Modern Wisdom
#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken
Sat, 08 Mar 2025
Brigham Buhler is a healthcare entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Ways2Well, and co-founder of ReviveRx Pharmacy. American healthcare stands apart from any other system in the world. While some argue it has the potential to be the best, for many, it feels like the worst. Sky-high costs, an overreliance on prescriptions, and systemic inefficiencies suggest something is deeply broken. Why is this the case, and what can be done to fix it? Expect to learn what the number one reason for bankruptcy in America is, what the average state of health is for the average American and how it compares to the rest of the world, why so many American’s are on Pharmaceutical drugs, what drugs Americans are taking that are causing the most damage, what is happening with the Food industry’s corporate capture of food, how much of an impact RFK can really have on changing the pharmaceutical and food system, the simple changes that can improve American healthcare and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is American healthcare so broken?
Why? How did we end up there? It's a long, twisted road. One of the things I've talked about a lot is, you know, in medicine, if you're going to understand or treat a disease state, you have to find the root cause. And if we go to find the root cause of the broken health care system in America, it runs deep and it's insidious and it's widespread.
So it's a lot to unpack, but it starts with our food, our diet, our lifestyle, our nutrition, our food sources. What you and I were talking about right before we went on the air is all the contaminants in our food, all the ingredients in our food.
Chapter 2: What role does the food industry play in health issues?
You know, a good friend of mine, Bonnie Hari, has been beating the drum on all these media outlets lately, exposing like in the United States in the 80s, we had 700 approved ingredients in our food. Now we have 10,000. In Europe, it's still close to 700. Why in America do we have 10,000? One set of ingredients for Americans in the same factory and a different set of ingredients for Canadians.
whether it's Froot Loops or whatever it is, but that's one component of the issue. Then we go to the checks and balances. Like if we have a primary care in America that only has six minutes with a patient and they're controlled by what the insurance companies do, the main message that I have for people is it comes down to corporate capture.
Like if you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes. And our entire incentive systems in this country are based off monetizing and capitalizing off chronic disease. It's all about quarterly earnings, quarterly profits. Nowhere in anyone's business school or any of these executives is their priority to drive healthspan or to cure chronic disease.
Oddly, it's actually quite an American approach to things. You know, profits first. It's very important to us. It is. It's wild. There's a few areas that we maybe should put profits second or third, perhaps.
Yeah. And health care is definitely one of those. And so throughout the system, the checks, the balances are. All of that has been ripped out, even with the collusion of our three-letter alphabet organizations. Whether we're talking about the FDA, the NIH, the CDC, all of these various entities have also been corporately captured.
A lot of their funding, a lot of their goals and initiatives are based off of helping these giant institutions that are monetizing these things.
How... Recently, has it been since saying stuff like this didn't sound like crazy conspiracy theories?
You know what's wild is I was telling Joe this stuff like five years ago. And one day, Rogan's like, come on the podcast. And when I went on there... Nobody was talking about some of these things, like especially the insurance part. The insurance is one of these hidden monsters that people just don't know. And even to this day, they don't know.
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Chapter 3: How do insurance companies profit from chronic diseases?
And even after doing some of these bigger platforms like yourself, you know, now the message is getting out. And I've had people like Bobby Kennedy reach out and I went and sat down and even a guy said, who's been in the trenches, who's battled big pharma, who's battled these big corporate captured institutions. When I brought up PBMs, he said, I don't, what are you talking about a PBM?
I don't have a PBM, I have insurance. And that's the feedback most people give me. I don't know, I don't have a PBM. And so I have to like methodically walk them through what a PBM is, how it's hurting America's health. So if we look back to this whole profits first model, We talk so much about big pharma, big pharma, big pharma.
The big five insurance companies made four times the revenue of the biggest five pharmaceutical companies last year. Four X the revenue. They control every surgery, every drug, every treatment, when, where and how you can access health care and treatments and preventative care.
I actually think the UnitedHealth CEO shooting for me was a real eye-opening moment because I just thought a guy shoots another guy on the street, obviously there's going to be public outcry about this. And I didn't realize how strongly the American populace feels against all healthcare insurance companies. It was, I mean, again, I'm an immigrant here.
I know you can understand most of the words that I say, but I was just, fucking shocked i come from a country that's got national health service yeah right if someone had gone and shot the head of the nhs who'd been like what the fuck are you doing yeah
I think it's well, I never condone violence. And obviously what happened is terrible and tragic. But so are the 1.7 million people dying every year of chronic disease in this country. We spend more on health care than any other nation. But we're one of the fattest, sickest and most chronically ill societies in the history of the world. More people are dying every year.
You brought up SSRIs in the very beginning. More people are dying every year. of deaths of despair in the United States than ever before in the history of the world. We have more people dying now than during the Great Depression of suicide and deaths of despair. Why? What we're doing is not working. People have a hard time. Even what that guy Luigi did is terrible and it's tragic.
Terrible way to deliver the message, right? Nobody's condoning that. But it's also equally terrible and tragic to delay, deny, and depose people's ability to get the care they so desperately need. When people pay their hard-earned paycheck every month, and all they expect is to have you there when you need it, and then you don't allow them to access care. And I can explain why.
And I broke this down before. These insurance companies, right? They've made four times the revenue of the big pharmaceutical companies. Ask yourself how? How? They don't have a product. Their product is to be there in a time of need and provide you with care. And insurances were started right in Texas, at Baylor in Houston, Texas, where I was a device rep for literally 15 years.
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Chapter 4: What happened with the opioid crisis?
And so it's a little tricky to explain. So I'll walk you through it as seamlessly as I can. Insurance companies say, hey, there's these middlemen. Let's go buy them. They bought the middlemen. At that point, they controlled the negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies. And rather than negotiating down the price of the drugs,
They said, aha, what if we negotiate up the price of the drugs via rebates and what we would call kickbacks in any other industry? So they negotiated rebates on almost every major pharmaceutical product. And if you want to be on UnitedHealthcare's plan, you got to pay to play. If you want to be on Medicare, Medicaid, that is all an illusion. Medicare and Medicaid are outsourced to who?
the big five insurance companies. And so throughout the chain of checks and balances and the system, they are now monetizing chronic disease. They're incentivized for you to be on more and more medications because it's a profit center for them. And so to explain how that works, people go, wait a second, why would an insurance company mark it up? Because they're the ones paying for it. Bullshit.
They don't pay for it. Insurance companies pass that bill on at the end of the year to your employer. And 92% of people's insurance are from their employer. So most people never realize. And then they also have what's called gap pricing. So the only reason I know all this, just to take people to walk through history on me, is I had the touch points. I was a drug rep and I went from that.
I launched Cialis in North America, the Viagra competitor, which was a blast. It was fun. Everyone loved it. Nobody was complaining about Cialis. But then I got pivoted to antidepressants and antipsychotics, and I saw the dark side of big pharma.
And within eight months, I was out of there, and I was left to go be a device rep where I stood in surgeries with the best and brightest surgeons in the world, and I saw those problems. And then from there, I became a serial entrepreneur in healthcare where I attempted to work within the insurance framework. And what I saw was so eye-opening it made it all finally make sense.
I was like, oh my God, this is what they're doing. And once you know the magic trick, you can see it over and over and over again. And so the magic trick is we push people to medications and prescription drugs. A real world example would be the opioid crisis. What nobody realized, and an article came out maybe two months ago, I think in the New York Times,
30% of the money and revenue generated from opioid abuse in this country went to the big insurance companies. Never did they get indicted. Never did they get questioned. Never did they get sued. They skated scot-free, but they had negotiated rebates on opioids. Why that's important is I owned pharmacies that offered alternatives to opioids.
I would go out and educate clinicians on the importance of not prescribing opioids because I lost my brother to opioids. They pushed it into the market. They let Big Pharma ramrod it via a deal with the FDA. The head of the FDA then went to go work for Purdue Pharma, who brought that drug to market. for a big, huge, fat salary three years later.
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Chapter 5: Why are compounding pharmacies under scrutiny?
Can you explain what compounding pharmacies like, you know, white label? Yeah. Like what that is? Because I always hear people talking about it and I have no idea.
Yeah, this is this is actually crucial, especially current events. Hims and hers did a Super Bowl ad. Set the world on fire. People were pissed because what they did was they kind of captured the Maha message and made it look like it's about being healthy. But the real message was, oh, and by the way, we'll sell you GLP ones. Call us today. The weight loss drugs.
And so that upset, you know, the health advocates and rightfully so. But then it upset Big Pharma because Big Pharma said, look, this is the problem. You know, you make us follow these rules and we have to give disclaimers and side effects. But these guys didn't.
And the problem with that is it went from a conversation about a telemedicine company potentially acting in a way that some people think was unethical to a full blown attack on compounding pharmacies. And the reason that attack was perpetuated is Big Pharma is attempting to every day discredit and scare people away from compounding pharmacies.
So a compounding pharmacy compounds medications unique to the patient. They also are utilized anytime there is a shortage in the marketplace. And so do not be fooled. I own one of the biggest compounding pharmacies in the country. And every single product we make is FDA improved ingredients that come from the same exact suppliers as Big Pharma.
Every single batch we make is independently third-party verified by an independent lab. Every single dosage we ship out the door, we then retest to make sure that it's exactly what we thought it was, said it was, and it is. Okay? There are dozens of checks and balances. And the FDA has been in my building three times in 18 months. There are over...
5,000 big pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities that the FDA has not inspected in five or more fucking years. Why? Because they've moved their facilities overseas. They're in India. They're in these third world countries that are hard to get to. The FDA has to file for a visa and then go over there and stay in a hotel with sometimes no running water. They don't want to do that.
So they just don't go look. And the reason we're on a GLP-1 shortage here in America is because Eli Lilly's American facility got shut down because of a whistleblower. And so big pharmas out there trying to scare people away from companies like, you know, all of these telemedicine companies, all these compounding pharmacies and tell people these are dangerous. These are unsafe. No.
It is no more dangerous than what you're doing. And in fact, I would argue what Big Pharma's doing is astronomically more dangerous because they don't have the checks and balances and they have the lobbying power. What happened with the Eli Lilly thing? Eli Lilly ended up getting hammered at one of their facilities. They came in and there were barefoot people in the sterile rooms.
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Chapter 6: What alternative treatments exist for mental health?
You're looking at something that's pro-social. You're looking at something that's got other people involved and so on and so forth. It's like, hey, that's a little bit of trickery. But anyway, surely... Psychiatric drugs, mental health world. Is there not something coming down the pike?
I think we, as much as we're connected, we're also isolated. Think about it. Like think about how much we're on our phones. Think about the reward system. And I've heard you have podcasts where you've talked about it. it all elevates our cortisol levels. It all devalues our self-worth. It all creates and perpetuates this problem of mental health. And it starts now at a very young age.
And our diets, our lifestyles, our ability to exercise and get fresh air and build community, you know, as woo-woo as that sounds, those are real answers to these problems. And the other part is There were answers and have been answers for thousands of years. Like products like Ibogaine, like it's not a product. This is a plant-based medicine that was used on the plains of Africa 8,000 years ago.
Why have these things been suppressed and hidden and villainized? Well, we know why. The same old narrative, right? The establishment wants to suppress and prevent things from coming into the marketplace. I'm very optimistic about a treatment like Ibogaine or psilocybin. And even at Ways to Well right now, we're doing a project called the Minds Project affiliated with Dell Medical School.
where we're diving into using psilocybin for problem solving and complex problem skills. Because one of the lead scientists, Dr. Bruce Danner, worked at NASA and had an experience on psychedelics where he solved an equation that NASA had been working on for like seven years. No way.
There's so much to the human brain and the complexities, even products like, and so much is controlled by the insurance. I hate to keep going back to that, but like one of the treatments we do that I learned about less than two years ago, you know, there's a brain scan, an EEG brain scan that has over an 85% success rate on depression, anxiety, and insomnia. It's mind-blowing.
The numbers are overwhelming. And what they do is they assess your brain with an EEG. It's called wave neuroscience. Assess your brain with a simple EEG loaded into an AI algorithm. The AI tells us where neurons are misfiring. It could have been from chemical abuse. It could have been from head trauma.
It could have been from an extended period of depression and anxiety where your brain has now been rewired and these neurons are becoming beta waves in different aspects of the brain. The future's bright is where I'm going with this. It's not that there's one solution. It's that we've been looking in the wrong place, in my mind.
And we've been looking in the wrong place because insurance and big pharma is telling our government where to look. And the people historically, until COVID-19, I feel like the veil came off and now we all are going, hold on a second. I don't know if I believe you anymore. At least I am. That was an eye opener for me.
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Chapter 7: What is the state of healthcare for the average American?
You know, I walked in when I was 22, 23 and started talking about the fact that I had a low mood and the doctor looked at me and said, well, what's wrong? I'm like, there's like nothing ostensibly wrong other than just like, you know, the weight of existing. I don't really know what's happening.
I haven't had a, you had a recent grief, you had a recent breakup, you're in financial straits, you're in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no, no, no. He sort of gave me this puzzled look and then gave me a single page printout and sort of said, go on your way.
So, you know, in the UK, GPs, general practitioners that are our sort of first port of call, you've got something up, you've got a cough, your back hurts, you've got something that you're worried about, you go and see them. They have 10 minutes. to get you in, introduce, diagnose, explain, recommend, and get you back out of the door again.
And that's just cycled through over and over and over again, like a turnstile all day long. So, you know, you don't get to choose your fucking surgeon in the UK. It's the NHS, good luck. You know, you don't have the same kind of levels of care in that way. You know, in the UK, every time that I post about blood work,
Every single time I post about blood work, I get tons and tons of messages from friends, from other people. Where can we get this done in the UK? I'm like, I fucked if I know, man. There is no such thing. Like when I came over here and I was introduced to the idea of an annual physical or a six monthly checkup. And they said, well, when was your last six monthly checkup? And I'm like,
I've never had this. We don't have. You don't do preventative. There is no, there is zero preventative care. It's crazy. But the main reason there's zero preventative care is that the power users of a nationalized healthcare system, the people that are the sickest, are the ones that take up the most time for the doctor.
So if you, a relatively well person, tries to get from wellness to fitness as opposed to sickness to wellness, he looks at you and goes, dude, I've seen someone who's going to fucking lose their leg because of their diabetes earlier on this morning. Yeah. Your lower back pain, meaning that you can only deadlift 80% of your max as opposed to 100%, is not my problem. Get the fuck out.
Because the anchoring bias that they're used to is so skewed toward the sickest members of society. Quite rightly, they're the people that need the most care. But there is this odd adjustment bias where they can't make the site actually come back down to point at someone much closer to them, which is...
I'm not absolutely catastrophic, but I'm not as good as I could be and I would like to become better. The first time I moved to America, I had an assessment so I could start working with telehealth. And they said, just normal physical, got to get you in for normal physical. So they bring me in and they do the knee tap thing and the height and the weight and all the basic shit.
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Chapter 8: How do systemic issues in healthcare affect doctors?
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Well, this was sort of a big question that I had, you know, especially coming from the UK. And look, again, not to beat on the UK in many ways, it's great that we're like this. But 96% of people in the UK, I think around about 96% took their first dose of the COVID vaccine. It was about 90% second dose and then in the 80s for the third for the booster, something like that.
My point being that we're a very orderly bunch, right? You give us a set of instructions and people will follow. I think that it's in the 90s, although I may be told I'm wrong by the internet. Point being, it was way higher than it would be in America.
That sense that there is someone looking over you, that we're not adversarial with the key suppliers of our infrastructure, of our sort of life-saving care. Nobody looks at the NHS. People look at the NHS and they think that's shit and that is inefficient. The NHS uses Windows XP still, right? Wow. That tells you everything that you need. Yeah. You fax things. In the UK, right?
Windows XP and fax, okay? So you have inefficiencies, you have this sort of lumbering behemoth, which is essentially impossible to upgrade, all the rest of the stuff. But nobody looks at it and thinks it's malicious. They think it's incompetent.
Yeah.
In America, same isn't true. People have this sort of very adversarial relationship. Well, it feels very malicious, and that's where I was going.
But historically, I would have said it's compartmentalized, it's siloed, much like the human body, right? We have built an entire health ecosystem of siloed experts. The body is one organism. The gut biome impacts your body.
chemical levels in your brain it's what it's the second brain to the body you know and that has a direct impact on your serotonin your dopamine all of that so to silo off these different areas and we are so niche and specialized that in a way we're missing the big picture it's interesting how the approach to health is similar to the structural approach to health care
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