The healthcare system is more rigged than broken | Brigham Bueller

Great speech by Brigham Bueller, CEO of Ways2Well: "I've heard so many times, the healthcare system's broke. The healthcare system's broke. And I want to be clear as day. The healthcare system's not broke. It's rigged. And we're the ones fitting the bill.
If we look at what's happening in this country and we look at the chronic disease crisis that we're facing and you peel back the layers to the onion, you realize that the cost is much more than the dollars and cents. And we could get into the dollars and cents. I could tell you that healthcare is the number one budgetary concern for the federal government at 25 percent. It's in the top. It's the number one budgetary concern for most states. It's the number one reason for bankruptcy in our nation for individuals. But the costs are much more dire than that. They're paid in human lives, loved ones, friends, and family. As the brother of a victim to the opioid crisis, the son to a victim of the diabetes crisis, and a sibling to a victim of the mental health crisis, I can tell you that the stakes are not only real, but they're personal. And I would implore you next time you have the privilege of having dinner with your family, look around the table and ask yourselves, when you look into their eyes, what you would give to have another year with that family member, another month of health and happiness and joy and memories and moments, because that was something that was taken from my family during the opioid crisis. This is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democrat issue. This is a humanity issue. If we really truly want to address the chronic disease crisis in this country, we have to start by preventing these diseases from occurring in the first place. In medicine, we often say that to properly treat or prevent a chronic disease, we must first understand the root cause of that disease. I believe the same principle applies to business and politics. To truly grasp what is driving chronic disease epidemic, we must understand the root cause of the crisis. There is a cancer, in our healthcare system, and it is insidious and spreading rapidly. That cancer is big industry, a broken system fueled by corruption and collusion. We cannot treat what we refuse to diagnose. I have personally witnessed physicians unable to run necessary lab tests, unable to prescribe appropriate medications, unable to even perform investigations into their patients' conditions to uncover their root cause. We hear people reference President Eisenhower's speech all the time about the military industrial complex. But rarely do we hear the second half of that speech. He also warned us about the rise of the scientific industrial complex. He warned us if we allow the elite to control the scientific research, it could have dire consequences. The statistics and the data that we are presenting today illustrate that very nightmare. How is it that Americans are so chronically ill, despite spending more on health care than any other nation? The answer is simple and public health for quarterly profits and earnings. Private interest now dominates academia, scientific research, the governing and regulatory bodies. As a result, the focus has shifted away from patient care to corporate gain. What I ask this group of individuals today is to take off the blinders and look deeper into ourselves, into our institutions, because we have a real opportunity to effect meaningful change. The data and statistics that everyone's going to share today may feel overwhelming and at times hopeless. But I want to share with everyone one final statistic. 400 trillion to one. 400 trillion to one are the odds that we're here today and alive. What are we going to do with it? The time to act is now."

SOURCE: https://x.com/newstart_2024/status/1841423254256341376