174. Dr. Mehmet Oz: The BIG Problem with America's Healthcare System Nobody Talks About

What if I told you that America spends twice as much on healthcare as any other developed country, yet our life expectancy keeps declining? In this conversation with Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of CMS, I explore why we're getting sicker despite spending more. Dr. Oz reveals alarming childhood obesity statistics, how loneliness drives healthcare costs, and why one in four children are pre-diabetic. This exposes the fundamental disconnect between healthcare spending and actual health outcomes every American needs to understand! Join the Ultimate Human VIP community: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Listen to "Dr. Mehmet Oz" on all your favorite platforms! YouTube:https://bit.ly/4l0M3Pi Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4l0wyXu Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/43GpA4l Connect with Dr. Mehmet Oz: Website: https://bit.ly/4jVnPoQ YouTube: https://bit.ly/4l0M3Pi Instagram: https://bit.ly/43X8Nsz Facebook:https://bit.ly/45eA107 TikTok: https://bit.ly/45eC18A X.com: https://bit.ly/45lkDiE LinkedIn:https://bit.ly/3TkynTk Thank you to our partners: H2TABS - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg BODYHEALTH - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV BAJA GOLD - USE CODE "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa EIGHT SLEEP - SAVE $350 ON THE POD 4 ULTRA WITH CODE “GARY”: https://bit.ly/3WkLd6E COLD LIFE - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp WHOOP - GET 1 FREE MONTH WHEN YOU JOIN!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW MASA CHIPS - GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER: https://bit.ly/40LVY4y VANDY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/49Qr7WE AION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD HAPBEE - FEEL BETTER & PERFORM AT YOUR BEST: https://bit.ly/4a6glfo CARAWAY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3Q1VmkC HEALF - GET 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S BIOPTIMIZERS - USE CODE “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4inFfd7 RHO NUTRITION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: https://bit.ly/44fFza0 GENETIC TEST: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X.com: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2 Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps: 00:00 ​Intro of Show 02:32 Why America spends twice as much on healthcare with declining life expectancy 04:32 Childhood obesity pandemic statistics and government responsibility 06:29 Loneliness as the number one driver of healthcare costs 07:57 The importance of a sense of community in health 10:21 PACE centers and community-based healthcare solutions 11:57 Medicaid reform and protecting vulnerable populations 13:37 Closing thoughts on America’s generational healthcare transformation Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation. Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At its very core, we're sicker people. And what's the best way to reduce how much we spend on pharmaceuticals?

• 0:05Gary Brecka?

  Make people healthier.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  If they're healthy, they don't need the pills. And yet, our life expectancy keeps slipping.

• 0:10Gary Brecka?

  If you wanted to cut a person's life expectancy in half, put them in isolation.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  If you don't have another person in your life that you can crutch on, that can support you, but because we're supposed to be in community and supporting each other, many of these chronic illnesses begin to grow.

• 0:23Gary Brecka?

  I think we think of chronic disease, we look at these very myopically as later in life born illnesses. And what's really scary about this report is the age at which this seed is being planted and the necessity for us to take dramatic action.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  We have definitely made it hard to be healthy in America.

• 0:41Gary Brecka?

  Eighty percent of obese teens remain obese into adulthood. And this is a big problem to solve. Where do we start?

• 0:49Speaker 00

  A major driver of all of this, and the number one driver of costs overall for what I do.

• 1:08Gary Brecka?

  Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecker, where we go down the road of everything, anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today's guest, Dr. Mehmet Oz, is the 17th administrator of the CMS, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Before we even get started, I just want to interject a personal anecdote here. You came to my home a little over a year ago, I think with Steve Wynn and the Wives.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:37Gary Brecka?

  And I just want to say for the people watching this podcast, very sincerely from my heart, you struck me as a very passionate, purpose-driven human being. I don't think anyone sits in this seat, takes on the role that you're taking because they want to be rich and famous. It's because they want to make a difference.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.

• 1:57Gary Brecka?

  And I had a strong sense of that when you were in my home and we got to know each other a little bit. And I just wanted to start with that because I think a lot of times, you know, People look at very, take a very slanted view of people in public policy, positions of power. And it's important to know that some of the people that I've gotten to know in this administration are some of the most passionate, purpose-driven, intentional human beings that I've ever met. And you're, you're one of them. So it's a, it's a great honor to be sitting here next, next to you. You know, when, when we walked in, I've got a whole list of questions for you, but you handed me a life expectancy and health expenditure per capita by country.

• 2:41Gary Brecka?

  I don't think it's any secret that we are the biggest spender on healthcare worldwide. What are we getting for it?

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Well, that's the big challenge that we have at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. We got to figure out why is it we're paying twice as much as every other developed country or more. And yet our life expectancy keeps slipping. When I was going through medical school, we were roughly equal with Europe. Now we're about four or five years behind.

• 3:04Gary Brecka?

  Four or five years?

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Four or five years.

• 3:07Gary Brecka?

  That's a massive decline.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  And you start to search for why that is, and it has to do with this Maha report more than you would think. At its very core, we're sicker people. And when you have chronic illness, that drives probably 70% of all the expenditures. Then you're sort of stuck in a bind. And what's the best way to reduce how much we spend on pharmaceuticals?

• 3:26Gary Brecka?

  Make people healthier.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. If they're healthy, they don't need the pills. So who cares? There wasn't even a chronic medication concept until the birth control pill.

• 3:32Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  What really sort of got this whole thing going was this concept, was this belief that instead of doing the right thing with your lifestyle, it wasn't your fault. Sometimes it's not, by the way. But sometimes it is. So if you sprinkle a statin drug on a kielbasa, it doesn't make the sandwich any better.

• 3:48Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  So that's the fundamental disconnect. And the Maha report that we're so proud about is fundamentally about curiosity. What do you actually want to know about why we're sick? And if you're courageous enough to ask the question and act on what you've learned, you ruffle some feathers. Get back to the point you brought up, people don't like you as much because you're saying things that are inconvenient.

• 4:11Gary Brecka?

  Right. Inconvenient, but the inconvenient truth. But the good news is that we can do something about it. And I think getting away from the victim mentality, take Taking responsibility for some of your own healthcare choices, realizing that maybe it's not the governmental elite and entities that are going to take care of you. Some self-responsibility is required on this journey. I want to talk about, I haven't seen the full report, but I have a couple of notes here, some extractions from it, and some of these statistics are very scary. Over one in five children over six years old are obese, which is a 270% increase since the 1970s. The US obesity rate is more than double that in the G7 countries. 80% of obese teens remain obese into adulthood.

• 4:56Gary Brecka?

  And so this is a, you want to talk about a pandemic, and this is a pandemic. And this is a big problem to solve. And where, from a government public policy standpoint, where do we start?

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Let's put some numbers on the risk factors you identified. So if an obese child costs about $2,000 more per year than a child who's not obese, that's roughly 50% more than it would normally cost. And remember, half the kids in America are on Medicaid or CHIP, Children's Health Insurance.

• 5:25Gary Brecka?

  So Half the kids in America?

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Half the children in this country. So we're paying for half the kids as a government. So if the kids are sick, we're footing the bill. We pay now, we pay later. You know, you improve their school lunches, you improve SNAP, the food stamp system. You help kids understand where they have agency over their future. You know, you mentioned that, you know, over the age of six, you've got that, you know, significant upswing in obesity rates. But the downstream problems from that are, for example, diabetes and prediabetes. A quarter of children, a quarter are prediabetic now. That is tens of thousands of dollars over their lifetime. A quarter of kids have allergies. You know, we've had increases in things like celiac, you know, by tenfold

• 6:10Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  in a generation. These are crazy numbers. You can't even begin to put your arms around them. A quarter of teenage boys are believed to be ADHD, and a quarter of women, children, you know, young girls under the age of 18, have significant depression. Suicide rates are way up because of that. Anxiety rates are way up. I mean, everything in between. And this comes back, I think, Gary, to some fundamental issues, and I'll bring one of them up right off the bat. This is not a government solution. A major driver of all of this. And the number one driver of costs overall for what I do is loneliness.

• 6:43Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 6:44Speaker 00

  If you don't have another person in your life that you can crutch on, that can support you, we are social beings.

• 6:49Gary Brecka?

  Absolutely.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Most of my brain right now is functioning on your face and is designed to very precisely intuit every single micro change in how your facial expressions are altering based on whether you're bored or on board.

• 7:02Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Are you upset with me? Are you endorsing me, embracing me? It's all read pretty subconsciously, but we're not using our brains if we're lonely. Plus, the things you're doing that make you lonely might be a problem as well. But because we're supposed to be in community and supporting each other and young people aren't doing that, many of these chronic illnesses begin to grow. That stated, we have definitely made it hard to be healthy in America.

• 7:25Gary Brecka?

  No question.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  And for young kids who are the canaries in a coal mine, it's that much more evident. And it's manifesting itself in a whole slew of chronic illnesses that we've got to pay for.

• 7:33Gary Brecka?

  That are getting younger and younger, too. I think, I think we think of chronic disease and the pandemic of chronic disease and morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, multiple chronic disease in a single biome. I think we look at these very myopically as adult born or later in life born illnesses. And what's, what's really scary about this report in particular is the age at which this seed is being planted and, and the necessity for us to take dramatic action. You know, it's interesting that you talk about community, sense of purpose and, and connection because when you look at the blue zones, there really was no continuity in diet, right? It wasn't a dogmatic diet, it wasn't carnivore keto, paleo pescatarian. It was a whole food diet and that, that had people living the longest.

• 8:14Gary Brecka?

  But the two non-negotiables were sense of community and purpose and mobility until later in life. And I have a background as a population mortality expert for 20 years. I was in the research space in population mortality. We knew that if you wanted to cut a person's life expectancy in half at any age. Put them in isolation.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 8:35Gary Brecka?

  So I find it really fascinating that you bring that up because this is one of those nebulous concepts of community, sense of purpose, connection. I feel like because of social media, because of a lot of reasons, you know, lack of recess, just lack of activity, we've, we've lost the, the human connection. We've lost our connection to nature. We've lost our connection to one another and people are becoming more and more isolated in plain sight, right? It's hard to build connectivity through your iPhone. So I wonder if you might talk about that for a moment and, and I, and, and before we wrap, I definitely would like to address some of the narrative.

• 9:17Gary Brecka?

  I find it to be highly false, but a narrative that your intention is to cut spending, cut services, you know, reduce access to healthcare. I don't think anything could be further from the truth, but I want to give you a chance with my audience to, to address that specifically.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  So I'm a heart surgeon and I made a rule early in my career that I would not operate on patients who came to the office alone.

• 9:42Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Because heart surgery is life and death, measurably life and death. So not everyone's going to make it through the procedure. And if you don't have anyone that you think you can bring with you to the office to talk about this, that's a concern for me. It's a concern because you might actually think it's true and I'm sure it's not that someone who cares about you, but there's also the possibility you've done things to force those folks away. So I would push, they would always deliver, they'd find a dormant or a cousin or estranged kid and they'd bring them back into their life. And I'd say to them, I need to celebrate the success of your operation with somebody. When you're under anesthesia and I finish, who am I going to high five with? And that message generally got them out of their shell and to do some of these things we're talking about. There are massive opportunities for us to improve the way we think about healthcare delivery. I'll give you one concrete example.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  There are programs around the country where they take older folks who are living alone at home and they support them in these community health centers. They're called PACE centers. And so these PACE centers are designed to get you doing yoga and dancing and singing and just eating lunch together. Go back to your own home and you're lonely at night oftentimes. But back the next morning, they transport you in and off you go. It dramatically slows the amount of time that people are in in long term care facilities. Reduces it because you're living in this this community setting instead of being in some nursing home. It also seems to improve their health outcomes. They've got doctors there. And I like those kinds of approaches for, and I'll give you one concrete example. I was visiting one in San Francisco last week. And as we're dancing with these octogenarians, the little old lady next to me steps on a dumbbell,

• 11:12Speaker 00

  which she was using earlier, falls back and bang smacks her bottom. Now, normally what happens then is as you smack your bottom, you smack your back, you smack your head, you get a subarachnoid hemorrhage or subdural hematoma. Now you have to be in the hospital for weeks. They try to drain it. You get infections. You have to be in respirator, ventilator, all this stuff. Instead, this woman tensed her core, held her neck up because she'd been dancing and exercising for months in this center. And she rolled and got back up again and started dancing. And that's the difference.

• 11:41Gary Brecka?

  Between frailty and non frailty.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Fair as concrete as you can say it, and you know frailty is the single biggest predictor. If you get older, if you can't walk a mile, it means a lot. Can I go quarter, quarter mile, it means a lot. This woman fell and did something a child does because she's, though she's in her 80s, figured ways to go past that. You asked me about what we're going to do in Medicaid in particular. It is imperative that we protect Medicaid. And not let anything hurt the people that every great society protects. And we're great people, so we're going to do that, which is protect the vulnerable. When you walk into the building that Bobby Kennedy and I are working, which is the Health and Human Services Building, it's called the Hubert Humphrey Building. And Humphrey has a quote on the left side as you walk in. He was there when they signed the original bill 60 years ago that created Medicare and Medicaid.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  And it says that it's the moral obligation of government to protect those in the dawn of life, those who are young, those in the zenith of twilight of life, the older folks, seniors, and then those who are living in the shadows. That's our job. But what has happened to Medicaid now is legalized money laundering, tons of waste, fraud, abuse, structural challenges to allowing it to truly serve those people by expanding it to able bodied. Populations who also deserve to have it if they're trying to either work or volunteer or get educated or just take care of the rest of the family.

• 13:00Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  There's many reasons that you might not be able to go to a job, but you've got to show that you're trying, that you have agency over your future, that you care.

• 13:06Gary Brecka?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  And that's the big disconnect. It's amazing to me that there's so much vitriol about this because if you ask the average American, 80%, 80% will say, yeah. If there's someone sitting in my basement that I don't know and they're getting something free like health insurance, which is, you know, important, and they're not even willing to pick up the phone, make a phone call to try to get a job or volunteer somewhere or, you know, go get educated or take care of the kids, do something, vacuum, right?

• 13:31Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  If they're not willing to do any of those things, then do they really deserve it for free? And we do this for food stamps already. SNAP programs say, yeah, we'll give you food. We don't want people to be hungry in America.

• 13:40Gary Brecka?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  But you've got to prove that you're trying to help a little bit.

• 13:43Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  That's the breakpoint in America right now. And I think this is an argument, the moral high ground, this argument is to protect those original folks, make sure nothing ever gets in the way. And if you bankrupt the system, you're hurting those people.

• 13:54Gary Brecka?

  I couldn't agree with you more. And it's interesting that there's actually a financial component to this that could really save our country from the burdening debt of healthcare. I mean, it's got to be one of the fastest, most ballooning areas of expenditure in our federal government.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  Healthcare is growing at 2% to 3% faster than the rest of the economy. It is the number one budget item for most governors that's increasing. And they can't keep up with it. Our states are crowding out education, child services, all the things that a state government's supposed to do, they don't have the money because they're paying for Medicaid.

• 14:24Gary Brecka?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  So we're trying to lead by taking bold action. This is a generational opportunity to make a difference. The people who've come into this administration, led by President Trump, Secretary Kennedy, they're brave folks, they're curious people, and they're courageous enough to act on what they learn. And we're trying to do it with compassion for the people who really, really get hurt if you don't do it.

• 14:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  And there are plenty of special interests that don't like that because they might get hurt too.

• 14:46Gary Brecka?

  Well, we're blessed to have passionate, purpose-driven people like yourself at the top of our agencies, really looking out for the future of healthcare. I'm excited about this report. Um, I think it may rattle a few cages.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:56Gary Brecka?

  Based on what I'm seeing here. But, uh, but I'm happy to see there's people like you trying to fix it.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  God bless you.

• 15:02Gary Brecka?

  Thank you for coming on The Ultimate Human.