The Tucker Carlson Show
Brigham Buhler: UnitedHealthcare CEO Assassination, & the Mass Monetization of Chronic Illness
Mon, 30 Dec 2024
An unhealthy, over-medicated country means record profits for insurance companies. Brigham Buhler explains how they work to keep us sick and monetize chronic illness. (00:00) The Assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO (13:32) The Opioid Crisis Could Have Been Prevented (30:28) Monetizing Your Chronic Illness (35:00) How Health Insurance Companies Are Scamming You (54:18) How They Profit Off of Cancer Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Get 3 months free at https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker Heritage Foundation: https://Heritage.org/Tucker Hallow prayer app: Get 3 months free at https://Hallow.com/Tucker Policygenius: Get your free life insurance quotes today at https://Policygenius.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened to the UnitedHealthcare CEO?
This health insurance CEO is murdered on the street on Sixth Avenue in New York a couple of weeks ago. And the reaction to it is not what I expected. You know, 41% of younger people say they support the murderer. And on the one hand, you think, well, you know, clearly there's a spiritual crisis in the country. That's nihilism. There's no defending murdering a guy, any guy, in my opinion.
However, it also reveals, so I'm not in any sense justifying it. I think it's appalling. But there's a lot of latent hostility toward the insurance companies. And I want to understand that more. I mean, I hate them, but I don't really know why I hate them.
Yeah. I mean, what happened is terrible. It's terrible and it's tragic. And I mean, obviously, I never condone violence and the loss of human life is a tragedy. Right. But so is the loss of 1.7 million Americans a year to chronic disease. Yes. You know, they're profiteering off the disease. They're delaying people's ability to get coverage and care.
And there's a lot of money being made through these dark pathways and approaches to these insurance companies and the revenues that they generate. It's all become a profit-driven system. And when I testified in front of the Senate with Bobby Kennedy and the Maha Group, you know, my main message was,
the corporate capture of our institutions and how that is the real cause of the chronic disease crisis that we're facing. And candidly, the insurance companies aren't only implicitly involved, they are probably one of the major contributors that somehow have gone unnoticed for decades.
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So the profit motive is designed to improve the quality of goods and services. That's what we've been taught. So in other words, if I pay more for a hotel, if I stay at the Four Seasons instead of Motel 6, I get a nicer room. If I pay more for a car, I get a nicer car. We pay more for healthcare than any country in the world, but we have crappy healthcare. Yeah.
So the idea of healthcare started, insurance started right in Houston, Texas, in the Texas Medical Center with Baylor. Baylor Hospital began to offer insurance plans to patients to try and make it a consistent payment plan where they could have accessibility to preventative care. And that was the premise of what Baylor did.
So health insurance is a fairly new idea?
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Chapter 2: Could the opioid crisis have been prevented?
So prior to the 80s, your doctor knew you. They knew your family. They showed up with their little leather bag. They knew everybody in the family. They spent time with you. In the system we have today, because the insurance companies control the doctor's reimbursement rates, the clinician only spends six minutes with you on average here in the United States.
And in six minutes, how can they possibly uncover the root cause, talk to you about family history, diet, lifestyle, nutrition, which they're not trained on in the first place. So it created an issue with the ability to prevent chronic disease is one section of that. But the other end of that is once these insurance conglomerates got ahold of our healthcare institutions and took over,
they begin to profiteer off of the chronic disease. So it's not just where it gets very, very complicated and what people don't understand, Trump actually yesterday announced that he was going to break up PBMs. And when I talked to Bobby Kennedy, I was walking him through the PBM and what it is. So many people say these middlemen Or even when I did Bobby's podcast, he said, what is a PBM?
I only I have insurance, not a pharmacy benefit manager. And I said, you have a pharmacy benefit manager that claims that it outsources your drug coverage to a pharmacy, to a PBM. But the truth is.
they owned the pbm it's like scooby-doo so you pull the mask off it's like oh it was mr rogers all along so pbm stands for pharmacy benefit man pharmacy benefit manager and they were established in the 70s to be an advocate for the american people to drive down the cost of prescription drug care their job was to negotiate on our behalf to drive down the cost of our medications and
Along the way, as the insurance companies became a for-profit institution, guess what they did? They went out and they gobbled up all of the middlemen. So the pharmacy benefit managers in America are all owned by the five big insurance companies. So when you pull back the layers to the onion, what you find is they've turned the PBM into a profit center.
So rather than negotiating down the cost of prescription drug care, they negotiated up the cost. But why? Why would you negotiate up the cost? Because by negotiating up, they get rebates. We would call them kickbacks in any other business. And so essentially, I'll use a real world example. GLP-1s are hot right now.
Everyone's talking about the price of Ozempic and how it's so expensive, it's egregious. Roughly 30% of the cost of every prescription drug is because the 30% kickback is going to a PBM. So if Ozempic's $1,000 a month, $300 a month are going to the pharmacy benefit manager via a kickback. It's a pay-to-play system.
So who pays? The drug banker pays the pharmacy?
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Chapter 3: How are chronic illnesses monetized?
More than every war we've ever fought since the history of this country. That's how staggering this is. Like you and I were talking before we got on this, the equivalent to a 747 jet worth of people are dying every day of opioid abuse. Deaths of despair at an all-time high. greater than that of the Great Depression, suicide, all-time high. All of these things are through the roof.
We are chronically ill as a society. And if we look at the pillars of what's causing that, one branch is the big pharmaceutical industry. Another branch is the food industry. But the other dirty branch is the insurance companies. They are implicitly involved in this. And I'll show you how and why. So the reason I know all this is because I was a drug rep.
And then I was a medical device rep and I stood in surgeries with some of the best and brightest minds in the country. And from there, I owned labs and pharmacies that attempted to bill and work within the insurance framework. So if you or your grandmother were to come in and try and fill a medication,
The average American's on four or more prescription drugs, which is just mind-boggling in itself. Four or more prescription drugs is what the average American's on. Average American?
Yes.
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Chapter 4: In what ways are health insurance companies scamming you?
So, like, I'm 55. Would that apply to my age group? Yeah. This is all age groups. The age demographic, I think 18 to 70-something years old, we're on four or more drugs on average, which is mind-boggling. If that doesn't tell you that there's something wrong with us and our system and our food— Like, we've got to wake up and realize somebody has to say the emperor wears no clothes.
Like, it's terrifying. So I love using the example of metformin because it's a very simplistic number that I can show you. If you come into a pharmacy and you tell me you have UnitedHealthcare, I have a gag clause as a pharmacy owner. It is illegal for me to tell you that I could sell you your Metformin for cheaper than what the insurance is charging you. But you paid for that insurance coverage.
Why can't I disclose to you that I can give you the product for cash cheaper than your copay? So you come in, I swipe your card. Met Forman cost me, I'm going to use ballpark numbers, roughly $2 for a month's supply. I would have sold you the Met Forman for $4. I'm not allowed to tell you that. I swipe your card. It tells me to charge you $10. That's your copay. So I charge you a $10 copay.
Me, the pharmacy, I don't get to keep that money. Who takes that money? The pharmacy benefit manager.
they pull that money out to their holding company and they get the additional seven dollars they short pay me i don't even get what i would have made if i sold it to you for cash they're an unnecessary middleman and when they say they're negotiating down for the behalf of the people that's just not true so i'm going to methodically walk you through what i like to tell people is the margins are made in the mystery when people say why is it so confusing why can't healthcare be more transparent how do i not know what i'm going to pay
All of that bullshit is because of these insurance companies. It's because of United, Cigna, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield. It is a system built to monopolize and profiteer off of your sickness. There's more money in you being sick than in you being well. And so most of the insurance company's profits come from you being on prescription drugs.
So they obstruct your ability to get surgery because that's a loss leader. They don't want you getting surgical procedures. They don't get a kickback on that. They want you on medicine. There was an article two days ago. They're finally talking about how much the big insurance companies were involved in the opioid crisis. Let's look at that. If you look at a product like an opioid,
As a compounding pharmacy like mine, we had non-abusive, non-addictive pain creams. We could have prevented the opioid crisis by not prescribing an opioid in the first place.
But when the FDA allows opioids to be rammed into the marketplace, because the head of the FDA went to go work for Purdue Pharma 18 months later after giving them the goose that laid the golden egg, a label that says these are non-addictive, non-abusive, when they never had a human safety study on that. How? How can they do that? They daisy chain this drug into the marketplace.
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Chapter 5: How do insurance companies profit off cancer treatments?
And then that individual went to go work for Purdue Pharma 18 months later when they left the FDA. That's shocking. Shocking.
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Chapter 6: What role do pharmacy benefit managers play in healthcare?
Chapter 7: How do corporate interests influence healthcare outcomes?
Like the biggest, baddest, best, brightest minds for orthopedic surgery in the state of Texas, arguably is University of Texas, UT Medical School. UT Medical School is kicked off. of Optum and United Healthcare's plan. So if you're, let's say you blow an ACL, you know, the Texans, Rockets, Astros, Team Doctors, all those guys, for the most part, are either at Methodist or UT.
Well, you can't get to those guys because they're out of network for you. If you have an out of network plan, you can use it and pay a bigger co-payer deductible to get to go see those guys. Does that make sense? Yes. But they have to bill them out of network and they'll get paid a percentage of the bill charges.
The cash model that you operate under, is that the future?
I think what I tell people is the same way these insurance companies are using AI algorithms to deny coverage, they are going to use large language models and AI to obstruct your ability to get care. The last person in the world you want digging through your underwear drawer is the federal government, but the second is the insurance companies. You don't want them to know your blood work.
You don't, unless you need a procedure or something that's coming up that's catastrophic because they're going to use it and use AI to screen you out of their system. Right. And if they think you're headed towards a catastrophic event, like a heart attack or surgery or cancer, they're going to want to get you out of there before that manifests.
And the average person is employed or is insurance comes from their employer. And so if I'm a CEO at United and I know you're headed towards, you know, something catastrophic. I can delay your ability to uncover that through putting these obstructions on things that don't make me money. Oh, come on. You think they would do that? Oh, absolutely. Like diabetes is a prime example.
Wait, wait, hold on. You're saying that health insurance companies would intentionally keep people from knowing about a catastrophic illness.
That's why they don't allow you to get comprehensive blood work. That's why they delayed women's care. Like the OB-GYN initiatives were saying that we should be screening for certain genetic disorders in your 20s. And the insurance company said, no, we think that number should be 35. And all the clinicians go, okay, the number's 35.
And so now women don't get that screening to see if their child's gonna have a genetic issue unless they're over the age of 35. And there's hundreds of examples of this. So I think what happens is I'm an executive at United. The whole system's built for quarterly earnings, quarterly profits. I gotta hit that number for Wall Street. Let's just say I'm managing 100,000 patient lives.
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