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. 41% of younger people say they support the murder. On the one hand, you think, well, 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. I want to understand that more. I hate them, but I don't really know why I hate them.

Yeah. You tell me- What happened is terrible. It's terrible and it's tragic. Obviously, I never condone violence, and the loss of human life is a tragedy. But so is the loss of 1.7 million Americans a year to chronic disease. These big insurance conglomerate are implicitly contributing to the chronic disease crisis that America faces. They're profiteering off the disease. They're delaying people's ability to get coverage and care. 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. When I testified in front of the Senate with Bobby Kennedy and the Maha group, 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.

Welcome to Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else, and they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson. Com. Here's the episode. Maybe it does make sense. I'm trying to understand it. The The profit motive is designed to improve the quality of goods and services. That's what we've been taught. 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 health care than any country in the world, but we have crappy health care.

What's the difference? The idea of health care started, insurance started right in Houston, Texas, in the Texas Medical Center with Baylor 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. That was the premise of what Baylor did.

Health insurance is a fairly new idea?

Well, since the 1930s, but it got captured in the '80s and became HMOs. Essentially, once it was HMOs, it became a profit center, and it changed, it pivoted. The money that's being made off of every single chronic disease and by delaying the onset of these procedures and surgeries. It's pretty nuanced. It is.

I'm going to ask a ton of dumb questions because I'm uninformed. What's the difference between an HMO and pre-1980s health insurance.

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 company is troll the doctor's reimbursement rates, the clinician only spends six minutes with you on average here in the United States. 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 a hold of our healthcare institutions and took over, they began 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 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 PBM. But the truth is, they own the PBM. It's like Scooby-Doo. You pull the mask off and it's like, Oh, it was Mr. Rogers all along.

So a PBM stands for Pharmacy Benefit Manager.

Pharmacy Benefit Manager. 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 cost of our medications. 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. 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 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. If Ozempic is $1,000 a month, $300 a month are going to the pharmacy benefit manager via a kickback.

It's a pay-to-play system.

Who pays? The drugmaker pays the pharmacy?

The drugmaker pays the pharmacy benefit manager the $300 per month in order to be placed on a preferred contract with the insurance company, which is the PBM. It's so staggering. Let's talk about United Health care, since that's the CEO that was unfortunately assassinated. If we break down United Health care, they generated 373 billion dollars in revenue last year. 60% of that revenue came from their pharmacy benefit manager, a holding company that nobody knows about. The general public are politicians. They don't understand this and they don't get it.

And I'm trying to- Are the profit margins high in that business?

The profit margins are not as high as Big Pharma, but there's a lot of levers that they're pulling to hide their profits. There's liars, there's damn liars, and then there's statistics. These guys are using a lot of levers to hide their profitability. And so a lot of the profitability is held at the pharmacy benefit manager holding company. And so they can artificially dilute down their profitability on paper. But as an industry, the health insurance companies, and I said this on Rogan, they are the hidden juggernaut that nobody is seeing. Everyone's saying big pharma, big pharma, big pharma. Big pharma did, I think, $600 million. And you look at these big insurance companies, they did two and a half that in revenue, 2.5 times that in revenue. They did $1.5 trillion. North of one point, they're projecting that they'll do $1.9 trillion in revenue by 2029.

So can we, in a nod to my personal ignorance, I should just say, I don't know, I don't go to the doctor. I don't know what my health insurance plan is. I just have no... Once the COVID thing happened, it was like, I'm not going to the doctor, and I haven't. I'm a little bit out of it. I'm not as knowledgeable as most Americans on how exactly this works. Can you walk through the average person's experience of health insurance and medical care? Yeah, absolutely. Let's say I'm a 40-year-old woman. Women go to the doctor annually. I think most do. So use the doctor more, how much is this person paying for insurance? Where's that money coming from? What's the experience like?

The average American, because of our food and our diet and our lifestyle, 90% of chronic disease is driven by lifestyle. If we peel back and look at what's causing these chronic diseases and get to the root cause, it's not just diet, lifestyle, nutrition. It's that the system is failing Americans. Again, there is no safety net anymore. You're The clinician doesn't have the time to do a deep dive. So the cancer that develops in your 40s started in your 30s. The diabetes that develops in your 40s started in your 30s. The chronic disease that hits you in your 50s started in your 40s. If we got proactive and predictive, we could prevent chronic disease. Chronic disease is killing 1.8 to 1.9 million Americans a year. More than every war we've ever fought since the history of this country. That's how staggering this is. 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.

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. I'll show you how and why. 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. From there, I owned labs and pharmacies that attempted to build and work within the insurance framework. If your grandmother were to come in and try and fill a medication, the average American is on four or more prescription drugs, which is just mind boggling in itself. Four or more prescription drugs is what the average American is on. Average American?

Yes. So I'm 55. Would that apply to my age group?

Yeah, 100. This is all age groups. The age demographic, I think 18 to 70 something years old, were 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, we've got to wake up and realize somebody has to say the Emperor wears no clothes. It's terrifying. 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 United Health care, 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. Metformin Metformin cost me, I'm going to use ballpark numbers, roughly $2 for a month's supply. I would have sold you the Metformin 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 $7. 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 health care 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. Really? They want you on medicine. There was an article two days ago. They're finally talking about how much the big insurance 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 non-addictive, non-abusive, when they never had a human safety study on that.

How?

How can they do that? They daisy-chained this drug into the marketplace. It's a lot to digest. Sorry, I'm trying to explain it very complex.

I don't know how I missed the fact that the head of the FDA went to work for Purdue.

Two months later, it took a big salary job. I think in the last 40 years, only two heads of the FDA haven't gone to work for industry. Then go over to- Wait, so Purdue Pharma, to be clear, was basically just OxyContin. Oxycontin, correct.

They didn't have an entire- What happened is what happens so often in big pharma.

When they say pharmaceutical companies innovate, and that's why they make all this money, the United States makes up 60% of the pharmaceuticals industry's profitability. But we're ranked 40th overall in health care outcomes. 40th. We have a train wreck health care system. Again, four more drugs the average American is on. The pharmaceutical companies are not fitting the bill for research and development. We, the taxpayers are because we fund the NIH, and the NIH does most of the early product development. Then they sell the patent to the pharmaceutical companies for pennies on the dollar. Pharmaceutical companies pick them up and use their relationship and lobbying power with the FDA to bring these products to market. Okay, so there's that. The other thing the pharmaceutical companies do that is not innovative and in a way to extend their revenue streams and maximize profits is they refile patents patents by changing subtleties of molecules or delivery mechanisms, and they get additional patents that make it impossible for a competitor to come into the marketplace. That's exactly what happened with Purdue Pharma. Purdue Pharma's delivery mechanism, the cotton system, was going to expire. They were making millions, hundreds and hundreds of millions.

They panic. They say, What do we do? They scramble to find a different opioid that they could plug into the delivery mechanism. They found Oxy. But the problem with Oxy is it is eight times more addictive than hydrocodone. They knew this. They knew it. They knew it 100%. They put it in the drug and they put it into the marketplace, and they met with the head of the FDA in a private hotel for weeks in advance, and they pushed it into the market, and the FDA gave them the golden goose. They put that this was less likely to be addictive or abused than other opioids, which was a boldface and then that individual went to go work for Purdue Pharma 18 months later when they left the FDA.

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And the same thing happens- Especially because, again, Purdue Pharma didn't make lots of famous cancer drugs or antibiotics.

No. Basically just made opioids. Yeah.

And before that, they created the volume crisis of the '60s, where they were advertising to women in the New York Post, in New York times saying, Feeling stressed? Pop a volume. And women got addicted to volume all over the country. So Purdue Pharma has done this multiple times. And the final ramifications are so much more staggering because, again, who pays this? The But the real cost of all of this, and this is what I said to the Senate, we can ramble off numbers and dollars. I can tell you how the number one reason for bankruptcy in America is health care cost. I can tell you how the number one budgetary concern for the federal government is our rising health care cost. I could tell you how for employers, one of the biggest burdens is the insurance plans and covering their employees' health care costs. But the real costs are paid in human lives. People like my brother, who got addicted to opioids and lost his life because the system chewed him up and spit him out and let him down.

How did he get addicted to opioids?

He had an ACL surgery in high school, like so many kids, and the insurance companies are incentivized to prescribe opioids. That's the article that came out the other day, and that's what I'm trying to explain about the danger of these middlemen called the pharmacy benefit managers. They're not middlemen at all. They're profit centers for the big insurance companies. And so even on opioids, you could have been prescribed a non-addictive, non-abusive pain cream after your surgery. It's a topical that uses non-abusive, non-addictive ketamine, but in a topical form. You can't consume it, you can't eat it, you don't get high. There's no physiological high from it. But it works. It's very efficacious. Why would the insurance companies not prescribe that over a highly addictive, side effect riddled opioid? The answer is the insurance companies were getting rebates on these opioids. If you look this up, you can do the research. They made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars right beside Purdue Pharma, but they floated through all of it unscathed.

How does the rebate work, exactly?

What happens is we'll go back to a product. Well, here's another hot topic. Insulin will be a great example. Insulin has been out Why is insulin six times more expensive than it was when it launched? The pharmaceutical companies are not making more than they did when they launched it. Eli Lilly is actually making less per vial than it ever made on insulin. Where is all that extra money going? That money is going to the pharmacy benefit manager. United Health care owns Optum. Optum is a pharmacy benefit manager that negotiates rebates or kickbacks with the pharmaceutical companies. So when it came to opioids, they go to Purdue Pharma and they say, Okay, Purdue, I'm just going to use simple math for my small brain. If it's $100 a month, they say, Purdue, we're going to... If Purdue wants to charge 50, they'll say, Charge 100 and give us a $50 rebate. Okay, And so then United will show you, the patient, that your opioid cost them $100 that month, or whatever the prescription drug is. Prescription drug A, cost them $100. They never paid the $100 because they got a $50 rebate. So they paid $50.

What people don't realize is 80% of your health plan in America, 80% of Americans health plan is covered by their employer. Most people are getting their health plan through their employer. So at the end of the year, these big insurance companies meet with your employer and say, Bobby Sue was on this opioid all year long. It cost us $100 a month. That's $1,200 a year. We've got to raise your copays, your deductibles, and your out-of-pocket expenses because it's really running up our costs. But in reality, they never paid that. Then where this gets more sick and twisted is a lot of people don't understand this, Medicare and Medicaid, after Obamacare, has all been outsourced to the big insurance companies. So 60% of United Health care's profits are coming from Medicare and Medicaid. And how do they negotiate the Medicare-Medicaid prices? They negotiate it by looking at the average wholesale price in America and saying, You want a discount? Well, that average wholesale price is a bullshit price because they set the market, but they didn't pay that price. Does that mean... Is this making sense? So just follow the dollars. Okay, $100 a month. They didn't pay the $100, they paid 50.

They tell the employer they paid the hundred. At the end of the year, that employer is going to get hit with the cost going into the following year. All of those copays, deductibles, all that goes up. Then you, the patient, get hit. And so when they decide what drugs to put on a formulary, what drugs they're going to cover. It has nothing to do with the efficacy and what is best for the patient. It has everything to do with who gave them the biggest rebate. And they incentivize you to go to those drugs by lowering your copay and deductible on those drugs. So with opioids, they made it very easy to get an opioid because it was getting a rebate. But they made it very difficult to get a non-addictive product like a pain cream. And then eventually, they just said, We won't cover pain creams at all. You're going to have to take an opioid. Then to go even deeper, that's just the prescription.

This is what happened to your brother.

This is 100% what happened to my brother and what happened to millions and millions of Americans. And it's still happening to this day. I'll paint a picture for you. Imagine being a young kid with a spine issue, and you're in pain. This particular spine issue causes the sensation of burning and fire shooting into your hands, your feet, your extremities. And the worst of it all, a large percentage of these male patients with this spine issue experience burning and fire in their genitals. Fire and pain shooting into your genitals and extremities. In the insurance model with United Health care, you're going to have to go to a primary care first. That's going to take two months to get in with that primary care. You're dealing with this pain and suffering the whole time. Now, you get in with the primary care, they go, Whoa, got six minutes with you. This is out of my wheelhouse. I'm going to refer you to a Specialist. You go to a specialist, that's going to take months. Oftentimes, you have to argue with the insurance, right? Deny, delay, depose. You're going to argue with that insurance company, begging them to allow you to go to a specialist.

Your primary care may even have to get on the phone and get a prior off and negotiate it for you. Now, you finally get in with a specialist. Specialist says, I want to order an MRI. A lot of times, the insurance companies will deny the MRI or delay it. So now you've got a battle for that. That's going to be another three or four months. The gist of it is the average spine patient takes 6-9 months before they ever really even get an answer, and then they've got to negotiate to get into the surgery. Now you finally get the day in the sun where you're finally feeling like you're going to get relief and you're going to get that surgery that you desperately needed. But the whole time, they've been selling you opioids to keep your pain level down because that's the only option you have. Now you get your approval and you say, I found the best surgeon in the country. I want to go to this die. That's not how it works. The insurance company tells you who you're allowed to go see. And they say, Yeah, he's not in our network. You've got to go to this other doctor.

And then that doctor botches the surgery. It wasn't the surgeon you wanted. You waited nine months to get this thing done, and that surgery messes your... That surgeon messes up your surgery. That's what happened to this kid, Luigi. Can you imagine how he could have lost his mind and gone crazy? Yes. And what's unfortunate is that's what's happening to millions and millions of Americans every day. What happened is terrible. It's tragic. Nobody has the right to play judge, jury, and executioner, but neither do the PBMs and the insurance companies. And that's what they're doing every day. They are monetizing and printing money on the backs of Americans monetizing our chronic disease and illness, making money off prescription drugs while denying surgeries, slow-playing surgeries. I could go on for hours because it just gets deeper and deeper. And I love to show people how Once I show people the magic trick, they will be able to see through the insurance's scam because it's a scam. I mean, they're gangsters. They're the mob.

How much did this play out during COVID? I mean, these systems affected how we responded to COVID, correct?

It affects everything. I mean, everything under the sun. Again, they decide what gets covered, how it gets covered, what the reimbursement rate is, who gets in for surgery, when you get in for surgery, then they can change the surgery. The other thing is having owned labs and pharmacies and had all these touch points. I didn't know this. I was naive like everybody else. I just thought you pay your hard-earned money, and when things go south, the insurance has got you back. That's literally how naive I was. That's what I thought. But what you learned is HMOs are not health insurance. They are managed care. What do I mean by that? You've got to think of it like... The analogy I use is, think of car insurance. It's there if you wreck the fucking car.

Exactly.

And that's all it's good for. But they're not going to rotate the tires, change the oil, maintain the vehicle. If you put your life in your family's life in the hands of these insurance companies, they are going to monetize your chronic disease. And I say it, if you see the average American doctor and you eat the average American diet, then don't be surprised when you die of the average American chronic disease.

So I think what's changed, and this is maybe That's something that it's taking me a while to figure out, maybe until right now, because I do think of health insurance that way, just as I think of collision insurance or fire insurance. Had a fire, used insurance, worked great, that's it. But the addition of chronic disease to America, where the majority of the population has a chronic disease, that means that it's not catastrophic coverage, it's a maintenance program that you're paying for. Correct.

The challenge is every safety net throughout the system has been captured. That's why I think the corporate capture narrative is so important. And that's what I was trying to get through to the Senate. Everyone talks about the speech that Eisenhower gave about the military-industrial complex. People forget there was a second half to that speech. It's very rare. Bobby Kennedy is actually the only person I've ever heard talk about it. And I was so excited when I heard him talk about it because I'm like, finally. And the second half was, if we allow corporate interests to capture our scientific community, then what we will find is we will lose the garage tinkerer, we will lose the innovator, we will stifle and suppress innovation, and everything will turn to basically profits and a profit-driven system. Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes. We have built a system based on quarterly profits and quarterly earnings throughout the system, whether we're talking about the pharmaceutical industry, the big health insurance companies, the hospital systems, the doctors' practices. Everyone is built into this ecosystem that is attempting to capture human lives and monetize those touchpoints. So everything that you do is a revenue generator for all of these various entities.

And there's so much money being made off chronic disease. There's no interest in curing chronic disease. And so the National Institute for Health, like I said earlier, they are the seed essentially that grows into the tree, and they're the ones doing most of the innovation and early development of drugs. But they're doing it oftentimes through incentives that incentivize them to look at treatments rather than cures. And so the problem is we're just launching bandaids into the marketplace rather than healing the wound. In medicine, we say, to treat chronic disease, you have to uncover the root cause. And I'm telling you, the root cause runs deep, and it's insidious, and it's park, and it has captured our entire healthcare ecosystem, front to back, from the food we eat to the way we grow our food to the way we process our food. Big tobacco captured most of the food industry in the '80s. They literally owned the food industry and brought their marketing campaigns and strategies to the food industry, where they made food more addictive, more processed, and more chemically laden. And so throughout that process, now you are eating the wrong foods and you're getting chronically ill at a disproportionate rate.

The preventative care was the way to prevent that, and now those doctors are out of that ecosystem. So now you're essentially getting pushed into chronic disease, where then the insurance companies monopolize and profiteer off of it for years. And then your employer and the American people and the taxpayers are who are really fitting the bill for all of this.

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It's amazing to read it. Again, that's heritage. Org/tucker. I know it's a lot. Where do you think health insurers are of the system that they preside over? Do they understand what's happening?

Absolutely. They were knowing and willingly active participants. They know. I mean, United Health Care implemented an AI algorithm that rejected 90% of claims, inaccurately. 90 % of Medicare claims for surgeries were getting rejected inaccurately, which drove up their profits. They're having double-digit profit growth right now when you asked about how profitable they are. For the last five years, they've doubled their stock price. So you also got to not just think about monthly... It's revenue and profits, but it's also what is your shareholder return on investment and what are your stocks doing? And if we look at that, guess who owns the majority of the Big Five insurance companies? It's BlackRock Vanguard State Street. Guess who owns the majority of the pharmaceutical companies? It's BlackRock Vanguard State Street. Guess who owns the majority of the media outlets? It's BlackRock Vanguard State Street. Do you start to sense a trend here? I do. And so And guess who funds and lobbies more than anybody? The pharmaceutical industry, followed by one of the top players is the health insurance industry. And then you've got these big conglomerates that are funding all of this. So there's so many levers we can pull to generate revenue off of these individuals that it's staggering.

Yeah. And so they absolutely know, and it makes it very, very hard. There's no alternative. If I'm a hospital, I can't afford to lose Blue Cross Blue Shield. I can't afford to lose United Health care. I'm out of business. In the state of Texas, Blue Cross Blue Shield is 30 % of your revenue. So I'll tell you a real world example. I owned a pharmacy, and I still do own pharmacies, but I don't take insurance. Our model now is we refuse to take insurance because if I don't take insurance, I can tell the patient the real price. I can get rid of all the games, all the fuzzy numbers, and I can just say, Hey, it cost me this. I'm going to sell it to you for that. I'm going to mail it to your doorstep. It's that simple.

Why aren't there more pharmacies like that?

They're springing up. They are coming up. I think it's taking the American people. So many people think, Well, my insurance should cover it. I try to explain, they're going to cover it, but there's a price to pay, and that price to pay is way more than dollars. They are going to make you chronically ill and make money off you. Oftentimes, you're spending more than you would to just pay cash for the compound. Here's an example. I also owned labs, and I owned a blood lab, and I went out and I educated clinicians in the state of Texas on the importance of preventative care. My elevator pitch was, the five chronic diseases that are killing so many Americans, how do we stop them? We don't let them develop in the first place. How do we do that? We do that through getting proactive and predictive. How do we do that? We do that by taking a look under the hood. Do you just go out and romp on a car without changing the oil or maintaining it? No, you take care of the vehicle. We have to take care of our bodies. And the only way to do that is to do the deep dive annually and to understand.

A basic checkup in America is a lipid panel. They're looking at four or five things. They're looking at nothing. You can't get anything out of that. To do a deep dive, you look at over 70 biomarkers. Now I'm looking at your bloodwork, and I can tell, like I said earlier, are you headed towards diabetes? And if you are, we can intervene. We can act now before you become diabetic. But what the insurance model does is they wait for you to become diabetic. Why? It costs six-fold to keep you alive every year once you're diabetic because they're getting paid off the insulin. There's an incentive for them to let you become diabetic. That's terrible. You show you the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes. We've got to pivot this and shift this. I would educate doctors on the importance of bloodwork, and I would tell them, Let's get active and predictive, and let's prevent chronic disease. Doctors start implementing this in their practice. Within months, clinicians, all of them, got letters from the insurance companies. Hey, doctor so and so, we noticed you're pulling a lot of bloodwork. We don't like this. We don't think there's medical necessity here.

Hold on now. One, where did you go to fucking med school? Two, who are you to tell a clinician what they do with a patient life? Three, that patient paid you their hard earned money for the right and accessibility to care. Four, you're doing this purely, purely out of evil necessity for profit and greed. That's all this is. There's no reason not to get a comprehensive blood panel at least once a year to be able to do a deep dive. So clinicians stop pulling the bloodwork. That's throughout the United States. Doctors are terrified. They are not going to fight the insurance companies because the insurance companies control everything. When we talk about corporate capture, you've got the big pharmaceutical companies that have captured the FDA. You've got the big insurance companies that have captured and colluded with FBI and DOJ, which I'll get into here in a second. They've also captured our hospital systems and our clinicians. There are no private primary care practice anymore because insurance cut their reimbursements, forced them to go work as employees of the hospital. Now they've funneled all of the sheep into one location so the wolves can pick them off.

Now these doctors are basically fall in line or lose your job. And so doctors fall in line.

There are no independent primary care- There's very few independent primary cares that are in an insurance model anymore.

Most of those have gone to work for huge HMOs and Blue Cross Blue Shield bought, Kelsey Sebo, I believe. The other thing they're doing is they're vertically integrating and capturing our systems. Where I was going earlier with the bloodwork is they basically deny the bloodwork, bully the clinician to not pull the bloodwork so then the doctors don't ever do the deep dive so they can't prevent the chronic disease. Now you are headed towards chronic disease because they don't have the ability to help you prevent it. That's just one sliver. Then the other And what you're doing is, as a pharmacy owner, I would bill and collect and I would ship out hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in medications a month. Crucial life-saving medications for patients. Blue Cross Blue Shield, true story, came, said, they quit paying me. And I shipped out, I think, over a million dollars in prescription medications in a month in the state of Texas. You go to negotiate, say, Hey, what happened? You guys didn't pay me this month. I have a million dollars that I've shipped to your patients. Yeah, we don't think you collected copays and deductibles. Okay, well, we did.

We collected 98 %. Okay, well, we'll come audit you. Okay, how soon can you be here? Three months. I can't ship out $3 million in drugs and float you guys. I'm not a bank, and they do that throughout the industry. The hospitals are floating the bills. It's 90 days on average to get reimbursed, anywhere from 60 to 90 days to get reimbursed on a surgical procedure. Then when patients say, why do I have such a big copay? It's another method to discourage you from having surgery and to force you back to the drugs that they're making money on.

That's so interesting. Doctors were associated with surgery. That's why they're called sawstones. Psychiatrists were talkers. Let's talk about your mother. The whole system, every part of medicine, seems totally focused on drugs now. Yeah.

Now, there's still a lot of money in surgery, but it is a loss leader for these insurance conglomerates. And so they put obstructions between you, deny, delay, depose. So they delay your ability to get the care. They make you jump through all these hurdles before you finally get approval. United Health care denied over 30%, one-third of claims. Actually, two years ago, they denied 37% of claims. 37%. That's not one-third. That's almost half. Let's be honest. All the meanwhile, and what that means is people are dying. It doesn't It means like, Oh, shucks. These aren't esthetic procedures. These are life-changing procedures that people are desperate for, that they paid for, and you're denying them. Do you know what percentage of people fight the claim? 10%. 10%. People are tired.

How do you fight a claim?

You have to go to your doctor and write letters and push back and go get second opinions and take time off from your busy job to go try and battle an insurance company. And then even if you get the procedure approved and everything's hunky dory and you go have the surgery, they're going to tell you who to go to, where to go, and then they're going to take 90 days to pay the hospital back or the surgery Center back. And that surgery center holds the bill. But here's where it gets even more fucked up. They set the copays and deductibles. Sorry, am I allowed to cuss? I didn't even ask you that. Of course, yeah. They set the copays and deductibles. And so oftentimes, your employer offers you 10 different plans. I employ 300 plus people. And so I let my employees choose the plan. They have an option between 10 different plans. My young people will usually choose a plan that has a bigger out-of-pocket expense. For sure. Maybe a 10,000 dollar deductible on a surgery. The way they word the insurance contracts is they make you, the hospital, or me, the lab. When I had a genetics lab, there were times I had to go after the patient for a $5,000 deductible.

I don't want to. I don't want to play collection agent on a patient, but the way they word the contract is, if I didn't collect the copair deductible, they have recourse. They can deny the claim and never pay me for the procedure, the surgery, or the lab screening that I did. And so I have to show a reasonable effort to collect. And if I don't, they can do an array of things. They can deny the claim. They could come back and say, We're going to do an audit. This is where we get into depose, right? Deny, delay, depose. The depose of the situation is, let's say I did that spine procedure and let's say this kid's out-of-pocket expense on it was $10,000 and he doesn't have the money. Well, I'm required by law to go after him and make a reasonable effort to collect. But in the fine print of my contract with United Health care, they're going to say if they uncover that I didn't collect the copay or deductible, they can deny the claim and never pay me for the surgery. And so I have to chase it. So then now you get into a dispute with United or like I did with Blue Cross Blue Shield, where they just don't pay me.

If I sue them, they're going to depose. They're going to dig into every I didn't collect a copay or deductible, and they're going to argue that they have a contractual ground to stand on, that they don't owe me the money. It's almost like a lie agreed upon. They wait until the deficit gets big, and then they put you out of business. And then what happens, hey, it's tough out there for a small, privately-held pharmacy. We're actually buying pharmacies right now. Would you like to sell to us? So Aetna owns CVS Health owns Aetna. Cvs Health owns CVS Pharmacies. Cvs Health owns the PBM. All of that's vertically integrated. They set the price point, they set the copay, they set the reimbursement, they set the deductible. They also own mail order pharmacies, and they will tell patients, Oh, we can get you this drug cheaper if you'll go to our mail pharmacy, in an effort to cannibalize and monopolize that patient life so nobody else has access to them. And so they can't see behind the curtain to find out that they're really getting screwed, that they never should have been paying that price point on the drug in the first place.

One of the things we're doing at my pharmacy is we disclose pricing. You could search and find out what the real wholesale price is on any drug and research that. To show a real world example of how dirty this is, Tucker, and if any of it's too much, let me know. I can tailor this to whatever makes sense because it's a lot. No, it's fascinating. It's a lot. Okay, the state of Ohio launched an investigation, hired 32 forensic auditors. Just the state of Ohio, just Medicare. Just Medicaid, sorry. Guess what they found? $230 million in fraud from the insurance companies in one year through Gap pricing, what they're calling Gap pricing, the whole Ponzi scheme I just explained. They are telling the state This drug cost us $200, you owe us $200. But the state pays on the $200, they only paid $100. So they made $100 every time that script got written. The state realized that they could negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies and get better pricing. So the state of Ohio is saving hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, multiply that times all 50 states. Now, multiply that times all the federal payers because Medicaid is just the state.

The Medicare program covers the whole freaking country. Yes. 60 % of the profits of these insurance companies is coming from the taxpayers. So we're getting killed paying taxes to give these guys all this money at the government level. But then we're getting killed on our company insurance plans. And then as a business owner, I'm getting killed because at the end of the year, they renegotiate the rates and they charge me more. I'm paying half of the care of my employees, my 300 something employees. Everything that costs that insurance money, they've taken a 30% markup on. That's why we're facing this mega health care expenditure issue in America. It's not just the pharmaceutical industries. It's the collusion and the capture of all of them working together to essentially screw all of us.

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The doctors are making less less and less to do more and more. In fact, we're- That's crazy, though, because medicine is...

I mean, at the core of medicine is a doctor, right?

A hundred %. And we are facing a crisis with that. We have a booming aging population. We have a primary care shortage in America. That's why it takes three to six months to get in with primary cares. And 80% of primary cares in an interview, I think it was done by Harvard, said they will not be in this profession within 36 months. They don't want to do it anymore. It is a beat down. These poor people are working their asses off, but they're in a system that ties their hands up.

The people getting rich are the parasites, right? They're not providing any actual stuff.

Then in certain states, clinicians have the right to earn into and make profit off of things. Because the insurance companies have gotten so dirty and have cut the reimbursement rates for clinicians, clinicians are now looking for ways to make money. Oftentimes, when I say corporate capture, again, it's the word of the day. But when I say it, it's one of two things. Either your doctor is an employee of the hospital and works for the hospital, which is directly controlled by the insurance company, and so they're essentially an employee of the insurance company, or your clinician owns the hospital or surgery center, and then they dictate to the hospital and surgery center the protocols and procedures. In those instances, they're oftentimes having to bill out of network, which is a whole 'nother' racket, because when you bill out of network, you get paid a third of charges. So that's why when people go, What the hell? My MRI was $6,000. It's because they know that they're only going to get paid a third of what they bill United or Cigna. And so they have to inflate their bill by three-fold. But the insurance company sets you up for failure by saying you have to go after the patient for any short pay.

So this is where people get into these medical bankruptcy issues, because if I go to United Health care when I own a blood lab and I say, United, I want to be in network. Their answer is, fuck off. We don't want you in network. We don't need you. We've got blood labs that we have browbeat for 20 years, and we've got them negotiated down to a dirt cheap price. We don't want another in network lab. So I either lay everybody off and go out of business, go to a cash model, which is what I do now, or you do what's called billing out of network. And if I were to... I'm going to use blood as an example. If I were to bill... The panel we run at Waze2well, if you were to walk in to a quest, and I And it's happened because I've had UFC- That's the biggest, right? Yeah. I've had UFC fighters that our clients and stuff walk into Quest, and they give them an insurance card, and they quote them $3,000 for our blood panel. And they'll call me and go, Oh, my God. Dude, they're quoting me. I'm like, No, no, no, no.

Give them our code. It's a $300 deal, and they bill me, they don't bill you. I got it. And they're like, How can it be $300 when they're charging 3,000? And so it's because once you've billed a panel at a rate by By law in the contract, you have to bill the patient for that rate. If I take insurance at a blood lab and I'm out of network, and I bill the insurance $300, they're going to pay me $100. I can't run. I'll lose money. I lose $200. So I have to bill them $900 to get paid $300. Does that make sense? Yes. And then in the instance that the insurance denies, one of the denied to pose, if they deny, I am in my contract required by law to go after you for the additional money. I have to chase- Meet a patient. Yes. I have to chase you down. But I never wanted $900. All I wanted was the $300 you owed me in the first place. That was it. But I can't get that because you won't give me a contract. And that's what's happening with surgery centers, MRI centers, hospitals. There's in-network and there's out-of-network.

You, the patient, oftentimes pay for out-of-network benefits and coverage, and then the insurance company tries to deny it and make it impossible for you to get that. And oftentimes, clinicians are out of network. 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 Health care's plan. So if you're, let's say you blow an ACL, 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 copay or deductible to get to go see those guys. Does that make sense? Yes. But they have to build them out of network and they'll get paid a percentage of the build 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. It If they think you're headed towards a catastrophic event, like a heart attack or a surgery or cancer, they're going to want to get you out of there before that manifestsates. The average person is employed or is insurance comes from their employer. If I'm a CEO at United and I know you're headed towards something catastrophic, I can delay your ability to uncover that through putting these instructions on things that don't make me money. Oh, come on. You think they would do that? Absolutely. Absolutely. 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 bloodwork. That's why they delayed women's care. The OB-Gene 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 is 35. And so now women don't that screening to see if their child is going to 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 is built for quarterly earnings, quarterly profits. I got to hit that number for Wall Street. Let's just say I'm managing 100,000 patient lives. Every day, month, week, I can delay those individuals is another day, week, and month that I don't spend money on a surgery. If I deny those surgeries and only 10% of them come back and fight me on it, step one is to deny. Delay. Step two, deny. Now, I've obstructed your ability to get to that. An example would be a chronic disease like- I'm sorry, I'm just fixated here.

To note the obvious... What you're saying is that they don't want you to know that you could develop a life-threatening illness.

They don't want to treat preventative. Anything preventative is proactive. But pancreatic cancer, for example, has a survival rate that's in the single digits.

But if caught early, it is survivable. Absolutely.

And there are many other examples. Here's an example. They will say these things are expensive. The screening tools we use in healthcare are dated. This is why we have moved to a cash pay. Our clinic weighs to well. We've become a big name because of Joe. We helped Joe, we helped Aaron Rogers. We're in the Aaron Rogers documentary. But everything we do pretty much is not covered by insurance. Almost everything we do wouldn't be covered by insurance anyway. It's not that it's crazy expensive, it's that it's just not part of their ecosystem. Our job is not to push drugs. Our job is to have an intelligent conversation with patients, to do the deep dive, to uncover the root cause, and to explain to the patient what is happening with their body and why, and to give you, the patient, sovereignty and autonomy over your health. An example would be a cancer screening. At our company, our cancer screening looks at you at the cellular level and can diagnose over 200 different types of cancer at stage zero. 99 % survival rate at stage zero. We know that a large majority of firefighters and first responders will develop cancer in their lifetime.

At a minimal, why would we We cannot be pre-screening all of our- Why? Because they're exposed to toxins, chemicals, fires, smoke, smoke inhalation. A lot of our military personnel have been exposed to Agent Orange and all these different compounds in the battlefield. They disproportionately have a higher cancer rate. We could be screening those individuals with real-world science and preventing cancer, but we don't. There's a lot of money made in chemotherapy. Did you know that the majority of an oncologist's income comes from marking up the medication itself? The chemotherapy itself is a profit center for the clinician that prescribes the chemotherapy.

That would suggest that if chemotherapy is a profit center, then I mean, I would assume it's overused.

Well, that's what you're going to see with everything. Glp-1s, the weight loss drugs. Well, I believe that. It's become a frontline defense. I have a different... I'm buddies with Calleigh, I'm buddies with Joe, I'm buddies with Gillian Michiels. They hate Ozempic. My thing about it is I don't hate it. I'm pragmatic. It's a tool in the tool belt. When utilized appropriately, it can change and save lives. Yes. But it is not a first-line defense, and it should not be used in children. Prescribing Ozempic- That's not sensible. Yeah. Prescribing Ozempic without first talking about diet, lifestyle, and nutrition is like brushing your teeth while eating fucking Oreos. It's delusional. That's what we're trying to do. And you go, well, wait, why? I told you why, Tucker. They're printing fucking money off these medicines. The insurance company loves Ozempic. The pharmaceutical industry loves Ozempic. Is there a A big benefit to it? Absolutely. It can help reduce the risk of chronic disease because the number one risk for almost all of these chronic diseases is metabolic disease and obesity. And we are chronically ill and obese as a society. And so if we can get that weight off, great.

But if we don't talk about diet, lifestyle, nutrition, we're just putting a bandaid on it. We got to get to the root cause. And then if we're not going to address the food issue and we're not going to fix our food issue, it isn't a matter of people eating bad or good. It clearly is. Diet is very, very important. It's the most important thing. But I want to be clear, even if you try to eat healthy in America, it's hard. I think it was the '80s, we had 700 FDA-approved ingredients in our food. Now there's thousands, I think it's over 10,000 ingredients. In Europe, it's 700. There's over 10... Petrochemicals, everything in our food sources, preservatives, food dyes, all of it. They're all causing an increase in metabolic disease and these problems. They're making our food more processed, more addictive, more abusive. Then we're getting chronically ill and chronically obese. Then that leads to being chronically on medications. Then that leads to trillions of dollars. When we talk about big pharma, the insurance companies made $1.5 trillion last year. Pharma is still in the billions. I think it was six or 700 billion. It's just still an insane amount of money in revenue.

But the insurance companies are two and a half size, the size of big pharma.

At least the pharma companies make something. Yeah. I mean, they may not have enough R&D, and they make addictive drugs, and that's all bad, but they do make things. I don't know. I just want to clear this up. Do you think it's possible, it sounds likely maybe, that chemotherapy is overprescribed?

I think every drug on the market is probably overprescribed. Antidepressants. I mean, why are we prescribing antidepressants? There is a place for every compound. I don't want to paint something that's all bad. But should the amount of people be on antidepressants?

It's really simple as a non-physician, non- College graduate, let me just say, if the suicide rate goes up, they're not working, and the suicide rate has gone up. So there's no getting around that. That's just very simple.

There are alternatives to that. Again, at our practice, we have a product called Wave Neuroscience. We scan your brain, we assess where neurons are misfiring. This is all stuff that's not covered by insurance, but it has an astronomically higher success rate and over 80% at helping depression, anxiety, and insomnia. It's not covered by any insurance company because they force you back to SSRIs, and you have to fail two or more SSRIs to But why, Tucker?

Which is more effective for rescuing people from despair and suicide, taking SSRIs or getting a dog? Super simple. Exactly.

A hundred %. It's proofable. Yes, I believe you.

No, it's a national tragedy. It's a lot. I just know from years of covering mass shootings on television, if you ask the question, was the shooter an SSRIs? You get shouted down immediately. You get called into the office, oh, accuracy theory. Then what's the answer then? And the answer is all them are.

Joe had a quote, Rogan had a quote, We don't have a gun problem. We have a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem.

Yeah, well, we have a drug problem that's causing a mental health problem, in my opinion. But yes, no, people... I don't even take Advil. I feel great. So that's my feeling on it. Sorry, I know you're in a pharmacy, but I just got- No, and my thing is medications should not be the solution.

No. They're the last last option on the table. We first have to take the time to deep dive and understand. When you say, walk me through a patient life, a 40-year-old woman comes into a clinic, she's tired, she's exhausted, she's raising a family, she's working a job, She's trying to be superwoman, be everything to everyone. She goes in there, she's gained weight, she's tired, exhausted, doesn't sleep well, riddled with anxiety and stress. She's going to leave there on four or more prescription medicines. That's totally right. Because that's how the system was built. But if you were to come into a practice that is proactive, predictive, and preventative, that is truly trying to help you, you're going to spend an hour with that clinician. We're going to do a deep dive. We're going to look at your bloodwork, your biomarkers, your hormones. We're going to do an EEG to assess your brain health, your neurons. Is there anything going on here that's causing the noise, the static, the stress, the anxiety? We're going to talk to you about magnesium and supplements that maybe you're deficient in your diet because our food sources are crap now. And we're We're not going to help dial all those things in.

I can't tell you how many patients we've helped just through supplementing products like magnesium and zinc. We're all chronically deficient on so many minerals. It's not about a drug. Magnesium, zinc, sunlight, and sodium can probably solve a huge amount of our anxiety in this country.

I totally believe that. But I also think that they're big- And nature. Well, that is absolutely true, and dogs. But there are structural problems, too. If If you're a mother of a bunch of small kids and you have to work to support your family, there's something wrong with our economy. I mean, that's totally unnatural. It's totally unnatural. By the way, no person can pull that off adequately. I don't care what anybody says, and I'm sick of lying about it. It's absolutely impossible to have a full-time job and be a full-time mom to small kids. It's just not enough time. It doesn't matter how hard you try, how brilliant you are. I think there are a lot of super hardworking moms, but there's just not enough time in the day to pull that off. That was not the state of play the year I was born. People who had kids and were married, they could get by in one income.

A hundred %. The system has failed Americans in so many ways. And even the healthcare cost portion, so many people go, well, man, I can't afford preventative care. And to get a comprehensive blood panel in an hour on the phone with a clinician is 500 bucks. I'm not trivialized. That's a lot of money. But how much How much do you spend on beer? How much do you spend on your car? You're in your car a few hours a day. You get one body. 400 trillion to one is what I told the Senate. 400 trillion to one are the chances that God gave us this life to a day. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to let these people ruin it and riddle you with chronic disease and illness and your family? It's not about dollars, it's about memories. It's about moments. It's about having the life you've always wanted and living into your elderly years being healthy and not chronically ill and not on four or more fucking drugs. But the only way we can do that is if this fucking government gets off its ass and starts doing something about what these insurance companies and these pharmaceutical companies are doing to us.

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They're an unnecessary middleman. I think what needs to happen is if you get rid of the pharmacy benefit managers, you get rid of a huge profit center for the insurance companies. You take away their incentive to keep you on prescription drugs. Now they're de-incentivized because you're costing them money. If they don't get those rebates, they're losing money by you being on prescription.

They've done a secret deal that you don't know about as a patient to steer you towards certain drugs and away from other drugs.

Absolutely. They even have a safe harbor with the federal government. The federal government doesn't... This is insanity, Tucker. The Central government does not have a line of sight into Medicare and Medicaid and why the prescription drugs are costing them that much. What the insurance companies do- What does that mean? I'll explain. Let's go back to insulin. We'll just make up a drug. Drug A is, let's say, the insurance company tells the people the average wholesale price in America for this drug is $1,000 a month. They never paid the $1,000, they paid $500. Because of the rebate. They tell us it's $1,000. Okay, now they've set the average wholesale price because they're the ones that set it. Then they negotiate for Medicare and Medicaid with the federal government. They say, Hey, federal government, since you're our buddy, we'll give you a price break. We're going to sell it to you for $800 a a month, better than anywhere in the country. You're getting a $200 price concession per month on this drug. They didn't pay 800. They paid $500. They made $300 off of the federal government every month. Who paid that? Me and On four more- federal regulators don't know that?

There is a safe harbor, and that's what people are trying to peel through. They're trying to get rid of this safe harbor. I think the Senate had a investigation they launched, I think, two years ago on the cost of insulin. When we talk about people celebrating the death of this CEO, it's terrible. But I'm trying to get people to understand where this anger and animosity comes from. I think it's a fair question. People are catching on to the magic trick, and they're going, wait a second, you are screwing us. The reason my cost of health care is so expensive and I can't get my surgeries and my kids addicted to opioids and my wife is dying of cancer and I'm fighting with you to get this coverage is because you are literally They're renting money off of chronic disease. It is not about patient lives and patient outcomes, it's about profits, and they're killing it all the way to the bank.

If I'm a health insurance lobbyist and I'm trying to convince the administration or the Congress not to get rid of pharmacy benefit managers. What argument am I making?

They're going to come in and say, If there's no pharmacy benefit managers, we're an advocate on behalf of the people. We negotiate down the cost of prescription drug care. Federal government, if you look at this and add the numbers up, the average wholesale price of every drug in America times the amount of patient lives in America. And then I say, I'm giving you a 30% price concession on all of the average wholesale price, I can make the math look good. But like I said earlier- But the wholesale price is fake. It's fake, yes. Like I said earlier, there's liars, there's damn liars, and then there's statistics. So they control the baseline, so they control the outcome of the equation.

Bingo.

And then they control the copays and deductibles, which drive the behaviors of the patient. If I'm some guy working on oil rig and I'm working my ass off and I'm exhausted, I'm on four more meds, and one med is a $20 copay and addictive and abusive with side effects, but the other med is a $100 Today, what do you think NOS people are going to take? I think you all covered this with Calleigh and Casey, who are my buddies. But the third leading cause of death in America is medical misuse. That's with us reporting less than 2% of adverse events. Exactly.

How many people die of acetaminophen every year? A lot. Thousands. Many thousands. It's just an over-the-counter drug that is, by the way, useful. I'm not attacking it, but even a drug as simple as that can kill you.

There's so much we could get into at the FDA and all that. We could go all day. There's a lot. There's a lot there.

Do you have confidence that Bobby Kennedy will get confirmed, and if so, can sort some of this out?

I hope he gets confirmed. I'm not super political. I didn't get political until this, and it's ironic. Bobby, I think, cares. And Bobby, RFK, reached out and met with me. The two politicians that I've ever reached out said, I want to talk about this in my adult life were Tulsi Gabbard and RFK. And I've gotten to know both of them, and they're amazing humans and good people. I agree with that. Yes. And they care about people, and they care about this country. And what I've seen Trump do so far has me more excited. I talked to Joe about it. We were texting. We're like, We're back. America's back. I am excited that there's hope. But I do give this with a caveat to the American people. It will take years for the government to overhaul and fix these things if we can do it.

Do not wait for them to get- You can tell- Well, you can tell- for them to get- If you want to know who is sincere about fixing the corruption, they're the ones who are going to have trouble getting confirmed. Yeah. Right? So the people who are no threat at all, who are just supporters the status quo and who are in effect supporting the corruption, they're fine. But they hate Tulsi Gabbard. Boy, they really hate Tulsi Gabbard. If you're wondering if Tulsi Gabbard is sincere, look at the reaction she's getting. She's sincere. And same with Bobby. I do think Bobby has such a huge national constituency at this point. I did a couple of Trump events before the election, and Trump got the biggest applause, of course. It was a Trump event. But Bobby got a pretty close second. I mean, he's not just some random guy. He is a national leader.

When he has a lot of knowledge about litigation, and that's what it's going to take to be able to- Well, that's true. To carve through the bullshit and get to the point. I will say this. Even since he's secured the nomination or been nominated, He's called me to say, Hey, walk me through this to explain this to me. And he's put me on the phone with people. He truly cares and is interested. Can we fix it? We're talking about a major... I mean, you're- I agree. Again, we're back to, yes, it's big pharma. Yes, it's big insurance, but who are their puppet masters? You're talking about the biggest companies in the world, the richest entities in the world. Can we change this? And so I tell people, Hey, for $500 a year, you can take all these people out of the equation, and you can take sovereignty and accountability over your health, and you can at least begin to get proactive, predictive, and preventative on your own. But one of the things Calleigh and I have talked about is if we could reform our healthcare system to focus on preventative, to focus on proactive, to force the insurance companies to address metabolic disease rather than pushing weight loss drugs and diabetes medications.

Short circuiting your pancreas instead of not eating taco It's crazy.

There's ways to address this and reduce chronic disease and reduce the cost of health care, but they don't want to do that.

Okay, so as I said at the outset, I've opted out of the system just through negligence and craziness and just not going to the doctor, which I'm sure I'll pay for at some point. I'm just too mad to go to the doctor. But let's say you were saner than I am and wanted to go to the doctor but didn't want to participate in what's clearly a corrupt and distorting system, what What are your options?

I tell people, Man, if you can find a cash pay clinic in your area that practices preventative care, somebody who is not part of the captured system, you will have your mind blown at the level of care you get. Because you can sit down with that clinician and have a deep dive. If you were to come into our clinic, we're going to sit down with you and we're going to talk to you about family history, what medications you're on.

What genetics matter.

Oh, absolutely. There's genetics and there's epigenetics, and your epigenetics Genetics are there. So think of the epigenetics or the bullets in the gun. Your diet, lifestyle, and behavior are what pull the trigger. We can help guide your diet, lifestyle, and behavior, but it starts with having a discussion, and it starts with showing you physiologically what you're headed towards. And we can get proactive and predictive. Like I said, I can tell you seven years in advance if you're headed towards cancer. I can tell you if you're headed towards diabetes, metabolic disease. I can use a DEXA scan and a VO2 max to assess your cardiovascular health. The future that I think is going to happen is I think we're going to drive down the cost of health care astronomically, because what we're doing is we're using large language models and algorithm-based medicine to tie all these data sets together to truly drive health span. Because if you want to know the difference, and this has been a big hot button, I think Calleigh even posted it, Japanese men are living 10 years longer on average than American men. Who cares if you live to be 90 if you're sick and riddled with disease and on five drugs?

Bugs. So the goal is to drive health span. If you look at the difference between somebody who dies at the average American age and a centenarian, somebody who lives to be 100, the only difference is the onset of chronic disease. If we can delay the onset of chronic disease, which we can absolutely do if we get proactive and predictive and develop a strategy and a game plan, think of it like a business. If I know I've got to generate X amount of revenue in Q4, then I can follow the trends to see am I leading Heeding towards that goal or initiative. If we work you through an assessment at Waze to Well and dig in, we know your bone mineral density, we know your visceral fat, your subcutaneous fat. We know all of your biomarkers, we know your genetics, your epigenetics, your family history. We put all that into the algorithm and we begin to get proactive and predictive. We've got a slow bone mineral density loss. One of the biggest risk factors over the age of 65 for women is a fracture. We know how much bone mineral density you're going to lose a year.

This isn't rocket science. I am not that smart, and I can figure this shit out. How can fucking guys from Harvard, Stanford, John Hopkins not be doing this? It's because all of them are captured in this broken system, and everyone has plausible deniability.

What does it cost to get that assessment done?

A DEXA scan, a VO2 max is literally like $100 something combined. Then bloodwork with us and an hour with a clinician is $500. I mean, so Less than $1,000, you could have a full workup, including an EEG, a brain scan, AI-guided, everything done. And then you've got a blueprint, and then we load that into the AI algorithm. What we're launching is it ties into wearables. So we have those data sets, but then our AI is tied into a wearable. So we know your rim sleep, your deep sleep, your heart rate variability. And we're cross-referencing all of these data sets and proactively warning you if you're starting to head towards something that could be catastrophic. But that's where I go back to, we do not want this shit in the hands of the insurance companies. We don't. They're too corrupt.

I actually didn't plan this interview to be an ad for your business, but this sounds really interesting. Where do you get this?

Well, I think a lot of people are doing this, so it's not unique to us. I don't want people to think they have to go to us. I would implore people, if you've got the budget at minimal, I know Dr. Hyman is doing comprehensive blood analysis. There's a ton of companies out there. And so the main thing is to truly... You and I were talking about carpentry earlier and our obsession with woodworks and making sure you curate the right esthetic. So important. People spend so much time and energy, and if they are going to remodel their house, they'll interview five or six contractors. If they're going to get a car built, they'll go interview three or four mechanics. Why are you not doing that with your body? You only get one of these, and not all doctors are created equal. And if they're in that captured system and you're just blindly following the prescriptions and the drugs this person is telling you to take, you're doing you and your family a disservice. You need to do a deep dive, and we need to make healthcare approachable and fun and understandable, where patients want to be a part of the journey, but the systems beat them up and spit them out.

And so our thing is, can we make it fun again? Can we gamify it? Can we have we compete against our friends, where you can show, hey, Tucker's biological age has moved backwards over the last year while your biological age has gone forward. He's beating you at the game. He's aging backwards because there's linear age, right? I'm 44. That's my linear age. But my biological age, based off biomarkers, is 35. I'm nine years younger biologically, physiologically, than I am in a linear age capacity. And that's all calculated by the AI algorithms. So I'm basically walking around like a healthy 35-year-old. And that's how we prevent chronic disease. We quit fucking around with writing a bunch of prescription drugs, and we get proactive and predictive, and we could save billions, trillions. I mean, $1.5 trillion is what we spent last year.

Last question, why wouldn't you cover that? Could you have a federal health insurance cover that?

That's the hope. Or would that destroy it? No, that's what Calleigh and myself, and that's what I wanted to talk to Bobby about. You can't let the insurance company capture it, and we don't want the insurance company to have this data because it's dangerous. But could the federal government mandate that the insurance company gives you an allowance a year? Let's just say it's $5,000 a year to use to see a nutritionist, to see a dietitian, to get proactive and predictive and go to whatever clinic you prefer, the insurance reimburses the patient for it, or there's some tax incentive to incentivize us to get healthy.

Congress requires the insurance companies to cover all kinds of things. This is the opposite of a free market. It's a little bit...

My fear with that, though, is if the insurance companies get that, do they demand the data? You don't want them having access to this, but this is where we're headed anyway. That's the scary part. That's the part of the equation.

So HIPAA protects nobody, really. It doesn't sound like.

Yeah. Well, the insurance... No, because the insurance company is going to claim medical necessity, and they're going to need to evaluate you. In the model we have now, they go, Well, I don't think there's medical necessity. I need to see this patient's records. Then they've got some primary care that they're paying that's a consultant to get on the phone and come up with creative ways to deny your claim. It's complicated.

Well, it's complicated, but it also the big picture makes absolute sense.

If we drove metabolic disease like Calleigh said, if we focused on preventing metabolic disease, we indirectly prevent all the chronic diseases that are killing so many Americans. The number one risk factor for the big five killers of humanity is smoking, right? Yeah. The second is age, but age isn't considered a chronic disease. If we take out age, the number one risk factor, smoking. The number two, metabolic disease and obesity. Even when we talk, somebody had, after we testified in front of the Senate, I think it was, I don't even want to give them, The Atlantic, those scumbags posted. They are. Who-who caucus, these people are idiots. What do they know about health care? They're claiming that diet impacts cancer. Yeah, you moron. It is literally the second most crucial thing to driving your cancer risk rate.

Why would it be important for the Atlantic, which works on behalf of the CIA, Okay, fact. But why would it be important for them to lie about something like the link between diet and cancer?

Because there is... This is funny. Well, multiple reasons, but one is they are also captured. If you look at who previously owned the Atlantic, it was a lobbyist for all of the pharmacy benefit managers. Did you know that? I didn't. Yeah. Then they sold to Steve Jobs as widow, and she supports Michelle Obama and Kamala, and she was involved in that. It was more of, Oh, my God, if RFK stands for this and RFK backs Trump, we got to discredit these people. Again, that's what I said to the Senate, this is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democratic That issue. This is a humanity issue. Stop with your party bullshit. Nobody cares. Stop trying to fuck us and help us fix this problem. I don't care who wants to get behind this, Republican or Democrat. I welcome it with open arms. Let's put our egos aside and work 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 off 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.

Of all the things you could attack that people say, why would people be angry at you for saying this? It's just interesting to me.

Well, it's because the funding for those articles come from these lobbying groups that are funded by Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Ag, and they're terrified.

I was a magazine reporter, and I know what it's like to be told by your editor, You need to do a piece on this. You have to think like, Well, I'm probably being used in some way to settle some score or whatever. But if someone said, attack someone for saying that there might be a link between what you eat and your health, I would say, I'm not going to do that. Do you know what I mean? Of all the villains in the world, why am I attacking the guy who's pointing out, first of all, it's been very obvious.

One of the wildest things It's nice, Tucker, and we went through this on Joe, too, but it was... So I own these pharmacies, right? We make a lot of the GLP-1s and weight loss drugs for pennies on the dollar because it is, let's be real, this is not an obesity drug. It is a diabetes medication. And Diabetes disproportionately- Terminous impact. Yes. It disproportionately impacts poverty-stricken communities. Of course, I noticed. Minority communities. They can't afford this fucking price, and they don't have insurance in a lot of those communities. Our goal is to bring cost-effective prescription medications to the masses to make this affordable for every human. Jilly and Joe, everyone was asking, why are all of these articles coming out about compounding pharmacies saying that it's dangerous for compounding pharmacies to make these drugs. And I explained it to them. Why is there a huge backlog? There's a huge backlog because one, it's being overprescribed, but two, because Eli Lilly got several of its facilities shut down via a whistleblower. Eli Lilly had a whistleblower that blew the whistle, and that was the only reason the FDA went into their facility. And what they found was unsterile conditions, people working barefoot.

They were lying and misrepresenting the dosages in the amounts. I mean, there's a whole article on it. You can go through that Reuters did that breaks down what happened. So the FDA hammered that facility and shut it down. And so that created a backlog where Lily didn't have it. Here's where it gets dark. They are paying the media outlets that they fund $8 billion a year that big pharma puts into the advertising with these media outlets. They are paying them to do stories indirectly, to do stories, hatchet job articles, scaring people away from cost-effective alternatives like compounding pharmacies. Shut up and take your Ozempic. All the meanwhile. So one of these articles came out. I don't even remember who it was. It wasn't The Atlantic. I don't even want to give them the credit. Anyways, the article at the end is an advertisement for Eli Lilly. And by the way, Eli Lilly is cutting the prices of Ozempic. They wrote an article about a recall one of my pharmacies had on 28 vials. We've treated over a million patient lives. We recalled 28 vials proactively. We didn't know for sure if there was a discrepancy, but in an abundance of caution, we recalled it, 28 vials.

Made national news. Why? That's insanity. That should not be national news. And we know the answer why. We know the answer why. Meanwhile, the whole time, the FDA has been in my building three times in 18 months. There are over 2,000 pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities that the FDA has not been in in five or more years. Lilley and Pfizer have moved a huge amount of their manufacturing facilities overseas to third-world countries like India. They put them in rural areas where when an FDA inspector goes out there, they got to stay in a shit hole hotel that has no water and shit. So they don't want to go there. If they do go there, they have to give them a three months heads up because they've got to get visas and green cards or whatever they call them over, all these things and negotiate with the country to go in there for months at a time. I just say all that because the narrative that's being delivered in the direction it's headed, anything that's FDA approved in these pharmaceutical companies are not making these super safe products. We could go for hours.

I certainly don't take it. No chance.

But one of the things Trump did, and I'll wrap it up, but Trump, right Now, already, Trump said, We need to break up the PBMs. He's dead right. Spot on. Good work. He said, We need to move manufacturing from overseas back to the United States. That would clean up all of these facilities that these big pharma companies are hiding, and Then they're also hiding the dollars, the tax dollars over there, because they're able to hide those dollars overseas and realize those revenue streams overseas. And bringing all that back and putting them right back in this country gives Americans jobs. It creates better oversight. Several of the ideas that they have already floated out are phenomenal.

Yeah. I mean, it's one thing for Ozempic to be made abroad, but antibiotics are necessary, and those should be made here just for reasons of national security. Absolutely. Prigham, thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. I know it was a lot.

That was the best. I'm going to affect my sleep, but I appreciate it.

I appreciate it. Thanks, man.

Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson. Com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, tuckercarlson. Com.