The Tucker Carlson Show - Brigham Buhler： UnitedHealthcare CEO Assassination, & the Mass Monetization of Chronic Illness

00:00:00.000 This health insurance CEO is murdered on the street on 6th Avenue in New York a couple of

00:00:04.800 weeks ago. And the reaction to it is not what I expected. You know, 41% of younger people say

00:00:13.760 they support the murder. And on the one hand, you think, well, you know, clearly there's a

00:00:18.100 spiritual crisis in the country. That's nihilism. There's no defending murdering a guy, any guy,

00:00:24.220 in my opinion. However, it also reveals, so I'm not in any sense justifying it. I think it's

00:00:29.440 appalling, but there's a lot of latent hostility toward the insurance companies. And I want to

00:00:37.040 understand that more. I mean, I hate them, but I don't really know why I hate them.

00:00:41.680 Yeah. I mean, what happened is terrible. It's terrible and it's tragic. And I mean,

00:00:47.420 obviously I never condone violence and the loss of human life is a tragedy, but so is the loss of

00:00:54.120 1.7 million Americans a year to chronic disease. Yes. And these big insurance conglomerates are

00:01:00.820 implicitly contributing to the chronic disease crisis that America faces. You know, they're

00:01:09.560 profiteering off the disease. They're delaying people's ability to get coverage and care.

00:01:14.720 And there's a lot of money being made through these dark pathways and approaches to these insurance

00:01:22.380 companies and the revenues that they generate. It's all become a profit-driven system. And when I

00:01:28.740 testified in front of the Senate with Bobby Kennedy and the Maha Group, you know, my main message was 0.93

00:01:34.180 the corporate capture of our institutions and how that is the real cause of the chronic disease crisis

00:01:42.240 that we're facing. There's, there's, and, and candidly, the insurance companies aren't only

00:01:48.280 implicitly involved there. They are probably one of the major contributors that somehow have gone

00:01:54.480 unnoticed for decades.

00:02:07.720 Welcome to Tucker Carlson show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased,

00:02:12.220 anywhere else. And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest

00:02:17.560 brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our

00:02:23.040 content at tuckercarlson.com. Here's the episode. Maybe it does make sense. It's, I'm trying to

00:02:28.340 understand it. So the profit motive is designed to improve the quality of goods and services.

00:02:37.000 That's what we've been taught. So in other words, if I pay more for a hotel, if I stay at the Four

00:02:42.020 Seasons instead of Motel 6, I get a nicer room. If I pay more for a car, I get a nicer car.

00:02:47.980 We pay more for healthcare than any country in the world, but we have crappy healthcare. 0.79

00:02:52.280 Yeah.

00:02:52.520 So what's the difference?

00:02:54.340 The idea of healthcare started, insurance started right in Houston, Texas, in the Texas Medical

00:02:59.100 Center with Baylor. Baylor Hospital began to offer insurance plans to patients to try and

00:03:04.140 make it a consistent payment plan where they could have accessibility to preventative care. And that

00:03:10.080 was the premise of what Baylor did.

00:03:11.620 So health insurance is a fairly new idea?

00:03:14.240 Well, since the 1930s, but it got captured in the 80s and became HMOs. And so essentially, 0.89

00:03:21.200 once it was HMOs, it became a profit center and it changed, it pivoted. And so the money that's

00:03:29.160 being made off of every single chronic disease and by delaying the onset of these procedures and

00:03:34.260 surgeries. So it's pretty nuanced.

00:03:36.140 It is. And I'm going to ask a ton of dumb questions because I'm uninformed. 0.98

00:03:39.840 Um, what's the difference between an HMO and like pre-1980s health insurance? 0.51

00:03:45.760 So prior to the 80s, uh, your doctor knew you, they knew your family. Uh, they showed up with

00:03:52.180 their little leather bag. They knew everybody in the family. They spent time with you in the system

00:03:57.020 we have today because the insurance companies control the doctor's reimbursement rates. The

00:04:02.420 clinician only spends six minutes with you on average, uh, here in the United States. And in six

00:04:07.960 minutes, how can they possibly uncover the root cause, uh, talk to you about family history,

00:04:13.380 diet, lifestyle, nutrition, which they're not trained on in the first place. So it created

00:04:17.720 an issue with the ability to prevent chronic disease is one, one section of that. But the

00:04:23.500 other end of that is once these insurance conglomerates got ahold of our healthcare institutions

00:04:28.620 and took over, they began to profiteer off of the chronic disease. So it's not just where it gets

00:04:35.340 very, very complicated. And what people don't understand Trump actually yesterday announced

00:04:39.880 that he was going to break up PBMs. And when I talked to Bobby Kennedy, uh, I was walking

00:04:46.180 him through the PBM and what it is. So many people say these middlemen, or even when I did

00:04:51.660 Bobby's podcast, he said, what is a PBM? I only, I have insurance, not a pharmacy benefit

00:04:56.880 manager. And I said, you have a pharmacy benefit manager that claims that it outsources your

00:05:02.220 drug coverage to a pharmacy bit to a PBM. But the truth is they own the PBM. It's like

00:05:09.200 Scooby doo. So you pull the mask off and it's like, Oh, it was Mr. Rogers all along.

00:05:14.800 So a PBM stands for pharmacy benefit manager, pharmacy benefit manager. And they were established

00:05:18.680 in the seventies to be an advocate for the American people to drive down the cost of prescription

00:05:25.220 drug care. Their job was to negotiate on our behalf to drive down the cost of our medications.

00:05:31.480 And along the way, as the insurance companies became a for-profit institution, guess what

00:05:38.340 they did? They went out and they gobbled up all of the middlemen. So the pharmacy benefit

00:05:44.340 managers in America are all owned by the five big insurance companies. So when you pull back

00:05:51.160 the layers to the onion, what you find is they've turned the PBM into a profit center. So rather

00:05:58.260 than negotiating down the cost of prescription drug care, they negotiated up the cost. But

00:06:04.080 why, why would you negotiate up the cost? Because they, by negotiating up, they get rebates. We

00:06:10.640 would call them kickbacks in any other business. And so essentially, let me, I'll use a real world

00:06:16.160 example. GLP ones are hot right now. Everyone's talking about the price of Zimpik and how it's so

00:06:22.220 expensive. It's egregious. Roughly 30% of the cost of every prescription drug is because the 30%

00:06:30.300 kickback is going to a PBM. So if Zimpik's $1,000 a month, $300 a month are going to the pharmacy

00:06:38.320 benefit manager via a kickback. It's a pay to play system.

00:06:42.420 So who pays? The drug maker pays the pharmacy? 0.80

00:06:44.500 The drug maker pays the pharmacy benefit manager the $300 per month in order to be placed on a

00:06:50.560 preferred contract with the insurance company, which is the PBM. And it's so staggering. Let's

00:06:56.580 talk about UnitedHealthcare since that's the CEO that was, you know, unfortunately assassinated.

00:07:02.300 If we break down UnitedHealthcare, they generated $373 billion in revenue last year. Okay. 60% of

00:07:10.720 that revenue came from their pharmacy benefit manager, a holding company that nobody knows

00:07:15.700 about. The general public are politicians. They don't understand this and they don't get it.

00:07:21.280 And I'm trying to-

00:07:22.040 Are the profit margins high in that business?

00:07:23.480 The profit margins are not as high as big pharma, but there's a lot of levers that they're pulling

00:07:28.440 to hide their profits, right? And you can make, you know, there's, there's liars, there's damn 0.98

00:07:33.400 liars, and then there's statistics. You know, these guys are using a lot of levers to hide their 0.99

00:07:39.020 profitability. And so a lot of the profitabilities had held at the pharmacy benefit manager holding

00:07:44.480 company. And so they can artificially dilute down their profitability on paper. But as an industry,

00:07:52.360 the health insurance companies, and I said this on Rogan, they are the hidden juggernaut that nobody

00:07:58.760 is seeing. Everyone's saying big pharma, big pharma, big pharma. Big pharma did, I think,

00:08:04.180 600, 600 million dollars. And you look at these big insurance companies, they did two and a half

00:08:11.380 that in revenue. 2.5 times that in revenue. They did 1.5 trillion dollars north of one point.

00:08:18.180 They're projecting that they'll do 1.9 trillion dollars in revenue by 2029.

00:08:25.120 So can we, you know, not to my personal ignorance, I should just say, I don't know,

00:08:29.400 I don't go to the doctor. I don't know what my health insurance plan is. I just have no,

00:08:34.480 you know, once the COVID thing happened, it was like, I'm not going to the doctor. And I haven't.

00:08:39.320 So I'm a little bit out of it. I'm not as knowledgeable as most Americans on how exactly

00:08:44.280 this works. Can you walk through the average person's experience of health insurance and

00:08:52.120 medical care? Yeah. So let's say I'm a 40-year-old woman. Women go to the doctor annually. I think

00:08:59.200 most do. So they use the doctor more. How much is this person paying for insurance? Where's that

00:09:05.540 money coming from? What's the experience? Yeah. So the average American, because of our food and

00:09:11.400 our diet and our lifestyle, you know, 90% of chronic disease is driven by lifestyle.

00:09:16.820 Well, if we peel back and look at what's causing these chronic diseases and get to the root cause,

00:09:22.380 it's not just diet, lifestyle, nutrition. It's that the system is failing Americans. Again,

00:09:27.480 there is no safety net anymore. Your clinician doesn't have the time to do a deep dive. So the

00:09:33.460 cancer that develops in your 40s started in your 30s. The diabetes that develops in your 40s started

00:09:40.440 in your 30s. The chronic disease that hits you in your 50s started in your 40s. If we got proactive

00:09:45.860 and predictive, we could prevent chronic disease. And chronic disease is killing 1.8 to 1.9 million

00:09:52.800 Americans a year, more than every war we've ever fought since the history of this country.

00:09:58.380 That's how staggering this is. Like you and I were talking before we got on this,

00:10:02.200 the equivalent to a 747 jet worth of people are dying every day of opioid abuse, deaths of despair

00:10:08.920 at an all-time high, greater than that of the Great Depression, suicide at all-time high. All of

00:10:15.240 these things are through the roof. We are chronically ill as a society. And if we look at the pillars of

00:10:20.840 what's causing that, one branch is the big pharmaceutical industry. Another branch is the

00:10:26.460 food industry. But the other dirty branch is the insurance companies. They are implicitly involved

00:10:31.960 in this. And I'll show you how and why. So the reason I know all this is because I was a drug rep.

00:10:38.820 And then I was a medical device rep. And I stood in surgeries of some of the best and brightest minds

00:10:42.840 in the country. And from there, I owned labs and pharmacies that attempted to bill and work within

00:10:48.440 the insurance framework. So if you or your grandmother were to come in and try and fill

00:10:53.200 a medication, the average American's on four or more prescription drugs, which is just mind-boggling

00:10:59.360 in itself. Four or more prescription drugs is what the average American's on.

00:11:03.440 Average American.

00:11:04.320 Yes.

00:11:04.480 So like, I'm 55. Would that apply to my age group?

00:11:07.960 Yeah. This is all age groups. The age demographic, I think 18 to 70-something years old, we're on

00:11:12.580 four or more drugs on average, which is mind-boggling. If that doesn't tell you that there's something

00:11:17.140 wrong with us and our system and our food, like, we've got to wake up and realize somebody has

00:11:23.120 to say the emperor wears no clothes. Like, it's terrifying. So I love using the example of

00:11:29.340 Metformin because it's a very simplistic number that I can show you. If you come into a pharmacy

00:11:34.960 and you tell me you have UnitedHealthcare, I have a gag clause as a pharmacy owner. It is illegal

00:11:42.900 for me to tell you that I could sell you your Metformin for cheaper than what the insurance is

00:11:48.400 charging you. But you paid for that insurance coverage. Why can't I disclose to you that I can

00:11:54.320 give you the product for cash cheaper than your copay? So you come in, I swipe your card.

00:11:59.960 Metformin cost me, I'm going to use ballpark numbers, roughly $2 for a month's supply.

00:12:04.160 I would have sold you the Metformin for $4. I'm not allowed to tell you that. I swipe your card.

00:12:09.920 It tells me to charge you $10. That's your copay. So I charge you a $10 copay. Me, the pharmacy,

00:12:16.060 I don't get to keep that money. Who takes that money? The pharmacy benefit manager. They pull that

00:12:21.520 money out to their holding company and they get the additional $7. They short pay me. I don't even get

00:12:28.320 what I would have made if I sold it to you for cash. They're an unnecessary middleman. And when

00:12:32.940 they say they're negotiating down for the behalf of the people, that's just not true. So I'm going

00:12:37.920 to methodically walk you through what I like to tell people is the margins are made in the mystery.

00:12:42.600 When people say, why is it so confusing? Why can't healthcare be more transparent? How do I not know

00:12:49.220 what I'm going to pay? All of that bullshit is because of these insurance companies. It's because 0.99

00:12:54.560 of United, Cigna, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield. It is a system built to monopolize and profiteer off

00:13:01.980 of your sickness. There's more money in you being sick than in you being well. And so most of the

00:13:08.380 insurance companies' profits come from you being on prescription drugs. So they obstruct

00:13:14.080 your ability to get surgery because that's a loss leader. They don't want you getting surgical

00:13:19.080 procedures. They don't get a kickback on that. They want you on medicine. There was an article

00:13:23.860 two days ago. They're finally talking about how much the big insurance companies were involved in

00:13:31.160 the opioid crisis. Let's look at that. If you look at a product like an opioid, as a compounding

00:13:38.260 pharmacy like mine, we had non-abusive, non-addictive pain creams. We could have prevented the opioid

00:13:43.460 crisis by not prescribing an opioid in the first place. But when the FDA allows opioids to be rammed

00:13:50.260 into the marketplace because the head of the FDA went to go work for Purdue Pharma 18 months later

00:13:55.460 after giving them the goose that laid the golden egg, a label that says these are non-addictive,

00:14:00.840 non-abusive, when they never had a human safety study on that. How? How can they do that?

00:14:05.960 They daisy chain this drug into the marketplace. It's a lot to digest. So sorry, I'm trying to

00:14:10.940 explain it very complex. I don't know how I missed the fact that the head of the FDA went to work for

00:14:14.580 Purdue Pharma. 18 months later, it took a big salary job. And I think in the last 40 years,

00:14:19.400 only two heads of the FDA haven't gone to work for industry. Then go over to-

00:14:23.660 Wait, so Purdue Pharma, to be clear, was basically just OxyContin.

00:14:27.640 OxyContin, correct. I mean, they didn't have like an entire-

00:14:30.960 Right. And what happened is what happens so often in big pharma. When they say pharmaceutical

00:14:35.380 companies innovate, and that's why they make all this money. Okay. The United States pays for roughly,

00:14:42.200 makes up 60% of the pharmaceuticals industry's profitability, but we're ranked 40th overall

00:14:48.500 in healthcare outcomes. 40th. It's, we have a train wreck healthcare system. Again, four or more drugs,

00:14:55.520 the average American's on. The pharmaceutical companies are not fitting the bill for the research

00:15:00.360 and development. We, the taxpayers are because we fund the NIH and the NIH does most of the early

00:15:07.120 product development. Then they sell the patent to the pharmaceutical companies for pennies on the

00:15:12.540 dollar. Pharmaceutical companies pick them up and use their relationship and lobbying power with the

00:15:17.540 FDA to bring these products to market. Okay. So there's that. The other thing that pharmaceutical

00:15:22.440 companies do that is not innovative and in a way to extend their revenue streams and maximize profits

00:15:27.820 is they refile patents by changing subtleties of molecules or delivery mechanisms. And they get

00:15:34.780 additional patents that make it impossible for a competitor to come into the marketplace.

00:15:38.580 That's exactly what happened with Purdue Pharma. Purdue Pharma's delivery mechanism, the cotton system

00:15:43.960 was going to expire. They were making millions, hundreds and hundreds of millions. They panic. They say,

00:15:50.620 what do we do? They scramble to find a different opioid that they could plug into the delivery

00:15:55.860 mechanism. They found Oxy. But the problem with Oxy is it is eight times more addictive than

00:16:03.320 hydrocodone. They knew this. They knew it. They knew it a hundred percent and they put it in the drug and

00:16:09.980 they put it into the marketplace and they met with the head of the FDA in a private hotel for weeks in

00:16:15.900 advance. And they pushed it into the market and the FDA gave them the golden goose. They put that this

00:16:23.020 was less likely to be addictive or abused than other opioids, which was a bold face lie. And then that

00:16:31.360 individual went to go work for Purdue Pharma 18 months later when they left the FDA.

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00:18:14.500 And the same thing happens. Especially because, again, Purdue Pharma didn't make, you know, lots of

00:18:19.640 famous cancer drugs or antibiotics. No. Basically just made opioids. Yeah. And before that, they created

00:18:24.340 the Valium crisis of the 60s, where they were advertising to women in the New York Post and New

00:18:29.720 York Times saying, feeling stressed? Pop a Valium. Yes. And women got addicted to Valium all over the

00:18:35.680 country. So Purdue Pharma has done this multiple times. And the final ramifications are so much

00:18:42.040 more staggering because, again, who pays this? The taxpayers. But the real cost of all of this,

00:18:47.840 and this is what I said to the Senate, we can ramble off numbers and dollars. Like, I can tell you

00:18:52.880 how the number one reason for bankruptcy in America is healthcare costs. I can tell you how the number one

00:18:59.340 budgetary concern for the federal government is our rising healthcare cost. And I can tell you how for

00:19:06.760 employers, one of the biggest burdens is the insurance plans and covering their employees'

00:19:11.740 healthcare costs. But the real costs are paid in human lives. People like my brother, who got addicted

00:19:17.340 to opioids and lost his life because the system chewed him up and spit him out and let him down.

00:19:22.580 How did he get addicted to opioids?

00:19:23.600 He had an ACL surgery in high school, like so many kids. And the insurance companies are

00:19:31.000 incentivized to prescribe opioids. That's the article that came out the other day. And that's

00:19:35.900 what I'm trying to explain about the danger of these middlemen called the pharmacy benefit managers.

00:19:42.180 They're not middlemen at all. They're profit centers for the big insurance companies. And so even on

00:19:48.340 opioids, you could have been prescribed a non-addictive, non-abusive pain cream after your

00:19:54.680 surgery. It's a topical that uses non-abusive, non-addictive ketamine, but in a topical form.

00:20:01.800 You can't consume it. You can't eat it. You don't get high. There's no physiological high from it,

00:20:07.860 but it works. It's very efficacious. Why would the insurance companies not prescribe that

00:20:14.560 over a highly addictive side effect riddled opioid? The answer is the insurance companies were getting

00:20:22.000 rebates on these opioids. If you, if you look this up, you can read, do the research. They made

00:20:27.920 hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars right beside Purdue pharma, but they floated through all

00:20:34.480 of it. Exactly. So what happens is we'll, we'll go back to like a product. Well, here's another hot

00:20:41.960 talk. Insulin will be a great example. Insulin's been out 40 years. Why is insulin six times more

00:20:48.260 expensive than it was when it launched? The pharmaceutical companies are not making more

00:20:52.660 than they did when they launched it. Eli Lilly's actually making less per vial than it ever made

00:20:56.880 on insulin. Where is all that extra money going? That money is going to the pharmacy benefit manager.

00:21:03.980 So UnitedHealthcare owns Optum. Optum is a pharmacy benefit manager that negotiates rebates or kickbacks

00:21:11.380 with the pharmaceutical companies. So when it came to opioids, they go to Purdue pharma and they

00:21:16.080 say, okay, Purdue, I'm just going to use simple math for my small brain. It's if it's a hundred

00:21:20.980 dollars a month, they say, Purdue, we're going to, if they, if Purdue wants to charge 50, they'll say

00:21:25.940 charge a hundred and give us a $50 rebate. Okay. And so then United will show you the patient that

00:21:34.660 your opioid cost them a hundred dollars that month or whatever the prescription drug is. Prescription

00:21:38.680 of a cost them a hundred dollars. They never paid the a hundred dollars because they got a $50

00:21:44.380 rebate. So they paid $50. What people don't realize is 80% of your health plan in America,

00:21:52.380 80% of Americans health plan is covered by their employer. Most people are, are, are getting their

00:21:57.300 health plan through their employer. So at the end of the year, these big insurance companies meet with

00:22:02.460 your employer and say, Bobby Sue was on this opioid all year long. It costs us a hundred dollars a

00:22:09.420 month. That's $1,200 a year. We've got to raise your co-pays, your deductibles and your out-of-pocket

00:22:14.940 expenses because it's really running up our costs. But in reality, they never paid that. Then where

00:22:21.180 this gets more sick and twisted is a lot of people don't understand this Medicare and Medicaid after

00:22:26.780 Obamacare has all been outsourced to the big insurance companies. So 60% of United's healthcare's

00:22:34.180 profits are coming from Medicare and Medicaid. And how do they negotiate the Medicare and Medicaid

00:22:39.500 prices? They negotiate it by looking at the average wholesale price in America and saying,

00:22:45.060 we want a discount. Well, that average wholesale price is a bullshit price because they set the 0.98

00:22:50.720 market, but they didn't pay that price. Does that mean, is this making sense? So just follow the 0.97

00:22:55.660 dollars. Okay. A hundred dollars a month. They didn't pay the hundred, they paid 50. They tell

00:23:00.460 the employer they paid the hundred. At the end of the year, that employer is going to get hit with

00:23:05.160 the cost going into the following year. All of those co-pays, deductibles, all that goes up.

00:23:10.400 Then you, the patient get hit. And so when they decide what drugs to put on a formulary,

00:23:17.100 what drugs they're going to cover, it has nothing to do with the efficacy and what is best for the

00:23:22.660 patient. It has everything to do with who gave them the biggest rebate. And they incentivize you

00:23:28.340 to go to those drugs by lowering your copay and deductible on those drugs. So with opioids,

00:23:34.280 they made it very easy to get an opioid because it was getting a rebate, but they made it very

00:23:40.560 difficult to get a non-addictive product like a pain cream. And then eventually they just said,

00:23:45.520 we won't cover pain creams at all. You're going to have to take an opioid.

00:23:48.360 Then to go even deeper, that's just the prescription.

00:23:52.340 And this is what happened to your brother.

00:23:53.840 This is a hundred percent what happened to my brother and what happened to millions and

00:23:56.300 millions of Americans. And it's still happening to this day. And so I'll paint a picture for you.

00:24:02.340 Imagine being a young kid with a spine issue and you're in pain. And this particular spine issue

00:24:08.240 causes the sensation of burning and fire shooting into your hands, your feet, your extremities.

00:24:14.880 And the worst of it all, a large percentage of these male patients with this spine issue

00:24:19.700 experience burning and fire in their genitals, fire and pain shooting into your genitals and 0.98

00:24:25.800 extremities. In the insurance model with UnitedHealthcare, you're going to have to go to a 0.94

00:24:31.040 primary care first. That's going to take two months to get in with that primary care. You're

00:24:35.320 dealing with this pain and suffering the whole time. Now you get in with the primary care, they go,

00:24:39.840 whoa, got six minutes with you. This is out of my wheelhouse. I'm going to refer you to a

00:24:45.020 specialist. You go to a specialist. That's going to take months. Oftentimes you have to argue with

00:24:49.720 the insurance, right? Deny, delay, depose. You're going to argue with that insurance company begging

00:24:55.900 them to allow you to go to a specialist. Your primary care may even have to get on the phone and

00:25:00.300 get a prior off and negotiate it for you. Now you finally get in with a specialist. Specialist says,

00:25:05.180 I want to order an MRI. A lot of times the insurance companies will deny the MRI or delay it.

00:25:11.120 So now you've got a battle for that. That's going to be another three or four months. The gist of it

00:25:15.140 is the average spine patient takes six to nine months before they ever really even get an answer.

00:25:21.080 And then they've got to negotiate to get into the surgery. And now you finally get the day in the sun

00:25:27.200 where you're finally feeling like you're going to get relief and you're going to get that surgery

00:25:30.840 that you've desperately needed. But the whole time they've been selling you opioids to keep

00:25:36.060 your pain level down because that's the only option you have. So now you get your approval

00:25:41.580 and you say, I found the best surgeon in the country. I want to go to this guy. That's not

00:25:45.960 how it works. The insurance company tells you who you're allowed to go see. And they say, yeah,

00:25:49.700 he's not in our network. You've got to go to this other doctor. And then that doctor botches the

00:25:54.260 surgery. It wasn't the surgeon you wanted. You waited nine months to get this thing done.

00:25:58.560 And that surgery messes up your that surgeon messes up your surgery. That's what happened

00:26:02.940 to this kid, Luigi. That can you imagine how he could have lost his mind and gone crazy? Yes. And

00:26:09.280 what's unfortunate is that's what's happening to millions and millions of Americans every day.

00:26:15.500 What happened is terrible. It's tragic. Nobody has the right to play judge, jury and executioner,

00:26:21.680 but neither do the PBMs and the insurance companies. And that's what they're doing every day.

00:26:26.160 They are monetizing and printing money on the backs of Americans, monetizing our chronic disease and

00:26:32.500 illness, making money off prescription drugs while denying surgeries, slow playing surgeries.

00:26:38.620 And I mean, I could go on for hours because it just gets deeper and deeper. And I love to show

00:26:43.440 people how once I show people the magic trick, they will be able to see through the insurance's scam

00:26:50.120 because it's a scam. I mean, they're gangsters like they're the mob.

00:26:55.100 How much did this play out during COVID? I mean, these these systems affected how we responded to

00:27:00.760 COVID, correct? It affects everything. I mean, everything under the sun. Again, they decide what

00:27:06.620 gets covered, how it gets covered, what the reimbursement rate is, who gets in for surgery when

00:27:11.680 you get in for surgery. Then they can change the surgery. You know, the other thing is having owned

00:27:17.700 labs and pharmacies and had all these touch points. I didn't know this. Like I was naive like everybody

00:27:23.400 else. You know, I just thought you pay your hard earned money. And when things go south,

00:27:28.800 the insurance has got your back. Like that's literally how naive I was. That's what I thought.

00:27:33.020 But what you learned is HMOs are not health insurance. They are managed care. And what do I

00:27:40.620 mean by that? You've got to think of it like the analogy I use is think of car insurance. It's there

00:27:45.680 if you wreck the fucking car. Exactly. And that's all it's good for. But they aren't going to, 1.00

00:27:50.680 they're not going to rotate the tires, change the oil, maintain the vehicle. Right. If you put your

00:27:56.460 life and your family's life in the hands of these insurance companies, they are going to monetize

00:28:02.560 your chronic disease. And I say it, if you see the average American doctor and you eat the average

00:28:07.800 American diet, then don't be surprised when you die of the average American chronic disease.

00:28:12.180 So I think what's changed, and this is maybe something that it's taken me a while to figure

00:28:16.600 out maybe so right now, because I do think of health insurance that way, just as I think of

00:28:21.480 collision insurance or fire insurance, you know, how to fire used insurance work. Great. That's it.

00:28:27.120 But the addition of chronic disease to America, where like, you know, the majority of the population

00:28:32.720 has a chronic disease, that means that it's not catastrophic coverage. It's a maintenance program

00:28:39.460 that you're paying for. Correct. Okay. And the challenge is, every safety net throughout the

00:28:44.840 system has been captured. And that's why I think the corporate capture narrative is so important.

00:28:50.580 And that's what I was trying to get through to the Senate. Everyone talks about the speech that

00:28:55.380 Eisenhower gave about the military industrial complex. That's right. People forget there was a

00:29:00.060 second half to that speech. It's very rare. Bobby Kennedy is actually the only person I've ever heard

00:29:05.240 talk about it. And I was so excited when I heard him talk about it. Because I'm like, finally, in the

00:29:09.960 second half was, if we allow corporate interests to capture our scientific community, then what we

00:29:18.580 will find is we will lose the garage tinkerer, we will lose the innovator, we will stifle and suppress

00:29:24.520 innovation, and everything will turn to basically profits and a profit driven system. Show me the

00:29:30.740 incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes. We have built a system based on quarterly profits and

00:29:37.160 quarterly earnings throughout the system, whether we're talking about the pharmaceutical industry,

00:29:42.340 the big health insurance companies, the hospital systems, the doctor's practices, everyone is built into

00:29:50.200 this ecosystem that is attempting to capture human lives and monetize those touch points. So everything

00:29:58.340 that you do is a revenue generator for all of these various entities. And there's so much money being

00:30:05.040 made off chronic disease, there's no interest in curing chronic disease. And so the National Institute

00:30:10.200 for Health, like I said earlier, they are the seed essentially that grows into the tree. And they're

00:30:17.260 the ones doing most of the innovation and early development of drugs. But they're doing it oftentimes

00:30:22.240 through incentives that incentivize them to look at treatments rather than cures. And so the problem

00:30:29.020 is we're just launching band-aids into the marketplace rather than healing the wound. And in

00:30:34.900 medicine, we say, if you're to treat chronic disease, you have to uncover the root cause. And I'm telling

00:30:41.000 you, the root cause runs deep, and it's insidious, and it's dark. And it has captured our entire healthcare

00:30:48.040 ecosystem, front to back, from the food we eat, to the way we grow our food, to the way we process our

00:30:53.880 food. Big tobacco captured most of the food industry in the 80s. They literally owned the food

00:31:00.100 industry and brought their marketing campaigns and strategies to the food industry, where they made

00:31:04.320 food more addictive, more processed, and more chemically laden. And so throughout that process,

00:31:08.880 now you are eating the wrong foods, and you're getting chronically ill at a disproportionate rate.

00:31:14.040 The preventative care was the way to prevent that. And now those doctors are out of that ecosystem.

00:31:19.800 So now you're essentially getting pushed into chronic disease, where then the insurance companies

00:31:25.020 monopolize and profiteer off of it for years. And then your employer and the American people and

00:31:31.140 the taxpayers are who are really fitting the bill for all of this.

00:31:34.440 With Donald Trump returning to the White House, this country has a unique opportunity, maybe our last

00:31:38.880 opportunity to save ourselves from the anti-American and anti-human left. But our efforts may be stymied

00:31:47.760 by the deep state. That's what happened to the first Trump term. Permanent Washington stands in the way

00:31:55.520 of all efforts to approve the lives of ordinary Americans. And right now they are scheming to do the

00:32:01.100 same thing to the second Trump administration. They are determined to keep their stranglehold on power,

00:32:07.700 regardless of elections, anti-democratically. That is a fact. So what do you do to fight them?

00:32:14.840 How do you defeat the deep state? Well, one way you can is by supporting the Heritage Foundation,

00:32:19.160 which is in Washington and understands exactly how it works in such a way that they're a threat

00:32:24.620 and they're under attack. You know who's effective because they're the ones under attack.

00:32:28.880 Heritage has a comprehensive plan to dismantle permanent Washington and restore the country

00:32:33.400 to its democratic foundations. It's important. Visit heritage.org slash Tucker to learn more

00:32:41.500 and to support this critical effort. And when you make a gift today, you get a free pocket constitution

00:32:47.020 to make certain that you are equipped with the founding principles on your person at all times.

00:32:52.020 It's amazing to read it. Again, that's heritage.org slash Tucker.

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00:34:21.380 How aware do you think health insurers are of the system that they preside over? Like,

00:34:28.300 do they understand what's happening? Oh, absolutely. They were knowing and willingly

00:34:33.120 active participants. They know. I mean, UnitedHealthcare implemented an AI algorithm that

00:34:39.760 rejected 90% of claims inaccurately. 90% of Medicare claims for surgeries were getting rejected inaccurately,

00:34:48.200 right? Which drove up their profits. They're, they're having double digit profit growth right

00:34:52.600 now. Um, when you asked about how profitable they are for the last like five years, they've

00:34:56.540 doubled their stock price. So you also got to not just think about monthly, like it's revenue and

00:35:02.680 profits, but it's also, what is your shareholder return on investment and what are your stocks doing?

00:35:06.960 And if we look at that, who, guess who owns the majority of the big five insurance companies?

00:35:12.340 BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street. Guess who owns the majority of the pharmaceutical companies?

00:35:17.480 It's BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street. Guess who owns the majority of the media outlets?

00:35:22.000 It's BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street. Yes. Do you start to sense a trend here? I do. And so,

00:35:26.660 and guess who funds and lobbies more than anybody? The pharmaceutical industry, followed by,

00:35:31.580 you know, one of the top players is the health, is the health insurance industry. And then you've got

00:35:37.960 these big conglomerates that are funding all of this. So there's so many levers we can pull

00:35:42.480 to generate revenue off of these individuals that it's staggering. Um, yeah. And so it's,

00:35:49.760 they, they absolutely know, and it makes it very, very hard. There's no alternative. Like if I'm a

00:35:57.720 hospital, I can't afford to lose Blue Cross Blue Shield. I can't afford to lose United Healthcare.

00:36:04.680 I'm out of business. Like in the state of Texas, Blue Cross Blue Shield is 30% of your revenue.

00:36:08.940 So I'll tell you in a real world example, I owned a pharmacy and, uh, I still do own pharmacies,

00:36:14.600 but I don't take insurance. Like our model now is we refuse to take insurance because if I don't take

00:36:20.200 insurance, I can tell the patient the real price. I can get rid of all the games, all the fuzzy numbers,

00:36:26.000 and I can just say, Hey, it cost me this. I'm going to sell it to you for that. I'm going to

00:36:29.440 mail it to your doorstep. It's that simple. It's so, I mean, why aren't there more pharmacies

00:36:34.620 like that? They're springing up there. They are coming up. And I think it's taking the American 0.55

00:36:39.020 people. So many people think, well, my insurance should cover it. And I try to explain they're

00:36:43.860 going to cover it, but there's a price to pay. And that price to pay is way more than dollars.

00:36:48.540 They are going to make you chronically ill and make money off you. And oftentimes you're spending more

00:36:54.060 than you would to just pay cash for the compound. Uh, like here's an example. I also owned labs and

00:37:00.720 I owned a blood lab and I went out and I educated clinicians in the state of Texas on the importance

00:37:05.680 of preventative care. My, my, my pitch, my elevator pitch was the five chronic diseases that are killing

00:37:12.560 so many Americans. How do we stop them? We don't let them develop in the first place. And how do we do 0.59

00:37:18.280 that? We do that through getting proactive and predictive. And how do we do that? We do that by taking a

00:37:24.040 look under the hood. Do you just go out and romp on a car without change the oil or maintaining it?

00:37:28.540 No, you take care of the vehicle, right? We have to take care of our bodies. And the only way to do

00:37:33.260 that is to do the deep dive annually. And to understand a basic checkup in America is a lipid

00:37:38.740 panel. They're looking at like four or five things. They're looking at nothing. You can't get anything

00:37:43.640 out of that. Like to do a deep dive, you look at over 70 biomarkers. Now I'm looking at your blood work

00:37:49.580 and I can tell, like I said earlier, are you headed towards diabetes? And if you are,

00:37:54.580 we can intervene. We can act now before you become diabetic. But what the insurance model does is they

00:38:00.680 wait for you to become diabetic. Why? It costs six fold to keep you alive every year once you're

00:38:07.640 diabetic because they're getting paid off the insulin. There's an incentive for them to let you

00:38:13.840 become diabetic. You show you the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes. We've got to pivot this and

00:38:21.620 shift this. So I would educate doctors on the importance of blood work. And I would tell them,

00:38:26.100 let's get proactive and predictive and let's prevent chronic disease. Doctors start implementing

00:38:31.020 this in their practice. Within months, clinicians, all of them got letters from the insurance companies.

00:38:37.720 Hey, doctor, so-and-so, we noticed you're pulling a lot of blood work. We don't like this.

00:38:41.580 We don't think there's medical necessity here. Hold on now. One, where did you go to fucking med

00:38:46.620 school? Two, who are you to tell a clinician what they do with a patient life? Three, that patient 1.00

00:38:53.300 paid you their hard-earned money for the right and accessibility to care. Four, you're doing this

00:38:59.580 purely, purely out of evil necessity for profit and greed. That's all this is. There's no reason not to

00:39:08.500 get a comprehensive blood panel at least once a year to be able to do a deep dive. So clinicians

00:39:13.540 stop pulling the blood work. That's throughout the United States. Doctors are terrified. They are

00:39:19.500 not going to fight the insurance companies because the insurance companies control everything. And so

00:39:24.420 when we talk about corporate capture, you've got the big pharmaceutical companies that have captured

00:39:29.820 the FDA, you've got the big insurance companies that have captured included with FBI and DOJ, which

00:39:37.700 I'll get into here in a second. They've also captured our hospital systems and our clinicians. There are no

00:39:43.620 private primary care practice anymore because insurance cut their reimbursements, forced them to

00:39:48.720 go work as employees of the hospital. Now they've funneled all of the sheep into one location so the wolves

00:39:54.640 can pick them off. And now these doctors are basically fall in line or lose your job. And so doctors fall in line.

00:40:02.120 There are no independent primary care. There's very few independent primary cares that are in an insurance

00:40:06.260 model anymore. Most of those have gone to work for huge HMOs and like Blue Cross Blue Shield bought Kelsey

00:40:13.200 Siebel, I believe, which so the other thing they're doing is they're vertically integrating and capturing our systems.

00:40:18.880 So like where I was going earlier with the blood work is they basically deny the blood work, bully the

00:40:25.960 clinician to not pull the blood work so then the doctors don't ever do the deep dive so they can't

00:40:30.120 prevent the chronic disease. So now you are headed towards chronic disease because they don't have the

00:40:35.180 ability to help you prevent it. And so that's just one sliver. Then the other end is as a pharmacy owner,

00:40:43.100 I would bill and collect and I would ship out hundreds of thousands millions of dollars in medications a month

00:40:50.220 crucial life saving medications for patients. Blue Cross Blue Shield true story came said we they quit paying me and I

00:40:57.860 shipped out I think over over a million dollars in prescription medications in a month in the state of Texas. You go to

00:41:03.880 negotiate say hey, what happened? You guys didn't pay me this month. I have a million dollars that I've shipped to your

00:41:09.120 patients. Yeah, we don't think you collected copays and deductibles. Okay, well, we did we collected 98%. Okay, well, we'll

00:41:16.420 come audit you. Okay, how soon can you be here three months? What? I can't ship out three million dollars in

00:41:22.980 drugs and float you guys. I'm not a bank. And they do that throughout the industry. The hospitals are floating

00:41:29.600 the bills. It's 90 days on average to get reimbursed anywhere from 60 to 90 days to get reimbursed on a

00:41:34.540 surgical procedure. Then when patients say, why do I have such a big copay? It's another method to

00:41:41.400 discourage you from having surgery and to force you back to the drugs that they're making money on.

00:41:46.600 Interesting. So I, I mean, doctors were associated with surgery. That's what they're called sawbones.

00:41:53.100 Psychiatrists were, you know, talkers, you know, let's talk about your mother. The whole system, every part of

00:41:59.880 medicine seems totally focused on drugs now. Yeah, that now there's still a lot of money in surgery.

00:42:06.840 But it is a loss leader for these insurance conglomerates. And so they put obstructions between

00:42:12.680 you deny, delay, depose, right? So they delay your ability to get the care, they make you jump through

00:42:19.720 all these hurdles. Before you finally get approval, you know, UnitedHealthcare denied over 30%, one third

00:42:26.100 of claims. And actually two years ago, they denied 37% of claims. 37%. That's not one third. That's

00:42:33.640 almost half. Like, let's, let's be honest. And all the meanwhile, and what that means is people are

00:42:39.900 dying. It doesn't mean like, oh, shucks, you know, it's, these aren't aesthetic procedures. These are

00:42:46.560 life-changing procedures that people are desperate for, that they paid for, and you're denying them.

00:42:52.420 And do you know what percentage of people fight the claim? 10%. 10%. People are tired.

00:42:59.720 How do you fight a claim?

00:43:00.980 You have to go to your doctor and write letters and push back and go get second opinions and take

00:43:07.200 time off from your busy job to go try and battle an insurance company. And then even if you get the

00:43:14.140 procedure approved and everything's hunky-dory and you go have the surgery, they're going to tell you

00:43:19.720 who to go to, where to go. And then they're going to take 90 days to pay the hospital back or the

00:43:26.260 surgery center back. And that surgery center holds the bill. But here's where it gets even more fucked

00:43:31.300 up. They set the co-pays and deductibles. Sorry, am I allowed to cuss? I didn't even ask you that. 0.99

00:43:36.260 Okay. They, they set the co-pays and deductibles. And so oftentimes your employer, your employer

00:43:42.880 offers you 10 different plans. Like I employ 300 plus people. And so I let my employees choose

00:43:49.060 the plan. They have an option between like 10 different plans. My young people will usually

00:43:52.640 choose a plan that has a bigger out of pocket expense, maybe a $10,000 deductible on a surgery.

00:43:59.240 The way they word the insurance contracts is they make you the hospital or me the lab. Like when I had

00:44:06.300 a genetics lab, there were times I had to go after the patient for a $5,000 deductible, right? I don't

00:44:12.680 want to, it's not what I don't want to play, you know, collection agent on a patient, but the way they

00:44:19.120 word the contract is if I didn't collect the co-pair deductible, they have recourse. They can deny the

00:44:26.880 claim and never pay me for the procedure, the surgery, or the lab screening that I did. And so I have

00:44:33.860 to show a reasonable effort to collect. And if I don't, they can do an array of things. They can

00:44:39.600 deny the claim. They could come back and say, we're going to do an audit. This is where we get

00:44:43.740 into depose, right? Deny, delay, depose. The depose of the situation is let's say I did that spine

00:44:51.360 procedure and let's say this kid's out of pocket expense on it was $10,000 and he doesn't have the

00:44:57.460 money. Well, I'm required by law to go after him and make a reasonable effort to collect. But in the

00:45:03.240 fine print of my contract with United Healthcare, they're going to say, if they uncover that I

00:45:08.420 didn't collect the co-pay or deductible, they can deny the claim and never pay me for the surgery.

00:45:14.560 And so I have to chase it. So then now you get into a dispute with United or like I did with Blue

00:45:20.200 Cross Blue Shield where they just don't pay me. If I sue them, they're going to depose. They're going

00:45:25.700 to dig into every time I didn't collect a co-pay or deductible. And they're going to argue that they

00:45:30.080 have a contractual ground to stand on that they don't owe me the money. It's almost like a lie

00:45:37.220 agreed upon. They wait until the deficit gets big and then they put you out of business. And then

00:45:43.840 what happens? Hey, it's tough out there for a small privately held pharmacy. We're actually buying

00:45:51.760 pharmacies right now. Would you like to sell to us? So Aetna owns or CVS, CVS Health owns Aetna.

00:46:00.840 CVS Health owns CVS pharmacies. CVS Health owns the PBM. All of that's vertically integrated.

00:46:09.320 They set the price point. They set the co-pay. They set the reimbursement. They set the deductible.

00:46:13.620 They also own mail pharmacies, like mail order pharmacies. And they will tell patients,

00:46:19.220 oh, we can get you this drug cheaper if you'll go to our mail pharmacy in an effort to cannibalize

00:46:24.580 and monopolize that patient life so nobody else has access to them. And so they can't see behind

00:46:29.800 the curtain to find out that they're really getting screwed, that they never should have

00:46:33.980 been paying that price point on the drug in the first place. And so like one of the things we're

00:46:37.560 doing at my pharmacy is we disclose pricing. Like we added, you could search and find out what the

00:46:43.320 real wholesale prices on any drug and research that. And to show a real world example of how

00:46:50.040 dirty this is, Tucker. And if any of it's too much, let me know. I can tailor this to whatever

00:46:54.940 makes sense because it's a lot. Okay. The state of Ohio launched an investigation, hired 32 forensic

00:47:04.080 auditors, just the state of Ohio, just Medicare, get just Medicaid. Sorry. Guess what they found?

00:47:12.880 $230 million in fraud from the insurance companies in one year through gap pricing,

00:47:21.340 what they're calling gap pricing, the whole Ponzi scheme. I just explained, they are telling the state

00:47:26.460 this drug cost us $200. You owe us $200, but the state pays them the $200. They only paid a hundred.

00:47:34.600 So they made a hundred bucks every time that script got written. The state realized that they could

00:47:39.600 negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies and get better pricing. So the state

00:47:44.560 of Ohio is saving hundreds of millions of dollars. Now multiply that times all 50 states. Now multiply

00:47:52.560 that times all the federal payers because Medicaid is just the state. The Medicare program covers the

00:47:57.920 whole freaking country. Yes. 60% of the profits of these insurance companies is coming from the

00:48:03.700 taxpayers. So we're getting killed paying taxes to give these guys all this money at the government

00:48:10.220 level, but then we're getting killed on our company insurance plans. And then as a business owner, I'm

00:48:15.640 getting killed because at the end of the year, they renegotiate the rates and they charge me more,

00:48:19.920 right? I'm paying half of the care of my employees, my 300 something employees and everything that costs

00:48:25.360 that insurance money they've taken a 30% markup on. That's why we're facing this mega healthcare

00:48:33.260 expenditure issue in America. It's not just the pharmaceutical industries. It's the collusion

00:48:39.440 and the capture of all of them working together to essentially screw all of us.

00:48:45.080 Well, 2024 is a wild year. Who knows what 2025 will bring. But one thing a lot of people have

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00:50:00.440 That's Hallow.com slash Tucker. That is sincerely endorsed from personal experience.

00:50:06.340 You haven't mentioned doctors, really. It doesn't sound like they're getting rich from this.

00:50:25.120 The doctors are making less and less to do more and more. In fact, we're-

00:50:29.820 That's kind of crazy though because medicine is, I mean, at the core of medicine is a doctor,

00:50:33.820 right? 100%. And we are facing a crisis with that. We have a booming aging population. 0.99

00:50:39.360 We have a primary care shortage in America. That's why it takes three to six months to get

00:50:43.280 in with primary cares. And 80% of primary cares in an interview, I think it was done by Harvard,

00:50:49.120 said they will not be in this profession within 36 months. They don't want to do it anymore.

00:50:53.800 It is a beat down. These poor people are working their asses off, but they're in a system 0.98

00:50:59.200 that ties their hands up. 0.99

00:51:01.300 The people getting rich are the parasites, right? They're not providing any actual service. 0.96

00:51:05.120 Right. And then in certain states, clinicians have the right to earn into and make profit off

00:51:10.160 of things. And so because the insurance companies have gotten so dirty and have cut the reimbursement

00:51:14.980 rates for clinicians, clinicians are now looking for ways to make money. And so oftentimes when I say

00:51:21.640 corporate capture again, it's the word of the day. But when I say it, either it's one of two things.

00:51:26.940 Either your doctor is an employee of the hospital and works for the hospital, which is directly

00:51:33.660 controlled by the insurance company, okay? And so they're essentially an employee of the

00:51:38.280 insurance company, or your clinician owns the hospital or surgery center. And then they dictate

00:51:45.420 to the hospital and surgery center, the protocols and procedures. And in those instances, they're

00:51:50.060 oftentimes having to bill out of network, which is a whole nother racket. Because when you bill

00:51:54.840 out of network, you get paid a third of billed charges. So that's why when people go, what the

00:51:59.060 hell? My MRI was $6,000. It's because they know that they're only going to get paid a third of what

00:52:05.380 they bill United or Cigna. And so they have to inflate their bill by threefold. But the insurance

00:52:11.860 company sets you up for failure by saying you have to go after the patient for any short pay.

00:52:17.020 So this is where people get into these medical bankruptcy issues. Because if I go to United

00:52:24.340 Healthcare when I owned a blood lab, and I said, United, I want to be in network, their answer is 1.00

00:52:28.300 fuck off. We don't want you in network. We don't need you. We've got blood labs that we have browbeat 1.00

00:52:33.640 for 20 years, and we've got them negotiated down to a dirt cheap price. We don't want another in

00:52:37.840 network lab. So I either lay everybody off and go out of business, go to a cash model, which is what I do

00:52:44.040 now, or you do what's called billing out of network. And if I were to, I'm going to use blood

00:52:49.860 as an example. If I were to bill the panel we run at Ways to Well, if you were to walk into a quest,

00:52:56.380 and it's happened because I've had UFC. That's the biggest, right? Yeah. I've had UFC fighters that

00:53:00.700 are our clients and stuff walk into quest, and they give them an insurance card, and they quote them

00:53:05.960 $3,000 for our blood panel. And they'll call me and go, oh my God, dude, they're quoting me. I'm like,

00:53:11.080 no, no, no, no. Give them our code. It's a $300 deal, and they bill me. They don't bill you.

00:53:16.800 Like, I got it. And they're like, well, how can it be $300 when they're charging $3,000?

00:53:22.320 And so it's because once you've billed a panel at a rate by law in the contract, you have to bill

00:53:29.000 the patient for that rate. And so if I take insurance at a blood lab, and I'm out of network,

00:53:35.180 and I bill the insurance $300, they're going to pay me $100. I can't run it. I'd lose money. I'd lose $200.

00:53:40.100 Yeah. So I have to bill them $900 to get paid $300. Does that make sense? Yes.

00:53:45.660 And then in the instance that the insurance denies, one of the deny deposed, you know,

00:53:50.980 if they deny, I am in my contract required by law to go after you for the additional money.

00:53:57.620 I have to chase- 0.98

00:53:58.600 Me the patient.

00:53:59.020 Yes. I have to chase you down, but I never wanted $900. All I wanted was the $300 you owed me in the

00:54:05.160 first place. That was it. But I can't get that because you won't give me a contract.

00:54:11.120 And that's what's happening with surgery centers, MRI centers, hospitals. There's in-network and

00:54:16.640 there's out-of-network. You, the patient, oftentimes pay for out-of-network benefits and coverage.

00:54:21.520 And then the insurance company tries to deny it and make it impossible for you to get that.

00:54:25.680 And oftentimes clinicians are out-of-network. Like the biggest, baddest, best,

00:54:30.580 brightest minds for orthopedic surgery in the state of Texas, arguably is University of Texas,

00:54:37.180 UT Medical School. UT Medical School is kicked off of Optum and United Healthcare's plan.

00:54:45.200 So if you're, let's say you blow an ACL, you know, the Texans, Rockets, Astros, Team Doctors,

00:54:52.020 all those guys for the most part are either at Methodist or UT. Well, you can't get to those guys

00:54:58.500 because they're out-of-network for you. If you have an out-of-network plan, you can use it and

00:55:03.680 pay a bigger co-payer deductible to get to go see those guys. Does that make sense?

00:55:07.060 Yes. But they have to bill them out-of-network and they'll get paid a percentage of the billed

00:55:11.200 charges. The cash model that you operate under, is that the future? I think what I tell people is

00:55:20.960 the same way these insurance companies are using AI algorithms to deny coverage,

00:55:26.420 they are going to use large language models and AI to obstruct your ability to get care.

00:55:33.580 The last person in the world you want digging through your underwear drawer is the federal

00:55:39.100 government, but the second is the insurance companies. You don't want them to know your

00:55:44.440 blood work. You don't. Unless you need a procedure or something that's coming up that's catastrophic

00:55:49.760 because they're going to use it and use AI to screen you out of their system, right?

00:55:56.280 And if they think you're headed towards a catastrophic event, like a heart attack or a surgery or cancer,

00:56:03.160 they're going to want to get you out of there before that manifests. And the average person

00:56:08.000 is employed or is insurance comes from their employer. And so if I'm a CEO at United and I know

00:56:14.440 you're headed towards, you know, uh, something catastrophic, I can delay your ability to uncover

00:56:20.400 that through putting these obstructions on things that don't make me money.

00:56:24.220 Oh, come on. You think they would do that?

00:56:25.280 And you have, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Like, like diabetes is a prime example.

00:56:29.180 Wait, wait, hold on. You're saying that health insurance companies would intentionally keep people

00:56:33.900 from knowing about a catastrophic illness?

00:56:37.540 That's why they don't allow you to get comprehensive blood work. That's why they delayed women's care. 1.00

00:56:42.240 Like the OB-GYN initiatives were saying that we should be screening for certain genetic disorders

00:56:47.220 in the, in your twenties. And the insurance company said, no, we think that number should be 35.

00:56:52.540 And all the clinicians go, okay, the number's 35. And so now women don't get that screening to see 0.95

00:56:57.560 if their child's going to have a genetic issue unless they're over the age of 35. And there's

00:57:02.280 hundreds of examples of this. So I think what happens is I'm an executive at United. The whole

00:57:07.240 system's built for quarterly earnings, quarterly profits. I got to hit that number for wall street.

00:57:11.520 Let's just say I'm managing a hundred thousand patient lives every day, month, week. I can delay

00:57:19.060 those individuals is another day, week and month that I don't spend money on a surgery. And if I

00:57:25.820 deny those surgeries and only 10% of them come back and fight me on it, step one is to deny,

00:57:32.500 delay, step two, deny. Now I've, I've obstructed your ability to get to that. And an example would

00:57:38.380 be a chronic disease like, I'm sorry, I'm just fixated here. And to note the obvious, so what

00:57:42.460 you're saying is that they don't want you to know that you could develop a life-threatening

00:57:46.760 illness. They don't want to treat preventative. And so anything preventative is proactive. But like

00:57:52.700 pancreatic cancer, for example, has a survival rate that's in the single digits, but if caught

00:57:57.840 early, it is survivable. And there's many other examples. So here's an example. They will say these

00:58:03.860 things are expensive. So the screening tools we use in healthcare are dated. This is why we have

00:58:08.920 moved to a cash pay at our clinic ways to, well, like we that's, we've, we've become a big name

00:58:14.300 because of Joe. Like we helped Joe, we helped Aaron Rogers. We're in the Aaron Rogers documentary,

00:58:18.420 but everything we do pretty much is not covered by insurance. Almost everything we do wouldn't be

00:58:23.660 covered by insurance anyway. And it's not that it's crazy expensive. It's that it's just not part of

00:58:28.980 their ecosystem. Our job is not to push drugs. Our job is to have an intelligent conversation

00:58:35.540 with patients, to do the deep dive, to uncover the root cause and to explain to the patient what

00:58:41.520 is happening with their body and why, and to give you the patient sovereignty and autonomy over your

00:58:47.820 health. And so an example would be a cancer screening. You know, at our company, our cancer

00:58:52.320 screening looks at, looks at you at the cellular level and can diagnose over 200 different types of

00:58:57.420 cancer at stage zero, 99% survival rate at stage zero. We know that a large majority of firefighters

00:59:05.720 and first responders will develop cancer in their lifetime at a minimal. Why would we not be pre-screening

00:59:12.680 all of our, because they're exposed to toxins, chemicals, fires, smoke, smoke inhalation. A lot of

00:59:18.820 our military personnel have been exposed to, you know, agent orange and all these different, you know,

00:59:23.560 compounds in the battlefield. They disproportionately have a higher cancer rate and we could be screening

00:59:30.100 those individuals with real world science and preventing cancer, but we don't. There's a lot

00:59:37.900 of money made in chemotherapy. Did you know that the majority of an oncologist's income comes from

00:59:44.100 marking up the medication itself? The chemotherapy itself is a profit center for the clinician that

00:59:50.380 prescribes the chemotherapy. And so. So that would suggest that if it's, if chemotherapy is a profit

00:59:55.680 center, then, I mean, I would assume it's overused. Well, that's what you're going to see with everything.

01:00:02.420 GLP-1s, the weight loss drugs. Well, I believe that. It's become a frontline defense. And I have a different,

01:00:07.520 I'm buddies with Callie, I'm buddies with Joe, I'm buddies with Jillian Michaels. They hate Ozempic. 1.00

01:00:12.420 My thing about it is I don't hate it. I'm pragmatic. It's a tool in the tool belt. And when utilized

01:00:17.780 appropriately, it can change and save lives. Yes. But it is not a first line defense. Yes. And it

01:00:25.500 should not be used in children. And prescribing Ozempic. That sounds sensible. Yeah. Prescribing

01:00:32.380 Ozempic without first talking about diet, lifestyle, and nutrition is like brushing your teeth while 1.00

01:00:37.860 eating fucking Oreos. It's delusional. And that's what we're trying to do. And you go, well, wait, 1.00

01:00:43.360 why? I told you why, Tucker. They're printing fucking money off these medicines. The insurance

01:00:50.940 company loves Ozempic. The pharmaceutical industry loves Ozempic. Is there a big benefit to it?

01:00:57.960 Absolutely. It can help reduce the risk of chronic disease because the number one risk for almost all

01:01:04.640 of these chronic diseases is metabolic disease and obesity. Yes. And we are chronically ill and obese as

01:01:10.520 a society. And so if we can get that weight off, great. But if we don't talk about diet, lifestyle,

01:01:15.840 nutrition, we're just putting a bandaid on it. We got to get to the root cause. And then if we're not

01:01:21.840 going to address the food issue and we're not going to fix our food issue, you know, it isn't a matter of

01:01:27.100 people eating bad or good. Like it clearly is like diet is very, very important. It's the most important

01:01:32.880 thing. But I want to be clear. Even if you try to eat healthy in America, it's hard. It's I mean, we have,

01:01:39.700 we have over, so, and I think it was the 80s, we had 700 FDA approved ingredients in our food.

01:01:47.300 Now there's thousands and I think it's over 10,000 ingredients. In Europe, it's 700. There's over 10,

01:01:53.060 petrochemicals, everything in our food sources, preservatives, food dyes, all of it. And they're

01:01:58.540 all causing an increase in metabolic disease and these problems. They're making our food more processed,

01:02:04.340 more addictive, more abusive. And then we're getting chronically ill and chronically obese.

01:02:10.140 And then that leads to being chronically on medications. And then that leads to trillions of

01:02:17.060 dollars. Like when we talk about big pharma, the insurance companies made $1.5 trillion last year,

01:02:26.320 trillion. Pharma is still in the billions. I think it was six or 700 billion. It's just still an insane

01:02:31.680 amount of money in revenue. But the insurance companies are two and a half size, the size of

01:02:37.920 big pharma. And at least the pharma companies make something. Yeah. I mean, they do. They may not

01:02:41.360 have enough R&D and they make, you know, addictive drugs and that's all bad, but they do make things.

01:02:46.840 Yeah. I don't know. So, but just, I, I'm, I just want to clear this up. Do you think it's possible,

01:02:52.940 it sounds likely maybe that chemotherapy is over prescribed?

01:02:55.680 I think every drug on the market is probably over prescribed. Antidepressants. I mean,

01:03:03.240 why are we prescribing antidepressants? They have a, they barely, there is a place for every

01:03:07.660 compound. I don't want to, I don't want to paint something that's all bad. But should the amount of

01:03:15.000 people be on antidepressants? It's really simple. As a non-physician, non-college graduate,

01:03:20.200 let me just say, if the suicide rate goes up, they're not working. Yeah. And the suicide rate

01:03:25.780 has gone up. So like, it's just, there's kind of no getting around that. That's just very simple.

01:03:30.600 And there are alternatives to that. Again, at our practice, we have a product called wave

01:03:34.740 neuroscience. We scan your brain. We assess where neurons are misfiring. This is all stuff that's

01:03:40.220 not covered by insurance, but it has an astronomically higher success rate and over 80% at helping

01:03:46.640 depression, anxiety, and insomnia. It's not covered by any insurance company, uh, because they force

01:03:52.320 you back to SSRIs and you have to fail two or more SSRIs to get treatment. But why Tucker?

01:03:58.040 Which is more, which is more effective for rescuing people from despair and suicide,

01:04:03.220 taking SSRIs or getting a dog. Yeah. Super simple. No, it's provable. Yes. I believe you.

01:04:09.780 Um, yeah. No, it's, uh, it's a national tragedy. Yeah. And if you, I just know from years of,

01:04:18.160 you know, covering mass shootings on television, if you ask the question, was the shooter an SSRIs, 0.61

01:04:23.000 you get shouted down immediately. You get called into the office. Ooh, conspiracy theory. Like

01:04:27.400 then what's the answer then? Yep. And the answer is all of them are. Yeah. So Joe had a quote,

01:04:31.960 uh, Rogan had a quote. We, uh, we don't have a gun problem. We have a mental health problem

01:04:36.560 disguised as a gun problem. Yeah. Well, we have a drug problem that's causing a mental health

01:04:40.080 problem in my opinion. Yep. Um, but yes, no people, you know, I don't even take Advil. I feel

01:04:46.060 great. So that's, that's my feeling on it. Yeah. Sorry. I know you go to pharmacy, but I just go.

01:04:51.240 No. And my thing is medicine, medications should not be the solution. No. They're the last option on

01:04:57.740 the table. Yeah. We first have to take the time to deep dive and understand. And when you say walk me

01:05:04.480 through a patient life, a 40 year old woman comes into a clinic, she's tired, she's exhausted. She's

01:05:09.720 raising a family. She's working a job. She's trying to be superwoman, be everything to everyone. 1.00

01:05:14.300 That's right. She goes in there. She's gained weight. She's tired, exhausted, doesn't sleep well, 0.99

01:05:19.780 riddled with anxiety and stress. She's going to leave there on four or more prescription medicines.

01:05:24.920 That's totally right. Because that's how the system was built. But if you were to come into a practice

01:05:29.340 that is proactive, predictive and preventative, that is truly trying to help you, you're going

01:05:35.080 to spend an hour with that clinician. We're going to do a deep dive. We're going to look at your

01:05:39.680 blood work, your biomarkers, your hormones. We're going to do an EEG to assess your brain health,

01:05:44.740 your neurons. Is there anything going on here that's causing the noise, the static, the stress,

01:05:48.560 the anxiety? We're going to talk to you about magnesium and supplements that maybe are deficient in

01:05:53.840 your diet because our food sources are crap now. And we're going to help dial all those things in.

01:05:58.080 I can't tell you how many patients we've helped just through supplementing products like magnesium

01:06:03.780 and zinc. We're all chronically deficient on so many minerals. It's not about a drug. Like

01:06:10.520 magnesium, zinc, sunlight, and sodium can probably solve a huge amount of our anxiety in this country.

01:06:18.420 I totally believe that. But I also think that they're big. Well, that is absolutely true. And dogs.

01:06:23.300 But there are structural problems too. If you're a mother of a bunch of small kids and you have to

01:06:29.660 work to support your family, there's something wrong with our economy. I mean, that's totally

01:06:34.560 unnatural. It's totally unnatural. And by the way, no person can pull that off adequately. I don't care

01:06:40.100 what anybody says and I'm sick of lying about it. It's absolutely impossible to have a full-time job

01:06:44.900 and be a full-time mom to small kids. It's just not enough time. It doesn't matter how hard you try,

01:06:49.440 how brilliant you are. I think there are a lot of super hardworking moms, but there's just not 1.00

01:06:54.260 enough time in the day to pull that off. So that was not the state of play the year I was born.

01:07:00.620 People who had kids, you know, and were married, they could get by in one income.

01:07:05.540 A hundred percent. And it's the system, the system has failed Americans in so many ways.

01:07:11.400 And even the, even the healthcare cost portion, so many people go, well, man, I don't,

01:07:15.820 I can't afford preventative care. And, you know, to get a comprehensive blood panel and an hour on

01:07:21.320 the phone with a clinician is 500 bucks. And I'm not trivialized. That's a lot of money. But how much

01:07:26.520 do you spend on beer? How much do you spend on your car? You're in your car a few hours a day.

01:07:32.080 You get one body. 400 trillion to one is what I told the Senate. 400 trillion to one are the chances

01:07:39.680 that God gave us this life today. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to let these people

01:07:45.640 ruin it and riddle you with chronic disease and illness and your family? Like it's not about

01:07:52.000 dollars. It's about memories. It's about moments. It's about having the life you've always wanted

01:07:56.600 and living into your elderly years, being healthy and not chronically ill and not on four or more 0.99

01:08:02.080 fucking drugs. But the only way we can do that is if this fucking government gets off its ass 1.00

01:08:07.400 and starts doing something about what these insurance companies and these pharmaceutical companies 1.00

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01:09:30.120 how much you could save. So what would you said at the outset that Trump has said he would like to

01:09:50.780 get rid of the pharmacy benefit managers? What would that mean? So they're an unnecessary middleman. I

01:09:56.840 think what needs to happen is if you get rid of the pharmacy benefit managers, you get rid of a

01:10:01.840 huge profit center for the insurance companies. You take away their incentive to keep you on

01:10:06.700 prescription drugs. Now they're de-incentivized because you're costing them money. If they don't

01:10:11.820 get those rebates, they're losing money by you being on prescription drugs. So they've done a secret

01:10:16.200 deal that you don't know about as a patient to steer you towards certain drugs and away from other

01:10:20.180 drugs. Absolutely. And they even have a safe harbor with the federal government. The federal

01:10:23.860 government doesn't, this is insanity, Tucker. The federal government does not have line of sight

01:10:29.480 into Medicare and Medicaid and why the prescription drugs are costing them that much. So what the

01:10:37.360 insurance companies do. What does that mean? So I'll explain. Let's go back to insulin. Let's,

01:10:41.540 I'm going to use it. We'll just make up a drug. Drug A is a, let's say the insurance company tells

01:10:45.520 the people the average wholesale price in America for this drug is a thousand dollars a month.

01:10:50.360 They never paid the thousand. They paid 500, right? They tell us because the rebate,

01:10:55.320 they tell us it's a thousand. Okay. Now they've set the average wholesale price because they're the

01:10:59.860 ones that set it. Then they negotiate for Medicare, Medicaid with the federal government. And they say,

01:11:05.080 Hey, federal government, since you're our buddy, we'll give you a price break. We're going to sell it

01:11:09.780 to you for 800 a month. Better than anywhere in the country. You're getting a $200 price concession per

01:11:15.920 month on this drug. They didn't pay 800. They paid 500. They made $300 off of the federal government

01:11:23.280 every month. And who paid that? Me and you. And federal regulators don't know that there is a safe

01:11:30.220 harbor. And that's what people are trying to peel through. They're trying to get rid of this safe

01:11:34.200 harbor. And the, the, the, uh, I think the Senate had a, uh, the Senate had a investigation. They

01:11:40.300 launched, I think two years ago on the cost of insulin. And so when, when we talk about people

01:11:44.520 celebrating the death of this CEO, it's terrible, but I'm trying to get people to understand where

01:11:49.540 this anger and animosity comes from. People are catching on to the magic trick and they're

01:11:55.740 going, wait a second, you are screwing us. And the reason my cost of healthcare is so expensive

01:12:01.020 and I can't get my surgeries and my kids addicted to opioids and my wife is, you know, dying of cancer

01:12:07.640 and I'm fighting with you to get this coverage is because you are literally printing money off of

01:12:13.280 chronic disease. It's a, it's, it is not about patient lives and patient outcomes. It's about

01:12:18.480 profits and they're killing it all the way to the bank. So if you, if I'm a health insurance

01:12:24.480 lobbyist and I'm like trying to convince the administration or the Congress not to get rid

01:12:29.900 of pharmacy benefit managers, what argument am I making? Like they're going to come in and say,

01:12:34.660 if there's no pharmacy benefit managers, we're an advocate on behalf of the people.

01:12:38.260 We negotiate down the cost of prescription drug care, federal government. If you look at this and

01:12:43.480 add the numbers up, the average wholesale price of every drug in America times the amount of patient

01:12:48.600 lives in America. And then I say, I'm giving you a 30% price concession on all of the average wholesale

01:12:53.900 price. I can make the math look good. But like I said earlier, the wholesale price is fake. It's

01:12:59.040 fake. Yes. Like I said earlier, there's liars, there's damn liars. And then there's statistics.

01:13:03.380 So they control the baseline. So they control the outcome of the equation.

01:13:07.600 Bingo. Bingo. And then they control the copays and deductibles, which drive the behaviors of the

01:13:13.680 patient. So, you know, if I'm some guy working on oil rig and I'm working my ass off and I'm

01:13:18.540 exhausted and I'm on four more meds and one med is a $20 copay and addictive and abusive with side

01:13:23.880 effects, but the other med is a $100 copay. What do you think most people are going to take?

01:13:29.160 Like, and you know, I think y'all covered this with Callie and Casey, who are my buddies, but

01:13:34.180 you know, the third leading cause of death in America is medical misuse. And it's, and that's

01:13:40.180 with us reporting less than 2% of adverse events.

01:13:42.720 Well, exactly. How many people die of acetaminophen every year? A lot, thousands, many thousands.

01:13:47.440 Right. It's just an over-the-counter drug that is, by the way, useful. I'm not attacking it, but

01:13:51.560 even, even a drug as simple as that can kill you.

01:13:54.640 And there's so much we could get into with the FDA and all that. I mean, I don't want to,

01:13:58.220 we could go all day. There's a lot, there's a lot there.

01:14:01.600 Do you, um, do you have confidence that Bobby Kennedy will get confirmed? And if so, can,

01:14:06.560 can sort some of this out?

01:14:08.160 I hope he gets confirmed. Uh, you know, I'm not super political. I didn't get political until this.

01:14:14.540 And it's, it's ironic. I, uh, Bobby, I think cares and Bobby, you know, RFK reached out and had,

01:14:22.900 met with me and I'm an, the two politicians that I've ever reached out and said, I want to talk

01:14:26.240 about this in my adult life were Tulsi Gabbard and RFK. And I've gotten to know both of them

01:14:30.900 and they're amazing humans and they're good people. And they care about people and they

01:14:34.480 care about this country. And what I've seen Trump do so far has me more excited. I mean,

01:14:39.940 I talked to Joe about it. We were texting. We're like, we're back. America's back. Like,

01:14:43.300 I am excited that there's hope, but I do give this with a caveat to the American people.

01:14:50.080 Do not, it will take years for the government to overhaul and fix these things. If we can do it,

01:14:56.540 do not wait for them to get.

01:14:58.960 If you want to know who is sincere about fixing the corruption,

01:15:04.140 they're the ones who are going to have trouble getting confirmed.

01:15:06.480 Yeah.

01:15:07.020 Right.

01:15:07.360 Yep.

01:15:07.560 So the people who are no threat at all, you know, who are just supporters of the status quo and who

01:15:12.700 are in effect supporting the corruption, they're fine. But, you know, they hate Tulsi Gabbard. Boy,

01:15:18.780 they really hate Tulsi Gabbard. So if you're wondering if Tulsi Gabbard is sincere, look at

01:15:22.520 the reaction she's getting. She's sincere. And same with Bobby. I do think Bobby has such a huge

01:15:27.520 national constituency at this point. I did a couple of Trump events before the election and Trump got the

01:15:32.720 biggest applause. Of course it was a Trump event, but Bobby got a pretty close second.

01:15:35.980 Yeah. I mean, he's not just some random guy. Yeah. He is a national leader.

01:15:40.880 So he has a lot of knowledge about litigation and that's what it's going to take to be able to.

01:15:45.840 Well, that's true. That's right.

01:15:47.360 To carve through the bullshit and get to the point. And I will say this, 0.99

01:15:50.900 he's even since he's secured the nomination or been nominated, he's called me to say, hey,

01:15:58.320 walk me through this to explain this to me. I want to. And he's put me on the phone with people like

01:16:02.580 he's, he truly cares and is interested. Can we fix it? I mean, we're talking about a major,

01:16:08.480 I mean, you're, again, we're back to, yes, it's big pharma. Yes, it's big insurance,

01:16:13.440 but who are their puppet masters? You know? I mean, you're talking about the biggest companies in the

01:16:18.500 world, the richest entities in the world. Can we change this? And so I tell people, hey, for $500 a year,

01:16:26.000 you can take all these people out of the equation and you can take sovereignty and accountability over your

01:16:31.320 health and you can at least begin to get proactive, predictive and preventative on your own.

01:16:36.340 But one of the things Callie and I have talked about is if we could reform our healthcare system

01:16:40.480 to focus on preventative, to focus on proactive, to force the insurance companies to address

01:16:47.440 metabolic disease rather than pushing weight loss drugs and diabetes medication.

01:16:53.460 Yeah, short circuiting your pancreas instead of like not eating Taco Bell. It's crazy.

01:16:57.580 And so there's ways to address this and reduce chronic disease and reduce the cost of healthcare,

01:17:03.560 but they don't want to do that. Okay. So as I said at the outset, I've opted out of the system

01:17:08.200 just through negligence and craziness and just not going to the doctor, which I'm sure I'll pay for at

01:17:12.180 some point. I'm just too mad to go to the doctor, but let's say you're saner than I am and, you know,

01:17:19.740 wanted to go to the doctor, but didn't want to participate in what's clearly a corrupt

01:17:23.080 and distorting system. What are your options?

01:17:28.380 I tell people, man, if you can find a cash pay clinic in your area that practices preventative

01:17:33.560 care, somebody who is not part of the captured system, you will have your mind blown at the

01:17:39.800 level of care you get because you can sit down with that clinician and have a deep dive, right?

01:17:45.680 If you were to come into our clinic, we're going to sit down with you and we're going to talk to

01:17:49.140 you about family history, what medications you're on, what genetics matter.

01:17:53.400 Oh, absolutely. There's genetics and there's epigenetics and your epigenetics are there.

01:17:57.480 So think of the epigenetics are the bullets in the gun, right? Your diet, lifestyle and behavior

01:18:03.480 are what pull the trigger. We can help guide your diet, lifestyle and behavior, but it starts with

01:18:09.160 having a discussion and it starts with showing you physiologically what you're headed towards.

01:18:14.760 And we can get proactive and predictive. Like I said, I can tell you seven years in advance,

01:18:19.140 if you're headed towards cancer, I can tell you if you're headed towards diabetes, metabolic

01:18:23.040 disease, I can use a DEXA scan and a VO2 max to assess your cardiovascular health. And the future

01:18:29.260 that I think is going to happen is I think we're going to drive down the cost of healthcare

01:18:32.180 astronomically, because what we're doing is we're using large language models and algorithm

01:18:36.760 based medicine to tie all these data sets together to truly drive health span. Because if you want to

01:18:42.960 know the different, like this has been a big hot button, I think Callie even posted it.

01:18:46.500 Japanese men are living 10 years longer on average than American men, right? And who cares if you 1.00

01:18:52.400 live to be 90, if you're sick and riddled with disease and on five drugs. So the goal is to drive

01:18:58.420 health span. And if you look at the difference between somebody who dies at the average American

01:19:02.760 age and a centenarian, somebody who lives to be 100, the only difference is the onset of chronic disease.

01:19:08.060 And so if we can delay the onset of chronic disease, which we can absolutely do, if we get

01:19:14.880 proactive and predictive and develop a strategy and a game plan, think of it like a business.

01:19:19.180 If I know I've got to generate X amount of revenue in Q1, then in Q4, then I can follow the trends to

01:19:26.080 see am I leading towards that goal or initiative. If we work you through an assessment at ways to well

01:19:32.460 and dig in, we know your bone mineral density. We know your visceral fat, your subcutaneous fat.

01:19:37.440 We know all of your biomarkers. We know your genetics, your epigenetics, your family history.

01:19:42.300 We put all that into the algorithm and we begin to get proactive and predictive.

01:19:46.620 We've got a slow bone mineral density loss. One of the biggest risk factors over the age of 65

01:19:51.020 for women is a fracture, right? We know how much bone mineral density you're going to lose a year. 1.00

01:19:55.360 This isn't rocket science. I am not that smart and I can figure this shit out. How can fucking guys 0.99

01:20:01.700 from Harvard, Stanford, you know, John Hopkins not be doing this? It's because all of them are 0.99

01:20:08.060 captured in this broken system and everyone has plausible deniability.

01:20:12.760 What does it cost to get that assessment done?

01:20:15.320 A DEXA scan, a VO2 max is literally like a hundred something dollars combined. And then blood work is,

01:20:21.940 you know, with us and an hour with a clinician is $500. I mean, so less than $1,000, you could have

01:20:28.540 a full workup, including an EEG, a brain scan, AI guided, everything done. And then you've got a

01:20:35.420 blueprint. And then we load that into the AI algorithm. And what we're launching is aware of,

01:20:40.280 it ties into wearables. So we have those data sets, but then our AI is tied into a wearable.

01:20:45.400 So we know your REM sleep, your deep sleep, your heart rate variability,

01:20:48.460 and we're cross-referencing all of these data sets and proactively warning you if you're starting

01:20:54.860 to head towards something that could be catastrophic. But that's where I go back to,

01:20:59.680 we do not want this shit in the hands of the insurance companies. We don't. They're too corrupt. 1.00

01:21:06.140 I actually didn't plan this interview to be like an ad for your business, but this sounds really

01:21:12.120 interesting. Where do you get this?

01:21:13.360 Well, I think a lot of people are doing this. So it's not unique to us. I don't want people to think

01:21:16.660 they have to go to us. I would implore people, if you've got the budget at minimal, like I know Dr.

01:21:22.060 Hyman's doing comprehensive blood analysis. There's a ton of companies out there. And so

01:21:27.220 the main thing is to truly, you and I were talking about carpentry earlier and our obsession

01:21:34.480 with woodworks and making sure you curate the right aesthetic.

01:21:39.900 So important.

01:21:40.240 People spend so much time and energy. And if they are going to remodel their house,

01:21:43.660 they'll interview five or six contractors. If they're going to get a car built, they'll go

01:21:47.540 interview three or four mechanics. Why are you not doing that with your body? You only get one of

01:21:53.620 these and not all doctors are created equal. And if they're in that captured system and you're just

01:21:59.380 blindly following the prescriptions and the drugs this person's telling you to take, you're doing

01:22:05.220 you and your family a disservice. You need to do a deep dive and we need to make healthcare

01:22:10.260 approachable and fun and understandable where patients want to be a part of the journey,

01:22:15.780 but the systems beat them up and spit them out. And so our thing is like, can we make it fun again?

01:22:20.920 Can we gamify it? Can we have, we compete against our friends where you can show, Hey, Tucker's

01:22:25.680 biological age has moved backwards over the last year while your biological age has gone forward.

01:22:31.180 He's beating you at the game. He's aging backwards because there's linear age, right? Like I'm 44.

01:22:37.140 That's my linear age, but my biological age based off biomarkers is 35. I'm nine years younger

01:22:44.420 biologically, physiologically than I am in a linear age capacity. And that's all calculated by the AI

01:22:50.560 algorithms. So I'm basically walking around like a healthy 35 year old. And that's how we prevent

01:22:55.800 chronic disease. We quit fucking around with writing a bunch of prescription drugs and we get proactive 0.98

01:23:00.420 and predictive and we could save billions, trillions. I mean, $1.5 trillion is what we spent last year. 0.97

01:23:08.160 Last question. Why wouldn't you cover that? You know, could you have a federal health insurance

01:23:13.720 cover that? That's the hope. Or would that destroy it?

01:23:16.200 No, that's what Callie and myself and that's what I wanted to talk to Bobby about. Like you can't let

01:23:22.260 the insurance company capture it. And we don't want the insurance company to have this data

01:23:26.120 because it's dangerous. But could the federal government mandate that the insurance company

01:23:31.620 gives you an allowance a year? Let's just say it's $5,000 a year to use, to see a nutritionist,

01:23:38.760 to see a dietician, to get proactive and predictive and go to whatever clinic you prefer.

01:23:44.420 You, the insurance reimburses the patient for it, or there's some sort of tax incentive

01:23:49.700 to incentivize us to get healthy.

01:23:51.660 The insurance requires the insurance companies to cover all kinds of things.

01:23:54.680 So there's not, this is the opposite of a free market.

01:23:57.020 Right.

01:23:57.040 And my fear with that though, is if the insurance companies get that, do they demand the data

01:24:00.760 and do they get, you don't want them having access to this, but this is where we're headed

01:24:04.260 anyway. That's the scary part. That's the part of the equation.

01:24:07.360 So HIPAA protects nobody really. It doesn't sound like.

01:24:09.840 Yeah. Well, the insurance, no, because the insurance company is going to claim medical necessity

01:24:12.960 and they're going to need to evaluate you to, in the model we have now, they go, well,

01:24:17.940 I don't think there's medical necessity. I need to see this patient's records.

01:24:20.620 And then they've got some primary care that they're paying. That's a consultant to get

01:24:24.800 on the phone and come up with creative ways to deny your claim. It's complicated.

01:24:29.800 Well, it's complicated, but it also, the big picture makes absolute sense.

01:24:33.040 If we drove metabolic disease, like Callie said, if we focused on preventing metabolic disease,

01:24:38.120 we indirectly prevent all the chronic diseases that are killing so many Americans.

01:24:42.420 The number one risk factor for the big five killers of humanity is smoking, right?

01:24:50.840 Yeah.

01:24:51.060 And the second is age, but age isn't considered a chronic disease. So if we take out age,

01:24:55.640 the number one risk factor, smoking. The number two, metabolic disease and obesity.

01:24:59.840 So even when we talk, somebody had, after we testified in front of the Senate, I think it was, 0.99

01:25:04.980 I don't even want to give them the Atlantic, this, those scumbags posted, you know, woo woo caucus. 1.00

01:25:10.480 These people are idiots. What do they know about healthcare? They're claiming that diet impacts 1.00

01:25:14.900 cancer. Yeah. You moron. It is literally the second most crucial thing to driving your cancer risk

01:25:21.860 rates.

01:25:22.160 Why would it be important for the Atlantic, which is like works on behalf of the CIA fact,

01:25:28.300 but why would it be important for them to lie about something like the link between diet and cancer?

01:25:36.900 Because there is, yeah, this is funny. Yes. Well, multiple reasons, but one is they are also captured.

01:25:42.480 If you look at who previously owned the Atlantic, it was a lobbyist for all of the pharmacy benefit managers.

01:25:50.040 Did you know that?

01:25:51.080 I didn't.

01:25:51.420 Yeah. And then they sold to Steve Jobs' widow and she supports Michelle Obama and Kamala and

01:25:58.460 she was involved in that. And it was more of, oh my God, if, if RFK stands for this and RFK backs

01:26:03.160 Trump, we got to discredit these people. And again, that's what I said to the Senate. This

01:26:07.760 is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democrat issue. This is a humanity issue. Stop with your party

01:26:16.320 bullshit. Like nobody cares. Stop trying to fuck us and help us fix this problem. I don't care who wants 1.00

01:26:24.820 to get behind this Republican or Democrat. I welcome it with open arms. Let's put our egos aside and work

01:26:31.300 together to fix this. People are dying. It's insane. But as we peel back the layers, we went on Joe. Multiple articles came out. Joe and I pulled him up on Rogan. It was, I think, a week after I went and testified in front of the Senate. Joe and I on the podcast go through and methodically look. Monsanto. Monsanto. Multiple hatchet job articles were funded by Monsanto. Then, I don't remember who wrote a hatchet job.

01:26:56.560 Of all the things you could attack that people say, why would people be angry at you for saying

01:27:00.740 this? It's just interesting to me. Yeah. Well, it's because the funding

01:27:03.520 in the, from, for those articles come from these lobbying groups that are funded by

01:27:08.800 big pharma, big food, big ag, and they're terrified. I was a magazine reporter and I know,

01:27:16.960 you know, I know what it's like to, to be told by your editor, you know, you should do a piece on this.

01:27:20.860 And you have to think like, well, I'm probably being used in some way to settle some score or whatever.

01:27:25.120 But if someone said like attack someone for saying that there might be a link between what you eat and

01:27:30.940 your health, I would say, I'm not going to do that. Do you know what I mean? Like all the villains in

01:27:36.960 the world, why am I attacking the guy who's pointing out, first of all, one of the wildest Tucker and we

01:27:42.560 went through this on Joe too, but it was, so I own these pharmacies, right? Yeah. We make a lot of the

01:27:48.680 GLP ones and weight loss drugs for pennies on the dollar because it is, let's be real. This is not an

01:27:53.520 obesity drug. It is a diabetes medication and diabetes disproportionately, yes. And it

01:27:59.260 disproportionately impacts poverty stricken communities, minority communities. They can't 1.00

01:28:04.440 afford this fucking price and they don't have insurance in a lot of those communities. So our 1.00

01:28:09.680 goal is to bring cost-effective prescription medications to the masses to make this affordable

01:28:14.760 for every human. And Jillian, Joe, everyone was asking, why are all of these articles coming out

01:28:22.320 about compounding pharmacies saying that it's dangerous for compounding pharmacies to make

01:28:27.440 these drugs? And I explained it to him. Why is there a huge backlog? There's a huge backlog

01:28:32.840 because one, it's being over-prescribed, but two, because Eli Lilly got several of its facilities

01:28:38.980 shut down via a whistleblower. Eli Lilly had a whistleblower that blew the whistle and that's the

01:28:44.620 only reason the FDA went into their facility. And what they found was unsterile conditions,

01:28:49.780 people working barefoot. They were lying and misrepresenting the dosages and the amounts.

01:28:55.820 I mean, there's a whole article on it. You can go through that Reuters did that breaks down what

01:29:00.320 happened. So the FDA hammered that facility and shut it down. And so that created a backlog where

01:29:05.920 Lilly didn't have it. Here's where it gets dark. They are paying the media outlets that they fund

01:29:12.400 $8 billion a year that big pharma puts into the advertising with these media outlets. They are

01:29:22.080 paying them to do stories indirectly, to do stories, hatchet job articles, scaring people away from

01:29:27.560 cost-effective alternatives like compounding pharmacies. Shut up and take your Osempic. 0.97

01:29:31.960 All the meanwhile. So one of these articles came out. I don't even remember who it was. It wasn't 0.99

01:29:36.840 the Atlantic. I don't even want to give them the credit. Anyways, the article at the end is an

01:29:41.300 advertisement for Eli Lilly. And by the way, Eli Lilly's cutting the prices of Osempic. They wrote

01:29:46.040 an article about a recall one of my pharmacies had on 28 vials. 28 vials. We've treated over a million

01:29:53.740 patient lives. We recalled 28 vials proactively. We didn't know for sure if there was a discrepancy,

01:29:59.860 but in an abundance of caution, we recalled it. 28 vials. Made national news. Why? That's insanity.

01:30:07.480 That should not be national news. And we know the answer why. We know the answer why. And meanwhile,

01:30:12.980 the whole time, the FDA has been in my building three times in 18 months. There are over 2,000

01:30:19.320 manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities that the FDA has not been in in five

01:30:24.760 or more years. Lilly and Pfizer have moved a huge amount of their manufacturing facilities overseas

01:30:30.680 to third world countries like India. And they put them in rural areas where when an FDA inspector goes

01:30:35.820 out there, they got to stay in a shithole hotel that has no water and shit. And so they don't want 0.99

01:30:39.860 to go there. And if they do go there, they have to give them a three months heads up because they've

01:30:43.660 got to get visas and green cards and or whatever they call them over all these things and negotiate

01:30:48.260 with the country to go in there for months at a time. And so I just say all that because the

01:30:54.100 narrative that's being delivered in the direction it's headed, anything that's FDA approved in these

01:30:58.240 pharmaceutical companies are not making these super safe products. There's in, in, in week ago for

01:31:04.260 hours. I certainly don't take it. No chance. But one of the things Trump did, and I'll wrap it up,

01:31:10.540 but Trump right now already, Trump said, we need to break up the PBMs. He's dead right. Spot on.

01:31:15.440 Good work. He said, we need to move manufacturing from overseas back to the United States that would

01:31:22.040 clean up all of these facilities that these big pharma companies are hiding. And then they're also

01:31:27.180 hiding the dollars, the tax dollars over there, you know, because they're able to hide those dollars

01:31:32.420 overseas and realize those revenue streams overseas and bringing all that back and putting them right

01:31:38.000 back in this country gives Americans jobs. It creates a better oversight. I mean, several of the

01:31:45.180 ideas that they have already floated out are phenomenal. Yeah. I mean, it's one thing for,

01:31:49.300 you know, it was Zempick to be made abroad, but you know, antibiotics are necessary and those should

01:31:54.360 be made here. Yeah. Just for reasons of national security. Absolutely. Brigham, thank you very much.

01:31:59.600 Thank you for having me. I know it was a lot. That was the best. I'm going to, you're going to affect

01:32:02.800 my sleep, but I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Thanks, man.

01:32:05.780 Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to

01:32:11.080 tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made the complete library, tuckercarlson.com.

The Tucker Carlson Show - December 30, 2024

Brigham Buhler： UnitedHealthcare CEO Assassination, & the Mass Monetization of Chronic Illness

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