Look, it’s not hard to see how the whole thing works. When you’re sick or hurting, you aren’t a person anymore—you’re a customer who can’t say no. It’s a big, loud machine that runs on the fact that nobody wants to die and nobody wants to watch their family suffer.

The bosses at the top of the drug companies and the insurance offices spend all day looking at charts and stock prices. They talk about growth like they’re selling shoes or cars. But for us, that talk ends up at the kitchen table, where you’re looking at a bill for a five-minute checkup that costs more than a week’s pay. The high-up plans of the rich always end up being a weight on the back of the person just trying to get through a shift without their back giving out.

The medical business gets rich off the pills you have to take forever and the fear of a bad diagnosis and the bills for the ambulance ride and the high cost of the ER and the way they charge you twenty bucks for a single aspirin while you’re laying in a hospital bed.

Selling The Treatment Instead Of The Cure is just the start because they know The High Price Of Being Desperate and The Trap Of Paying For Your Life means you’ll empty your pockets just to keep breathing.

It all works because of The Knowledge Gap—which is just a fancy way of saying they know things about your body that you don’t, so they can tell you any price and you have to pay it—and Life-Or-Death Buying, which happens when you have to buy something because the only other choice is staying sick or worse.

Fear is the Fuel that keeps the lights on in those big glass hospital buildings. It’s the gas in the tank. If people weren’t scared of what might happen next, they wouldn’t agree to pay half their paycheck for insurance that barely covers anything. The industry needs you to stay a little bit worried so you keep feeding the engine.

When you get down to the bottom of it, there’s a big difference between a doctor trying to fix you and a company trying to profit off you. As long as a heartbeat is worth a dollar sign, the system is going to care more about the payment than the person.