During the summer of 2020, at the onset of the Covid pandemic, the documentary director Matt Nadel was back home in Boca Raton, Florida. He remembers one particular evening walk that he took with his father, Phil, as they weathered out those early months.<\/p>\n
As they strode through the neighborhood, Nadel, now 26, said that the prospect of a vaccine was exciting, but the idea of pharmaceutical executives profiting off a devastating virus left him feeling uneasy. Phil grew concerned by the complex ethical predicament that his son laid out, and Nadel could quickly tell that his father was acting strangely.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I have to tell you something,\u201d Phil said mid-walk, before explaining that in the early days of the HIV\/Aids epidemic he had invested in what are known as, \u201cviatical settlements\u201d. Phil would buy the life insurance policies of people dying of Aids, often with just weeks or months to live, for a portion of the plan\u2019s value in cash. For many, it afforded them the ability to pay for food, rent and hospital bills as debilitating illness left them unable to work. For others, it was their chance to blow the funds on travel or experiences with the limited time they had left.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was thrown for a total loop,\u201d Nadel told the Guardian. \u201cHe had been part of this industry, and that the profits he made from it had helped to bankroll my childhood.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Nadel, a gay film-maker, it sent him into a \u201cspiral\u201d that did not begin with the desire to make a movie. \u201cI understand myself as somebody who stands on the shoulders of Aids activists who use their bodies to create a world in which I can be healthy and take my PrEP [pre-exposure prophylaxis] every morning, and also in which I can be relatively free as a gay man,\u201d he said. \u201cSo many of the advances in gay rights came from the visibility of the Aids era, and here I was learning that my existence and privilege was hinged in some way on those same people dying.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
As he began investigating the muddied history of viatical settlements throughout the peak of the Aids crisis, the outlines of a film started to emerge. The result is Nadel\u2019s Oscar-shortlisted documentary short, Cashing Out, which tells the story of how a cottage industry of buying up life insurance policies was both ghoulish and liberating in equal measure.<\/p>\n
One of the film\u2019s main characters, Scott Page, inadvertently configured an early viatical settlement when his partner, Greg, who was living with Aids, became progressively sick.<\/p>\n
Short on cash, but armed with a robust life insurance policy, Page ran an advertisement in a local paper to see if someone could buy Greg\u2019s plan in exchange for an advance. When a private investor reached out, the couple struck up a \u201cloose agreement\u201d that allowed Greg to live out the time he had left with some financial security. The payout meant they could also move into a house and get a golden retriever.<\/p>\n
As dozens of old pictures flash across the screen, you see an idyllic slideshow of two people with a rich life: fixing up their home, lying by the beach and laughing with friends. But it\u2019s also a bittersweet record of Greg\u2019s final months. Page ultimately remembers how the money in-hand was \u201cabsolutely transformative\u201d for his late boyfriend, as he \u201csaw the stress leave his body\u201d.<\/p>\n
The absurdity of getting a cash advance on your death, however, wasn\u2019t lost on Page. When he saw the peace and freedom it gave Greg before he died, he turned his energy into becoming a viatical broker for scores of other gay men \u2013 often without loved ones by their bedside \u2013 who were dying of an illness that much of the federal government had shrouded in shame and prejudice. When Page started to approach banks and credit unions about getting involved in the investment scheme, they were incredulous and insisted that payouts should be for the families of the deceased. For Page, their arguments weren\u2019t rooted in reality. \u201cThese people\u2019s families have walked away from them,\u201d he recalls in the documentary.<\/p>\n
It meant that private individuals made up most of the initial investor network when it came to buying up policies. They were provided a morbid ledger. On one side, the value of a policy and the dollar amount needed to buy it outright, on the other, the T-cell count of a person living with HIV\/Aids and their life expectancy. Often, it served as an assurance that a payout was inevitable. The sicker the policyholder, the quicker the windfall for the investor. Soon, institutions realized that these small-time individual investors were making a lot of money, and changed their tune.<\/p>\n
Nadel constructs his documentary like a deeply reported magazine story: gripping anecdotes, a rich \u2013 albeit macabre \u2013 historical backdrop, and varied voices who show that while some people benefited from viatical settlements, there were so many who were left out of the conversation altogether.<\/p>\n
DeeDee Chamblee, a trailblazing advocate and activist reminds us that for Black trans women living with Aids \u2013 who often didn\u2019t have jobs that provided life insurance policies \u2013 a viatical settlement was something they could only dream about.<\/p>\n
A still from Cashing Out. Photograph: New Yorker<\/p>\n
One of the most harrowing moments of the documentary comes when Chamblee remembers suffering through her illness, with only three T-cells left, and how she would fantasize about getting a payout to live out her final days in peace. \u201cI could go to the beach, and I could stay there until this thing is through,\u201d she reminisces. \u201cThat was not a reality at all,\u201d she adds, expecting to end up buried in a wooden box in a \u201cpotter\u2019s field\u201d with other unclaimed bodies.<\/p>\n
Chamblee\u2019s testimony is a jolting reminder that her experience living with Aids is a world away from the white, gay men who had policies to sell. In making Cashing Out, Nadel realized the most marginalized, particularly trans sex workers of color, aren\u2019t \u201cafforded a shred of basic dignity when their death is imminent\u201d.<\/p>\n
But by the late 1990s, significant developments in antiretroviral therapy meant that HIV-positive people started living longer, defying the odds and outliving the predictions that viatical investors were initially promised. \u201cIt was going great, until people didn\u2019t die all the time,\u201d Page says, with a glint of karmic joy in his eyes.<\/p>\n
Eventually, those betting on death stopped cashing in so easily. Instead, they found themselves stuck paying premiums on policies that would never pay out. \u201cI think they banked on that not being an urgent enough question for our world to answer,\u201d Nadel said. \u201cThen they were angered when the activists from Act Up successfully pushed the government to develop and release drugs quickly \u2026 anybody who invested their whole retirement in viaticals was making a really bad investment decision, and that is no one\u2019s fault but their own.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nadel filmed interviews with his subjects \u2013 Page, Chamblee and Sean Strub, a long\u2011term survivor who founded POZ magazine \u2013 over the course of a year. Their unfiltered honesty ultimately prompted him to fold in the story of his own father\u2019s investment in viatical settlements. \u201cI just felt like they were submitting themselves so fully to the process,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so for me to have a secret about my relationship with this, that I was keeping from the audience, just felt wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a recent interview, Nadel said that while his thesis for the film had shifted over time, it now seemed straightforward. \u201cThis helped a lot of people, but I\u2019m disgusted that it had to exist,\u201d he said. Modern\u2011day precarity in accessing healthcare in the US \u2013 from the expiration of Covid\u2011era Obamacare subsidies to the substantial cuts to Medicaid funding projected over the next decade \u2013 means Cashing Out can serve as both a historically specific and evergreen indictment of the country\u2019s tenuous social safety net, Nadel said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the government refuses to fulfil its role in taking care of us, we have to come together and find creative ways to take care of each other,\u201d he said. \u201cIllness does not discriminate \u2026 so I want to encourage people who watch the film to find their strange bedfellows in the fight for survival.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During the summer of 2020, at the onset of the Covid pandemic, the documentary director Matt Nadel was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-428066","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}