FaeFae 💕

[Brandon Gill @realBrandonGill]

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

Words that revolutionized the world. The product of great men who chose patriotism and courage in the face of impossible odds.

250 years later, we stand on the shoulders of the giants who created the greatest nation ever known to mankind. 🇺🇸

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

Robin Williams’ emotional tribute to the American Flag leaves an entire stadium speechless — then in tears.

Is there a single Hollywood star who would give this performance today?

Total Patriot.

RIP Legend 🇺🇸

[Forest Park Pharmacy @ForestParkPharm]

My wife and I own a pharmacy. Last month we spent days trying to pry one prescription loose from a company that did everything it could to hold onto it.

The drug was everolimus. A generic. It treats cancer and protects transplant patients from rejecting their new organ. Not exotic. Not rare. A pill.

The patient wanted it filled with us because we're cash-pay and cost-plus. No insurance. No PBM. No secret markups, no games. Our price was $318. That's not cheap by our standards — most of what we fill runs under $20 — but it was honest.

Here's what that same prescription looked like on the other side of the counter.

In 2023, Medicare was paying about $6,645 for it. That's roughly 21 times our price for the identical medication. Medicare spent around $240 million on everolimus alone that year. If they'd paid our price, they'd have saved roughly $230 million. On one generic drug.

So how does an insurance company profit off a drug that expensive? Don't they pay for it?

No. You pay for it. In your premiums. Their job isn't to spend less — it's to keep your healthcare dollars circulating inside their own companies. And the tool they use is called spread pricing.

Spread pricing works like this: the middleman bills the health plan one price, pays the pharmacy a lower one, and keeps the difference. You never see it. On TRICARE, they pay an independent pharmacy like mine about $311 to fill everolimus. That barely covers our cost of the drug. Meanwhile the plan gets billed thousands. That gap — north of $6,000 on a single fill �� is pure margin the middleman pockets.

Now here's the part they'd rather you not think about.

The pharmacy we were fighting was Accredo. Accredo is owned by Express Scripts. Express Scripts is the pharmacy benefit manager owned by Cigna. Same company, three masks. That nesting-doll structure isn't an accident — it's the whole design. When the pharmacy, the PBM, and the insurer are all one entity, they can shuffle money between their own pockets and call it whatever they want. The confusion is the product.

And this isn't a story about one weird drug. It's the business model.

The FTC has been digging into exactly this. In its January 2025 report on the three biggest PBMs — CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx — staff found those companies marked up specialty generic drugs by hundreds and thousands of percent when dispensing through their own affiliated pharmacies. Just those markups generated more than $7.3 billion above what the drugs actually cost to acquire, from 2017 to 2022. One in five of the specialty generics they studied was marked up over 1,000%. Some cancer generics: over 3,000%. On top of that, the FTC pegged spread pricing on those same drugs at another $1.4 billion.

One example straight from the FTC's files: dimethyl fumarate, a multiple sclerosis drug. Costs about $177 to acquire. The PBMs paid their own pharmacies close to $4,000 for a 30-day supply. Same trick. Different drug.

And they steer the profitable ones to themselves on purpose. Pharmacies affiliated with the big three took in 68% of specialty dispensing revenue in 2023 — up from 54% in 2016. The prescriptions marked up more than $1,000 disproportionately end up at their own pharmacies, not independents like mine.

So when we called to transfer this patient's everolimus to be filled without insurance, it landed like we were asking them to set $6,000 on fire. Of course they stonewalled us.

That's why we fired them.

No insurance means no invisible $6,000 charge buried in a premium you can't itemize. It means the price you see is the price. Ours was $318. Theirs was thousands. Same pill.

[Randy Quaid @RandyRRQuaid]

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

[Brandon Tatum @TheOfficerTatum]

You can't truly be Charlie Kirk's friend if you're tearing down his wife. The sudden wave of hatred directed at Erika is completely backwards. Why didn't any of these cowards have a word of criticism for her while Charlie was still alive?

If we're going to honor Charlie, we need to show some respect to the family he left behind.

[Sarah Adams @sarahadams]

📢 Announcement

@The_Watch_Floor is now under new management, mine. The podcast will be on a brief hiatus and will be back soon with the need to know information, geopolitical analysis, and conversations that matter.

In the meantime, get out and enjoy America's 250th with your family and friends. Have a safe and happy Independence Day, and I'll see you back on the show soon.

[Sarah Adams @sarahadams]

@Salted2 I no longer work with Shawn and his team.

[Nick Sortor @nicksortor]

Sheridan Gorman's emotional mother has made INCREDIBLY clear she will NOT stop pushing Democrats to prioritize AMERICANS over illegals

"My daughter paid for your failures with HER LIFE!"

"NO FAMILY should ever have to bury its child because public officials FAIL to put American lives first.

I'm asking you to CHOOSE US! Why does my child matter less than an illegal immigrant?! WHY?"

God bless this family 🙏🏻

[Forest Park Pharmacy @ForestParkPharm]

AstraZeneca just paid Texas $34 million to make a fraud lawsuit go away.

The exact number was $33,998,000. Big Pharma rounds down when it's their money.

Here's what they got caught doing. 👇

You can't pay a doctor to write your prescriptions. That's a kickback. It's illegal. Everybody knows the rule.

So AstraZeneca got creative.

Instead of handing over cash, they handed over people. Free nurses. Free reimbursement support. Free administrative help — deployed straight into prescriber offices under the label of "non-branded counseling."

They put their own staff inside doctors' offices, dressed it up as patient education, and used it to steer scripts toward AstraZeneca drugs. They even paid outside third parties to do the steering for them.

It's a kickback with a stethoscope.

And here's the part that got Texas involved: a lot of those prescriptions were paid for by Medicaid. So this wasn't just AstraZeneca padding its own numbers — it was taxpayer dollars funding prescriptions that were tainted from the start.

This isn't a one-off, either. Texas has already sued Eli Lilly and Sanofi over the same "free nurse" playbook. A decade ago Lilly and Novo Nordisk faced nearly identical "white coat" allegations tied to insulin. Old tactic. New lawsuits. Expect more settlements coming.

Ken Paxton put it plainly: "I will not allow Big Pharma to misuse taxpayer dollars to put profit ahead of Texans' health."

Great line. One problem.

There's an entire industry that's allowed to put profit ahead of your health — legally.

The PBMs.

Drugmakers get sued into the ground for kickbacks. Meanwhile the middlemen sitting between you and your medicine got a federal exemption from that exact same Anti-Kickback Statute. Same behavior. Legal for them, illegal for everyone else.

So do the math. Your insurer and its PBM make more money when your prescription costs more. Why on earth would the price ever come down?

Somehow Congress got convinced that legalizing kickbacks would lower drug prices. It did the exact opposite. That's not a side effect of the system. That IS the system. It's most of the reason your drugs cost what they cost.

While we wait on Congress to undo the damage it caused, we did the obvious thing.

We fired the middleman.

No PBM. No legal kickbacks baked into your price. Just transparent, cost-plus cash pricing — which is how we hit the lowest-price generics you'll find anywhere.

[Terrence K. Williams @w_terrence]

Al Sharpton and other activists are telling Black Americans and Black-owned businesses to boycott America’s 250th birthday.

My response: You do not speak for me.

You do not get to use my skin color to tell me what I can celebrate. I was not a slave. You were not a slave. We are free Americans, and I refuse to walk around pretending we are still in chains.

Yes, I proudly put George Washington on my America 250 Cousin T’s pancake box. He owned slaves, but that is not his entire legacy. He was also our first president and helped build the nation that gave people like me the freedom to rise.

I went from foster care to building Cousin T’s, a successful Black-owned American company. I am living the American Dream.

So while Al Sharpton is calling for a boycott, I am calling for Black Americans to stop letting professional outrage merchants convince us that patriotism belongs only to white people.

America is my country too.

I will celebrate her loudly, proudly, and without permission.

[Ted Nugent @TedNugent]

#america #usa #250th #4thofjuly

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Monet's pond is a true oasis in Japan that looks like a painting come to life

[FaeFae 💕 @FaeFae337]

@GuntherEagleman For the record, this mess is not on me and we will soon reap what the idiots that voted for it have sown.

[United Cajun Navy @Unitedcajunnavy]

First shrimp boots on the ground, even in Venezuela! Our local ops team is already doing assessments and scoping out volunteer housing, stay tuned! Thanks @NewsNation and @EVargasTV for the hit! 🫡💪

[FaeFae 💕 @FaeFae337]

@GOP_is_Gutless Two words….’Bunker Buster’

[Dennis Morillo @soedeshmorillo]

@joeroganhq

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

If you’re looking to add a steady, mature person to follow here on X, consider @the_jefferymead.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

We tried to tell y'all. 🇺🇸

America is SO back.

[Forest Park Pharmacy @ForestParkPharm]

Most people don't realize that insurance is often the reason your "cash" price is so high in the first place. It isn't the thing protecting you from the price. A lot of the time, it's the thing creating it.

Here's a real example. This week a customer needed lidocaine ointment. Walgreens quoted her around a thousand dollars. We filled the exact same medication for fifteen. Same drug, same strength, wildly different price. And the difference had nothing to do with us being generous.

Pharmacies don't set those astronomical numbers on their own. The insurers and the middlemen known as PBMs require them to list inflated cash prices, and then on plenty of covered prescriptions they reimburse next to nothing, sometimes literally zero. There are scripts they lose money filling. That's just how the system is built.

That's the real reason discount cards exist. GoodRx and the rest are simply a way around a price these same companies invented. Everyone assumes running everything through insurance is the smart move, but on a surprising number of medications you're better off not using it at all.

You'll be amazed how often the cash price comes in below your copay. For years pharmacists weren't even permitted to bring it up. We are now, but most people still don't believe it.

As an independent pharmacy, no corporate office is pushing us to squeeze our patients. We simply price medication the way it ought to be priced.