00:19:10.000And, 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.
00:19:24.000And that the kids don't, you know, get...
00:19:26.000They also try to reduce the number of antibiotics.
00:19:29.000They don't use antibiotics to treat earaches.
00:19:32.000And they say the earaches go away when you don't do that.
00:19:36.000And 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?
00:19:51.000I definitely think that's the direction of the future.
00:19:53.000I don't want to make this about my companies, but I did start a cost-effective compounding pharmacy.
00:19:59.000I realized the only way I can make the average patient's medications affordable is to cut out everybody.
00:20:10.000I don't work with any of those formularies.
00:20:12.000And for most medications, I can provide patients a treatment option cheaper than their co-payer deductible.
00:20:19.000They could pay cash and have a medication mailed to their doorstep the next day.
00:20:24.000And that's what Mark Cuban is trying to do.
00:20:26.000There's dozens, if not hundreds of pharmacies throughout the country attempting to provide that exact model.
00:20:32.000And Ways to Well, my other company, is an effort to get ahead of chronic disease.
00:20:37.000And 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.
00:20:46.000And you're going to end up in the sick care system.
00:20:49.000If we can diagnose cancer early, we astronomically increase your chance of survival.
00:20:55.000If we can prevent metabolic disease from manifesting, this is another example.
00:21:00.000That's very, very close to home for me.
00:21:15.000Why would a big insurance company not help prevent a patient from becoming diabetic?
00:21:22.000What I mean by that, Robert, is we know through blood work, if you are headed towards diabetes, Years before you become diabetic.
00:21:30.000If 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.
00:21:55.000We 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.
00:22:06.000Why would you, as a big insurance company, not want to prevent that chronic disease that's going to cost you later?
00:22:16.000The average American switches jobs every two to three years.
00:22:21.000If 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.
00:22:40.000And then eventually becomes the American people's problem because they're going to end up in the governmental payer program at some point.
00:22:48.000And we know that Medicare and Medicaid are headed towards bankruptcy is what they're saying.
00:22:53.000And we have an obesity epidemic occurring in the United States and chronic diseases and a rapidly aging population.
00:23:03.000And the people who are benefiting the most are the big insurance companies and the big pharmaceutical companies.
00:23:11.000Yeah, 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.
00:23:31.000I was saying to him, look at this data.
00:23:33.000You're going to do better if you don't vaccinate because you reduce chronic disease.
00:23:39.000He said, the truth is that sick patients are better than the insurance companies than well patients.
00:23:50.000If 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?
00:24:05.000or is it better for you if there's 500 boats that sink a year?
00:24:09.000My initial answer to that is one, of course, because then you only pay one liability.
00:24:15.000You said, no, it's better if there's 500, because the insurance rates then go up, and more people demand coverage.
00:24:25.000And you're really, the insurance company is living off the friction.
00:24:29.000And so the more money that pours into the system, the more money they make.
00:24:35.000So you can't look at it as binary, that if people are healthy, they're going to make money.
00:24:39.000It's actually the sicker the society is, the more they make.
00:24:43.000And 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.
00:25:19.000And 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.
00:25:35.000So the higher margin drugs that are out there, the bigger the profits.
00:25:41.000So 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.
00:25:51.000They look at that and go, OK, the more they can keep everybody in that system, the bigger the profits.
00:25:58.000Look at every year the American people get more and more sick.
00:26:02.000We have some of the worst health of any evolved country and yet the profitability goes up.
00:26:09.000And the main thing I talked about on Joe was the system's not broke, the system's rigged.
00:26:15.000And the American people are the ones fitting the bill.
00:26:18.000And time and time again, big pharma, big insurance and big medicine Trade patient outcomes for quarterly earnings.
00:26:27.000And we can do the same thing with big pharma.
00:26:29.000And so as I'm fighting this fight and I'm trying to build cash pay alternatives and I call it building a life raft.
00:26:35.000I think there's going to be a day where people desperately need a life raft.
00:26:39.000And what I've been preaching is try your best to stay out of the sick care system.
00:26:46.000Find 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.
00:27:18.000They have to see a patient every seven minutes.
00:27:21.000How 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.
00:28:35.000And 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.
00:28:52.000And 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.
00:29:03.000What's that new drug, that new nutraceutical?
00:29:26.000And 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.
00:29:41.000And the physicians are being persecuted.
00:29:44.000They're being chased out of the country.
00:29:52.000And I listened to your Jack Carr podcast, which was great, by the way.
00:29:56.000And you said something that I had never heard.
00:29:58.000You 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.
00:30:10.000And I went back and I read that speech and it gave me chills because he was 100% right.
00:30:22.000I own a compounding pharmacy that ships to all 50 states.
00:30:25.000We try to make cost-effective medications mailed to your doorstep.
00:30:30.000And what happens is, so there's two ways that big pharma makes life really hard.
00:30:37.000When we allow, there's an article that came out that's called Google Has No Moat.
00:30:42.000And it's in regards to Google's artificial intelligence, and that AI is only as good as the data that comes in, right?
00:30:50.000And I would say humanity is only as good as the data that comes in.
00:30:53.000We see the world through the lens of what we're taught and we learn.
00:30:57.000And 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.
00:31:10.000I just think it's impossible not to, even if there is no hidden agenda.
00:31:15.000You know, 14 out of the last 15 heads of the FDA went to go work for Big Pharma, right?
00:31:48.000These are natural treatment options that we provide in efficacious doses because our food is stripped.
00:31:55.000The average carrot today is one-eighth as nutritious as a carrot 20 years ago.
00:32:07.000BPC, for example, is a short-chain amino acid that's found in protein sources like meat.
00:32:14.000Because 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.
00:32:26.000We've been using it for over five years.
00:32:28.000You know how many adverse events we've had?
00:32:53.000And semaglutides, which are both weight loss drugs that are patented by Big Pharma, okay?
00:32:59.000And Big Pharma's making buku bucks off of these.
00:33:03.000So 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.
00:33:29.000And that list is basically a plea for help for compounding pharmacies to compound these drugs.
00:33:36.000And a lot of these drugs are life-saving drugs, crash cart drugs.
00:33:40.000When you go into the hospital or you're in an ambulance, they need compounding pharmacies to make these to keep people alive.
00:33:46.000Well, anybody who has been making these GLP-1s, which are a peptide, it evolves in nature, naturally.
00:33:56.000Big 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.
00:34:15.000This is a drug that we have a nationwide shortage on.
00:34:21.000That'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.
00:34:30.000If 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.
00:34:40.000So why in the heck would Big Pharma, there's a shortage.
00:34:44.000They can't make enough of it to treat the American people.
00:34:47.000So why would they be suing, bullying, and intimidating compounding pharmacies out of the marketplace?
00:34:53.000I mean, I think it speaks for itself because they did it in Africa in the 80s.
00:34:57.000When people tried to make generic HIV treatments, Big Pharma sued and locked up compounding pharmacies and alternative solutions.
00:35:07.000Big Pharma was charging $14,000 a year for life-saving HIV treatments.
00:35:13.000The people of Africa could not afford that.
00:35:16.000So compounding pharmacies and generic companies began to lobby and try to provide cost-effective solutions that cost $40 a month for the same medication.
00:35:50.000They're getting bad information, and bad information leads to bad choices, which leads to bad policy.
00:35:58.000I think there's some bad people at FDA, too.
00:36:02.000I'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.
00:36:22.000What's best for pharmaceutical companies that's cost thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people their health, their lives, etc.
00:36:29.000I think at the upper levels of those agencies, you have a lot of people like that.
00:36:36.000People 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.
00:36:53.000It's tough because you do your best to navigate a very difficult marketplace to try and provide patients with a cost-effective solution.
00:37:02.000And the biggest battle I face is the federal government.
00:37:06.000Why should I be having to battle the federal government for bringing cost-effective solutions to To patients.
00:37:13.000And I look at it and I say, Robert, okay, it's one of two things.
00:37:18.000Either 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?
00:38:00.000So then the second question becomes, do you think that I am incapable of manufacturing these products and that my protocols and procedures are dangerous?
00:38:10.000The highest paid person in my building, I pay him twice what I pay myself.
00:38:14.000It's my compliance and regulatory guy who used to work for the FDA, but he is there in my building every day.
00:38:21.000We independently third-party verify every product that comes through our pharmacy.
00:38:31.000So in one breath, you tell me that it's It's dangerous for compounding pharmacies to be making peptides.
00:38:38.000But 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.
00:40:59.000Because now the FDA has to give them a three-month heads-up to get over there and inspect their facilities.
00:41:05.000In 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?
00:41:23.000Or a hotel with air conditioning to inspect your facility.
00:41:27.000And 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.
00:41:41.000These manufacturing facilities are literally burning their evidence of the crimes they've committed.
00:42:28.000Yeah, 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.
00:42:40.000So 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.
00:43:07.000but 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.
00:43:22.000And, you know, what the American people need is good information.
00:43:27.000To tell us that they're going to ban a product.
00:43:31.000And, you know, they don't give any reason for that.
00:43:34.000For peptide, you know, I've taken peptides a lot.
00:43:37.000I've got a lot of benefits out of peptides.
00:43:44.000They are efficacious and they do work.
00:43:46.000Every 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.
00:44:05.000The hospital met with him and said, no, you guys are not allowed to write peptides anymore at all.
00:44:15.000Now 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.
00:44:28.000The only adverse events I've ever seen with these peptides is an inflammatory response at the injection site.
00:44:36.000Everything else that the FDA put in their discovery documents where they're saying why they banned this is in reference to black market peptides.
00:44:57.000So 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?
00:45:10.000They're going to turn to the black market.
00:45:12.000You're going to do the same thing you did with the opioid crisis.
00:46:08.000But 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.
00:46:23.000And 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...
00:46:31.000We talk about, you know, that all the time.
00:46:35.000So you know the head of the FDA that approved that went to go work 18 months later?
00:46:46.000And that's the big narrative that I've learned being behind the curtain that terrifies me.
00:46:52.000You are spot on with your assessment of the government.
00:46:54.000And 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.
00:47:11.000When 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.
00:47:23.000And they would send an email and just say, we're not paying you.
00:47:26.000Well, what do you mean you're not paying me?
00:48:29.000I 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.
00:48:43.000He told me the pharmacy benefit managers Get to meet with the Department of Justice once a month.
00:48:51.000And 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.
00:49:14.000Because their narrative to the DOJ was these guys shouldn't be doing all these blood tests.
00:49:21.000They're running up the cost of health care.
00:49:23.000They're the reason the system's bankrupt.
00:49:26.000The 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.
00:49:38.000And big insurance and private industry has turned the DOJ into their attack dog.
00:49:44.000And people say, well, if you didn't do anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about.
00:49:49.000No, 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.
00:50:16.000When 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.
00:50:29.000I go to Blue Cross and I say, I would like to be in network.
00:51:07.000But 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.
00:51:27.000He's billing us $1,000 on a drug test.
00:51:30.000So that person at the government level, it's not their fault.
00:51:37.000They're operating with partial troops.
00:51:40.000And 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?
00:51:57.000They 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.
00:52:07.000And so there is so much cross-contamination and so much misleading action going on to where they're essentially rewriting law through enforcement.
00:52:19.000And so here's another example of the same storyline.
00:52:24.000And I tried to explain this in a way people can understand.
00:52:27.000I'm a believer that truth will prevail and innocence will prevail.
00:52:32.000But what I saw, that was not the case.
00:52:35.000Innocent people got federally indicted because of the actions of these pharmacy benefit managers and these big insurance companies.
00:52:42.000And they are doing it to intimidate and bully clinicians into not running these tests.
00:52:49.000And to not running up the cost of health care, right?
00:52:53.000You'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.
00:53:04.000And that's the last place you want to be.
00:53:06.000Because for most Americans, they don't understand how the system works.
00:53:10.000You don't get to present your side of the case.
00:53:15.000It's the DOJ presenting the narrative that was given to them by the big PBMs and the insurance companies.
00:53:26.000They've hired away former DOJ guys that were at that office a year earlier.
00:53:31.000Brushing 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.
00:53:41.000And the point of the matter is, it isn't about right or wrong.
00:55:05.000Brigham, 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.
00:55:51.000This 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.
00:56:03.000And 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.
00:56:19.000And our model is predictive, proactive medicine, a personalized approach.
00:56:24.000We'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.
00:56:33.000The 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.
00:56:41.000And that resonates with me because that's what I'm trying to preach with healthcare.
00:56:46.000The time to get well is when you're not sick.
00:56:49.000Don't wait for chronic disease to manifest.
00:57:31.000Look for a wellness, preventative care, longevity-based clinic.
00:57:34.000But 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.
00:58:08.000The other problem with the system is they tell you you're normal.
00:58:12.000When 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.
00:58:21.000Well, the average American is chronically ill.
00:58:39.000And most of the time, it's not pharmaceutical.
00:58:41.000Most 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.
00:58:55.000And 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.
00:59:05.000That is another huge indicator of VO2 max.
00:59:09.000And 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.
00:59:21.000And so you will know that you're headed towards something chronic and catastrophic years before you ever get there.
00:59:30.000And that's the way to practice medicine.
00:59:32.000Get these people out of the system where they're not going on these drugs.