The Berman Method
The Berman Method
Episode #197: Why Health Insurances Won't Pay for Things that Actually Work
The façade of modern healthcare is crumbling, revealing a system designed not to heal but to create lifelong customers. Dr. Jake and Jenni Berman pull back the curtain on how insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants systematically block access to effective treatments that could eliminate the need for their services.
Drawing a powerful parallel between health insurance and car insurance, the Bermans highlight a critical distinction: while no one expects their auto coverage to pay for routine maintenance like oil changes or tire rotations, we've been conditioned to believe health insurance should cover everything—except, remarkably, the very treatments that might cure our conditions. The reason? Simple economics. A healthcare system built on recurring revenue cannot afford to make people well.
The podcast spotlights their recent experience with StemPod technology, which delivered remarkable results for patients suffering from conditions ranging from diabetic neuropathy to sciatica, Bell's palsy, and overactive bladder. The most striking aspect? One hundred percent of workshop participants experienced significant pain relief, often within just 10 minutes of treatment. Yet despite documented evidence of effectiveness—including a privately funded $750,000 case study—Medicare and other insurers flatly refuse to cover this breakthrough therapy.
This rejection pattern mirrors historical efforts to limit access to knowledge, like resistance to the printing press that threatened to democratize information beyond the elite. Today's medical establishment similarly guards its territory by dismissing or burying research supporting natural, holistic treatments. The solution begins with education—becoming what Dr. Berman calls an "ask hole"—questioning conventional wisdom, seeking comprehensive diagnostics beyond standard panels, and investing as readily in preventative healthcare as we do in restaurant meals or Amazon purchases.
Ready to take back control of your health? Start by examining what you're willing to pay for. Share your healing stories. And remember: the healthcare revolution won't come from within the system—it starts with empowered patients demanding better.
This is the Berman Method podcast, featuring Dr Jake Berman and physician assistant Jenny Berman. We are here to treat problems and not symptoms. Disclaimer this podcast is for entertainment purposes only and not to treat anyone or to give medical advice. If you are interested in any information that we are giving and would like to use this for yourself, we recommend that you contact your primary care physician or reach out to us and ask us questions about yourself specifically. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:And we're rolling baby with a baby on the floor. Look at Walker smiling. Right now we need to do video podcasts. When are we going to do the video? How many times have I said that over the past three years?
Speaker 1:Oh, my word.
Speaker 2:Dr Jake Berman here with my beautiful co-host Jenny.
Speaker 1:Berman, physician assistant.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Berman Method podcast. We're focused on treating problems, not symptoms. We're, david, going against Goliath, goliath being the corporate medical system, big pharma, health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies. They do not have your best interests in mind. They will choose profits over patient outcomes every single time. And the reality is a patient cured is a customer lost, and there's more and more documentaries coming out about this customer lost and there's more and more documentaries coming out about this, or I guess it's not exactly a documentary. What's it called when it's a series based off of true events, but it's dramatized what is that called a non-fictional fiction?
Speaker 2:yeah, like pain pill on netflix that series, pain pill, where it was actual events of the Oxycontin pandemic and they just changed names and dramatized it for Hollywood. But it's real, it really, really happened. And there's more of these things coming out because the lawsuits are coming out Like they're being publicized. You can't you can't suppress them anymore and people are getting smarter and the reality is that health insurance companies in general are not paying for things that actually cure ailments, because if you don't need health insurance, they go out of business.
Speaker 1:That's the business, right, right. They want you to keep it and keep utilizing it.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. Think about a car insurance. Car insurances would go out of business if you never got into a wreck, because if you never got into a wreck, you wouldn't have car insurance.
Speaker 1:Right, because it doesn't cover the things like your oil changes and your maintenance.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. Now we have to start thinking about health insurance just like car insurance. You have to, you absolutely have to. Car insurance is not going to pay for you to go get your oil changed. Car insurance is not going to pay for you to get your tires rotated. It's not going to pay for you to get new brakes. It's not going to pay for you to have it detailed and clean. It's not going to pay for you to get it inspected. It will pay for a catastrophic event, though. It'll pay for you when you get your car totaled after you pay a deductible, most likely.
Speaker 2:Right, right, or if you're injured and have to go to blood pressure medication cholesterol medication or what's the 11 billion pharmaceuticals we see on the commercials every night?
Speaker 1:Yeah, to help with Crohn's and ulcerative colitis and psoriatic arthritis. And you know all the MABs all the drugs that end in the MABs that they want you to think are fixing your problems in 6 to 18 months, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, 6, 12, 18 months is when people started to see the best results. And it's just not true. It's not right because the answer is always the same, and Jenny has personally experienced this a handful of times in the past couple of years intentionally going to Western medicine and being prescribed a pharmaceutical and asking the provider bluntly how long will I have to be on it? And the answer is Forever.
Speaker 1:If you stop it it's going to come back, so you have to be on it forever. But if you take it forever, you're cured. Is that a cure To take a drug forever?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. So the most recent one is a stem pod. We've talked about it a handful of times on this episode or this podcast, the past few episodes, but we just had our big workshop a couple of weeks ago where we flew in Dr Collins, who is the expert in this technology, and learned so much over two days. We had three different workshops, had over 30 people come in and experience STEMPod and the results speak for themselves. 100% of the people felt relief in some way, shape or form, some of which it was dramatic relief, and we're talking about 10 minutes or less. Some of them only got five minutes of treatment, but the ones that got 10 minutes of treatment, there's ones that got 10 minutes of treatment.
Speaker 2:There was this one guy that we had in our Saturday morning workshop where I thought for sure that somebody planted them in there, because it was like it was straight out of one of those Southern Baptist churches where we were done with his 10-minute treatment on his diabetic neuropathy. He hadn't felt his feet in years and he goes oh my gosh, I can feel my big toe. Oh my gosh, I can move my big toe and he just stands up just in this excitement. I can't believe I can feel my toe and I'm looking at this guy. I'm recording this. This is all on video. By the way, I'm recording this going. I can't believe somebody planted this guy in here.
Speaker 1:Where'd he come from?
Speaker 2:But he was just freaking out because he's been told for years that there's no cure for his diabetic neuropathy. He's been told for years to take gabapentin and just deal with it. And, by the way, gabapentin is just an anti-C-ser medication, right, right? So the reason why doctors prescribe gabapentin to those that have diabetic neuropathy is because it's supposed to slow the transmission of this signal from your feet up to your brain. It doesn't cure anything. It's an anti-seizure medication that they're prescribing for diabetic neuropathy.
Speaker 1:Right. They prescribe it for many nerve pain issues. So shingles they put you on gabapentin to help with the nerve pain from shingles and any type of neuropathy. It doesn't have to be just diabetic neuropathy but any really any nerve pain. They're using this medication to help with calming the nerves.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and that's what you just said. Right, there is a big thing that I learned from this workshop, because I've been saying nerve pain, nerve pain, nerve pain, but the reality is pain is conducted via nerves.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So if you have pain, period stem pod is decreasing the pain.
Speaker 1:The pain response.
Speaker 2:The pain response. We had people that came in with hip bursitis and shoulder tendonitis, neither of which are typical traditional nerve related pains, and both of these people got up off the table and said oh my gosh, the pain is gone. One of them, or a third one, was golfer's elbow, which I tested it and it seems so mechanical and I'm going there's no way that this is going to help on this thing. 10 later, she's going. My elbow doesn't hurt anymore. And it was just one after another after another of people saying that it was significantly better than it was, and I'm going this is ridiculous. I've never experienced anything in my professional career where results were this instantaneous and lasting.
Speaker 1:Right and sciatic. You had a patient with sciatica, sciatic pain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he had sciatica for over a year. Hasn't been able to work past noon for over a year because the sciatica is just too bad. After 10 minutes he stands up and he goes. I feel better, I feel a lot better. I mean, I mean, wait a minute, I don't have any pain at all right with with back pain.
Speaker 1:It's also being used for overactive bladder so we have several of those clients for stress response stress, so anxiety stress, depression, using it and that so it's being used for a lot more than just neuropathy in the feet, although that was a large part of what you were testing it on initially.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even bell's palsy. That's one thing dr collins was talking to me about was that he's finding success using it with people with bell's palsy. And I'm going, holy cow, I didn't even think about that, and then he goes. You know anybody that's got dental pain, pain after having some type of dental procedure. This thing is helping out tremendously because nobody knows how to treat these nerves in your face. They're tiny nerves and nobody knows how to treat them and this thing is doing it. So now I say all that come back to this, because this happened 100% of the time after somebody felt significant relief.
Speaker 2:The very next question was will my insurance cover this? Will Medicare cover this? Will Blue Cross cover this? Will my insurance cover this? And the answer is absolutely no. There's not an insurance company in the entire country that will need insurance to help cover the cost of the pharmaceutical. Like it's black and white, the writing is on the wall, and Dr Collins goes on to tell me one story of this guy that he knows in the Northeast that took $750,000 of his own money to do his own case studies using StemPod to prove that it works. And then he takes all this data proving that it works and gives it to Medicare so that Medicare will start covering StemPod. And they just said thanks a lot, nope not happening.
Speaker 1:Thanks, but no thanks. We don't want a cure.
Speaker 2:It's like are you freaking, kidding me. Here's the data right here showing that it works. Like it's black and white it works.
Speaker 1:And they say no thanks.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's such a broken system and you, the listener, you've just got to get smarter. You've got to educate your friends and family, if you're listening to us for a while now. Got to get smarter. You've got to educate your friends and family. If you're listening to us for a while now, hopefully I'm preaching to the choir here, but you got to spread the word. You got to spread these podcasts with other people that just don't believe it, because the more people that educate themselves, the harder it is to hide these facts.
Speaker 2:This is almost identical to what happened back in the day before the printing press was invented. Before the printing press was invented, only the most elite, rich people of a society could read, because they were the only ones that had access to books. So you had to be the top of the top of the top of the food chain to be able to read, because you're the only one that could afford books. So when the printing press comes out and makes it readily available to anybody, this was a major, major pushback from the social elitists, because they're trying to keep people suppressed, because if you don't know information, you can't make informed decisions and you just have to do what I tell you to do Now.
Speaker 2:You may be shaking your head and thinking Jake, yeah, that's kind of a little bit extreme, but it's really not. It's really not. Just go back 10 years ago. 10 years ago, nobody, myself included, believed that gluten sensitivity was real 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago. Nobody, myself included, believed that gluten sensitivity was real 10 years ago, maybe 15 years yeah, 15 years ago 15 years ago I didn't believe it was true.
Speaker 2:And this is the whole first chapter of the first book that I wrote in my own education, my own journey in educating myself in Western medicine versus Eastern medicine and natural holistic medicine versus non-holistic, and functional medicine versus non-functional, and actually educating myself to where it's like, oh wow. There are countless, countless case studies where people are doing these natural holistic interventions in people with terminal illnesses and proving that time after time that they're getting better results than chemo-induced interventions or pharmaceutical-induced interventions, yet they will not get published because big pharma has too much money.
Speaker 2:They're not going to let this information get out.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:What do you do with that?
Speaker 1:Going back to us being like is it real, is it not real? Wasn't really until we went through it. Right, until I went through it. And actually you know we've talked about this before. But with the gluten sensitivity, when I first started having issues, I gave up gluten for like two weeks and I didn't feel any better, so I gave up on it and I said that's not my problem, right, it wasn't until we actually went through the entire process, through the gut healing, and actually did it longer before we saw results. But anyway, coming back to what we're talking about is sometimes you have to see and know someone going through it to actually be more invested in it, and so that's why we want you to share this podcast, share your experience with other people that have where you've done the services, either through nutrition and gut healing or the physical therapy world with manual therapy and the stem pod and sharing your experience so that others can really learn from it and not just have to hear it from us.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's education is all it is. Is you got to get informed? You have to spread the word. You have to inform others. You have to spread the word, you have to inform others. You have to share your stories. We're collecting as many video testimonials as we possibly can to prove that this is real, because there's something different between the written word or hearing something. Oh, walker, it's okay, buddy.
Speaker 1:It's okay, bubba.
Speaker 2:He didn't like this either. He doesn't like insurance companies.
Speaker 1:We've been battling insurance companies with him, yeah, so that's why he doesn't like it he's scarred from hearing me talk about insurance.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. Yeah, he's scarred about hearing us talk about it. Now he's got milk, so we're happy now.
Speaker 1:All better Walker there we go. Yeah, we've been battling his insurance to be able to have a urologic procedure done, even though we've known about the need for the procedure since I was 20 weeks pregnant and have been seeing the same urologist prenatally and postnatally, and then find out, oh, four weeks before his procedure, that his insurance is not accepted at the hospital that his current physician does surgery at and it's like wait the doctor that we've been seeing for 18 months. No for a year.
Speaker 2:For a year does accept this insurance, but the hospital in which he does his surgeries doesn't. So it was going to cost us 18 grand, 19 grand, 19 grand to pay out of pocket to go have this surgery. Grand to pay out of pocket to go have this surgery.
Speaker 1:And I'm going wait a minute this just doesn't make any sense, right, and they wouldn't take off our insurance to give us self-pay pricing because we have insurance.
Speaker 2:That was the part that I started to lose my mind, because, again, this is my life and I'm all about paying cash whenever possible, because it's just a racket. It really is. It's not even fair. So Jenny's arguing with this hospital, saying just treat me as if I don't have insurance, pretend that it doesn't exist. I just want to pay you cash for this procedure to be done. And the answer was no. I can't, because you do have insurance and it was going to cost a third.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 40% of the total cost would have been the self-pay price.
Speaker 2:The self-pay price and I'm like, okay, I'll pay that, like I can manage that, instead of having to drive to Miami to a provider and a hospital that actually does accept the insurance. So now this is inconveniencing me, my life, my time. So that's where you have to say what is your time worth to you, what's the convenience worth to you, and I'll pay cash to stay here in Naples and go to the hospital that's 15 minutes down the road and get the procedure done here right, right, but she didn't even give me the option yeah they said no.
Speaker 1:And then and this is a big insurance company that he has that walker has, it's not, you know, a small plan, it's a large insurance company. I'm not going to drop any names on here.
Speaker 2:Why not?
Speaker 1:Our physician even reached out to the insurance company the practice did and asked for a one-time authorization for a procedure at this particular hospital, and the insurance company declined it.
Speaker 2:It's like what in the world? What planet are we living on right now?
Speaker 1:For the physician to ask you to authorize something and you say, nope, you don't know anything, we know all. We're not authorizing that surgery.
Speaker 2:It's just insane, absolutely insane. So, coming back full circle, just continue to educate yourselves, keep asking questions. You got to become an ask hole. Be like my two-year-old and just ask, ask, ask, ask, ask. Can I have a cookie? No, can I have a cookie? No, dad, I really want a cookie. No, dad, I'm going to die if I don't have a cookie. Okay, eat the damn cookie. You got to become an askle. Ask questions. My stepdad is doing this perfectly. I mean to a fault sometimes, where he's just continuing to ask questions. But I'd rather you over ask questions than under.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we have clients that do all the time. They do tons of research, they read the next best thing, they try this, they try that, and we thoroughly enjoy answering the questions. Sometimes we have to say that's not for you, like you are not doing that. You need to follow what we're recommending to you because we're the professionals here. However, it always gets our mind thinking of could that work or who will that work for?
Speaker 2:Exactly, I love it, love it, love it and that's been something that I've been saying for years now is ask me any question you can possibly ask me, because the more questions you ask me, the more it's going to force me to prove that I actually know what I'm talking about and I just love it, absolutely love it. So, with all of that said, take your healthcare into your own hands. We've talked about it so many times. Look at your credit card statements. How much money did you spend last month on dining out, buying drinks, socializing, just anything Amazon, amazon? And then how much did you spend on your health care Meaning that preventative health care, not reactive, preventative? How much money did you spend seeking nutritional guidance? How much money did you spend going to a qualified therapist to see if your squat is performed correctly? How much money did you spend doing blood work that your insurance company will not pay for? That actually gives you the information that you need.
Speaker 1:And seeing someone that will help you review it and understand it. Yeah, you just did that Outside of your primary care?
Speaker 2:You just did that with one of my clients, longtime clients that I've seen for years, and he's like, yeah, I've got this great concierge physician. I just had my blood work done and he's got these odd symptoms going down his legs, neurological and sense, and he's out of state right now and I said, well, send me those, send me that blood work. I want to send it to Jenny, see what she thinks. She interprets this guy's blood work and right out of the gate she goes. First of all, they didn't even order xyz, which is the most important that you should be looking at with these complaints that he's having right. Second of all, abc is off the charts and is not even close to acceptable, and none of them were the traditional numbers that you look at, like cholesterol or Right, yeah, they were all his.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they were blood sugar markers and insulin levels and things like that. So they did look at some things and just didn't look at what was primarily important. But his response after you sent him my interpretation of his labs, he texts you back and said wow.
Speaker 2:He says wow, and then the next text is they must have got me mixed up with somebody else.
Speaker 1:Because his doctor told him he's fine. His doctor told him based on his labs that he was fine. So anyway, spend some money. Get somebody to look at your lab work and actually understand the lab work. Try out the STEM pod. Seek other options outside of normal traditional medicine.
Speaker 2:That's the end of the show, love it, like, subscribe, share this episode. Please go and review this. We're trying to build up reviews on this podcast, so can you please, please, please, review this podcast if you're enjoying this and getting some value out of it. Would love to see your reviews on this podcast and it'll help us gain traction in the organic searching realm and share it. Thank you.
Speaker 1:In the organic, searching realm and share it. Thank you, ciao. Thank you for subscribing on your social media and podcast platforms to the Berman Method Dr Jake Berman with Berman Physical Therapy and Jenny Berman, physician Assistant, with Berman Health and Wellness. You can find more information on our website wwwbermanptcom for physical therapy, wwwbermanptcom forward slash wellness for the health and wellness. You can also find us on social media Facebook, instagram and on your podcast platform, so be sure to follow us, like us, subscribe to us and if you would like any further information, definitely visit our website and reach out to us. And if you would like any further information, definitely visit our website and reach out to us. You may also find our free reports on the websites as well, where you can download this free information for yourself. Have a great day.