The Cash Advances On So Many Deaths

January 22Jan 22

One of the Oscar short-listed Documentaries has the title Cashing Out. As the HIV and AIDS crisis developed it became a cottage industry which an article in today's Guardian terms "ghoulish and and liberating at the same time."

Faced with a lover who is dying of AIDS, Scott Page recalled that his partner had a good term life insurance policy which would pay out on his death, at which time it would do him no good whatever. Short on cash, Scott placed an advertisement in the local paper to see if someone would buy his partner's policy in return for an advance. One did, and a reduced amount was agreed, thereby enabling his partner to live out what remained of his life in relative comfort. Page recalls how the money transformed his boyfriend's life as the stress of money worries vanished.

Many of those dying of AIDS did not have lovers and partners in the 1980s. With the US Federal Government downplaying the AIDS crisis and refusing medical advances recommended by the CDC, so Greg tried to set up a form of brokerage. Banks and credit unions refused to help, telling him that insurance monies should go to beneficiaries, not the dying. Yet it was the beneficiaries who had walked away from their dying sons! So he approached small time investors. Ironically the sicker the patient, the quicker the windfall payout.

As the young gay documentary director, 26-year old Matt Nadel recalls, it was members of the African American community who really suffered at this time as few had any form of life insurance. He knew, because he learned in 2020 that it was his father Phil who had been an early investor buying up these policies. The full documentary can be seen within the link below.