Push Notifications Give Foreign Spies Phone Access & Multiple Medications Denied By Insurance Groups

Senator Ron Wyden is asking the Justice Department to investigate how foreign countries could be spying on your phone data through your push notifications. Wyden's office has spent years investigating this issue, and now they wanna take it to the DOJ and plead with the DOJ, please take action. I've been talking to you about it for years. Talk about how this works. This is a really kind of complicated, yet, if you're a foreign government, it's actually a bit of a brilliant scheme here. Yeah. It i

s. Because we're talking about in every country, essentially the public airwaves. So when your phone sends you a notification, hey, your game is ready for you to play. A reward is ready. Your map says you gotta take a turn. Those are push notifications that come through your phone. But by doing that, they're of course, using this public space, these public airwaves, whatever. So foreign governments are allowed to say, oh. We want access to that. Well, you know, this is coming across our towers.

This is coming across our signals. We as the government have every right to see what's happening. And Ron Wyden's office said in a report last week, they said, listen, they're using this to get your messages because your messages come across through a push notification. They're getting emails, they're getting your location data. They're getting everything you do, because they can access these notifications. And Apple and Google, they have the information, but they're unwilling to share it becaus

e they know where that goes. This is just the very tip of the iceberg. They can't share this information. That's why they're refusing to do it. That's why Wyden is trying to demand, tell us who has been affected by this. You have the information. We wanna know who the people are. Right. Yeah. And doesn't this remind you a lot of, because we were doing segments back then, back during the FISA years where you had the AT&T and you had these other cell carriers say, oh yeah, we've given up data on A

merican citizens, but we can't tell you who, because that's just a breach of confidence. But it's the same thing today. It's just different people doing different things for different countries. The tech industry has just become so arrogant. They really have. They've just become so arrogant. That's why I'm so excited about the lawsuits we're bringing out, bringing against them, social media lawsuits. The stuff we're finding already is appalling and what the DOJ won't do, and what the government

won't do, we will do, we'll do in a courtroom, and we will ask the questions and take discovery. I just don't understand why the Department, why Wyden has for years told the Department of Justice, this is serious, man. Pay attention. They won't do it. Well, Wyden has been great on the whole range of issues with big tech. He is one of the few that's always been solid. He was solid on the surveillance breaches and breach of trust on all that. And he is still just the loudest voice, usually one of

the only voices sounding the alarm. Well, there's one more I read that's on this bill. I forgot who it was, but another Democrat. And of course, there's no Republicans coming up and saying, yeah, we oughta do something about this. Health insurance companies are working alongside drug companies to make sure that you can't get a good deal on your prescription drugs. The process is complicated and it's very shady. The end result is that you pay through the roof for the cost of pharmaceuticals. Now,

here's what people don't, most people watching this would've never even heard of a PBM. Okay. We're handling the insulin case. It's where PBMs are setting drug prices, and they're doing it through price gouging. It's antitrust. As a matter of fact, I've got a book coming out following December, about this very issue. It's in the series. But it's focusing on, it's fiction, but it's focused on the heart of the problem. PBMs came up in the sixties, and they were supposed to be there to protect con

sumers to make sure that pharmaceutical company doesn't overcharge. Now that PBM is taking kickbacks. So they want the price of the pharmaceutical to be as high as possible. They have three different avenues of kickbacks. One is just when they set the price. They put 'em on a list. Right. If you have your pharmaceutical on the list, you can sell it. These people can keep you off the list. And so it's, I mean, it's a extortion. We'll put your expensive product on the list, but we want a kickback.

They're literally taking, they call 'em rebates, but they're kickbacks. Rebates. So yeah. These are pharmacy benefit managers. The PBMs. And what a lot of people don't know, and the Lever did a beautiful job of explaining this. Oh, by the way, let me, if people, people always say, I can't find the news, go to the Lever. Yeah. It's wonderful. This is an extraordinary source of news. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead. No. It needed to be said. So you have these PBMs that are now increasingly a

ctually being owned by the insurance companies. Now, they used to be kind of this independent group. The insurance companies are here, your PBMs, and then your drug companies. Right. Check and balance. Right. The PBMs were kind of the intermediary saying, okay, insurance, you have to cover this. Drug companies, you gotta cover it at this price. Everybody's happy. But the insurance companies said, well, what if we just owned the PBMs? Right. Let's just cut out the middleman. We create our own sys

tem here. So as you said, they now own the PBMs, and the PBMs are going to the drug companies and saying, hey, we're gonna have to drop your drug. But, if you come off the price a little bit of what we'll cover, and you give us the difference. Yeah. That the PBM said. Right. It's extortion. It's nothing less than, they call it rebates. They, oh, this is only a rebate. No, it's a kickback. You say to the pharmaceutical company, you're not gonna be on the formulary list. We're not even gonna recom

mend that your drug be able to be sold in these various pharmacies like CVS or whoever. And the people making those decisions also own the pharmacies. Right? Yeah. So we're saying we want the most expensive drug. If you got a generic or you have a hundred times the cost of generic, we want that expensive one on the formulary list because the PBM gets a kickback and the pharmacy makes more money by selling the more expensive drug. Right? Yeah. So it's, just to give kind of a little bit of an exam

ple here. Say you've got a drug that big pharma would charge you $500 for if you didn't have insurance. Well, if you don't have insurance, you're not gonna be able to afford that medication. So the insurance company says, listen, we will cover it, and the cost of the consumer will be a hundred dollars. So you're coming off $400. In exchange, we're gonna get the rebate of $50 a prescription, that comes directly to me at the PBM. So you're actually paying, or 150 instead of the five, but we get th

e difference there. Yes. Yes. So that's how this scheme works. And as you said too, another part of it is the generics because they'll go to the drug companies and say, listen, we got a $2 generic over here. We could put that on the list and it's gonna be free. PBM says, no, we're not putting you on the formulary. We want the one that cost a hundred times that because we make more money. And there are no regulations. The FTC has done nothing about this since the 1960s. And it's evolved. And it i

s a mob control. I mean, it is literally. Matter of fact, in the book I'm writing, I actually have the Irish mob moving into this business because it's a way for them to make big money and never go to jail for committing the most awful crimes. And so, but the point, until somebody takes a look at it, this is gonna continue. And doctors will tell you, this is part of the problem. I can't even give my patient a medicine that works for 'em because in the middle of them taking that medicine, I'll ge

t a notice saying, you can't give 'em that medicine anymore. He has to buy the more expensive one. That doesn't work, by the way.