David Balat - CEO, Direct Care Alliance Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I would like a new drug that's cheaper. Can I
I have my hand raise for that? Can I get
a new drug that's cheaper. By the way, President Trump
yesterday talking about his executive action on drugs, here's what
he said.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
A friend of mine who's a business man, very very
very top guy. Most of you would have heard of him.
A highly neurotic, brilliant businessman, seriously overweight, and he takes
the fat shot drug.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
And he called me up.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
I'm in London and I just paid for this damn
fat drug I take. I said, it's not working. They said,
he said, I just paid eighty eight dollars and in
New York I paid thirteen hundred dollars. What the hell
is going on?

Speaker 1 (00:49):
What the hell is going on? David blot joins, us
CEO of Direct Care Alliance. That was a pretty good
point to make. I'm sure there are a lot of people
who are taking ozembic or some other weight life drug
that are wondering the same thing. David, Yeah, good morning.
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
It's a nice story, but I wonder if it will
apply because when we look at this executive order, it
really only applies to Medicare, Medicaid and the VA, it's
not going to address drug prices overall for all other Americans.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Okay, I think a lot of people would be surprised
to learn that. Let me ask you this though, just
do the sheer volume of Medicare and medicaid drug purchases.
So does that in itself potentially lead to lower cost.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
It does, and it will make an impact, especially for
a lot of people who are on fixed income. The
only concern, though, is that if you're not going to
deal with drug prices overall for both those programs and
in the private market, you stand to potentially have those
drug companies increase the prices for employers and people who

(01:51):
have insurance on their own outside of their jobs. So
they've got to address the entire problem holistically rather than
just dealing with Medicare and Medicaid THEVA and hope to
fix those.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Other ones later. How did how do we get ourselves
in this situation? How is it that we I know,
the excuse always is is that it's for developing and
research and that we're the but we're the ones evidently
that are paying for all the development and research. How
did we end up being the ones that paid for
all that and not have it more evenly spread amongst
other countries. They're similar doars.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
You know, that's just a piece of it. That's certainly
a problem, and I know that that is that's being
addressed now, especially with the new head of FDA who's
focusing on that issue particularly. But the other problem, and
I think I've talked about it on the show before,
is we have something in this country that no other
country has, which is something called pharmacy benefit managers. Are
these are paper pushers in the middle They're the middle

(02:44):
men that Trump used to talk about in the first administration,
and ever since they got injected and we're given a
safe harbor from from a rule that kept kickbacks happening,
we saw drug prices just skyrocket and until they repeal that,
we're going to continue to have these problems.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, we're out of time for this segment, but David's
gonna be on My afternoon show today on AM nine
fifty KPRC. We'll have him on about four forty of
this afternoon and we'll continue the conversation. Thank you, David.
David Blot, CEO of Direct Care Alliance