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When filmmaker Matt Nadel first embarked on the documentary that became Cashing Out, he thought the project would reflect poorly on his father.
“Initially, I was like, ‘I’m going to make a dad-bashing doc. This is perfect,’” Nadel recalls. “’I’ll find a bunch of people to say he was the worst and I’ll throw him under the bus.’”
Nadel’s father had invested in what were called “viatical settlements” at the height of the AIDS epidemic, before life-saving treatments came along. The financial maneuver allowed holders of life insurance policies to get cash before they passed away by selling policies to investors for a percentage of the policy value.
“Along came this industry,” Nadel explains, “[that said], ‘We’ll give you 80, 70, 60 percent of the money upfront, depending on how sick you are and how certain your death seems… We’ll keep the policy in force until you die. And when that happens, we’ll collect the full payout.’ And that industry was derided. I mean, the press said, it’s so ghoulish, it’s so horrible, it’s so extractive, which I understand that reaction.”
The more Nadel investigated, however, the more shades of gray emerged. Those shades are explored in his Oscar-shortlisted film, which is available to view for free on The New Yorker website. The funds available through a viatical settlement, Nadel discovered, became “a lifeline for thousands of people who were completely neglected by the government, neglected by the health insurance companies, who had basically been sent the message that all that was available for them was suffering and death. But they banded together with their ingenuity and their queer resilience and created this sort of weird loophole-y solution or Band-Aid at least to make it through some of the toughest days. And it helped many of them do that.”
Nadel adds, “The film really charts my journey of going from the initial, frankly, ‘What the fuck’ moment of learning what this industry was and that I had a relationship to it that I had never known about even as a gay man, to the moment of understanding where this fits into our history and what lessons I think we need to take from it if we’re going to move forward from the epidemic as a society, which I think we still haven’t fully.”
Scott Page, a gay man who appears in the documentary, helped pioneer those viatical settlements (today, they’re typically referred to, in less sinister sounding fashion, as “life settlements”).
“I was called every name in the book,” Page recalls of that earlier time. “But we were fighting for our lives. I knew what I was doing was such an important need to help people live the remaining time they had with some dignity.”
Nadel’s father, Phil, also appears in the film. Matt is measured in his assessment of his dad’s role as one of countless investors in viatical settlements in that era.
“My dad is not a philanthropist. He’s not a humanitarian per se,” Nadel tells Deadline. “His question wasn’t, ‘How can I help these people most effectively?’ My dad’s a businessman, and so in his world, in his profession, from his point of view, this is what he could do. He wasn’t going to do something purely altruistic. That’s just not who he was. That’s not where he was in his life, but there were lots of investments he could have made that would’ve helped no one. And he chose to make these ones that are pretty risky. I mean, what you’re betting on is that a medical innovation isn’t going to come along, and that could always have happened.”
Indeed, that is what happened with the introduction of protease inhibitors that extended lives dramatically. As the film explores, the medical advance left some investors in viatical settlements at a literal loss – paying into life insurance policies indefinitely with no prospect of payout. The longer a policy holder lived, the worse the investment for anyone who bankrolled a viatical settlement.
The viatical instruments were only of use, of course, to those who possessed life insurance policies that they could sell. But many trans people, for instance, were shut out of employment opportunities and thus couldn’t get a life insurance policy through their employer. Cashing Out also explores that reality, seen through the experience of Dee Dee Chamblee who survived the AIDS crisis even though, at one point, she was down to three T cells (she dubbed the cells “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”).
“I didn’t go into making this film with any kind of agenda of the specific point I wanted to make. As I got to do my research and venture through the archive and started meeting people and filming scenes with them and interviewing them, my questions changed and their scale sort of grew,” Nadel recounts. “And that’s when it became clear that I needed to speak to someone like Dee Dee – when I got to that question of like, “Oh shit, but what about everyone who didn’t have insurance to sell? I’ve been looking at this so closely, I’ve lost the forest for the trees.’”
Chamblee had accepted the near certainty of her death yet advocated fiercely for those whose needs had been completely neglected by the government. To Nadel, she illustrates the resilience of the LGBTQiA community.
“It just showed me that the viatical industry was one manifestation of this fundamentally human impulse that even when the world and society tell you, ‘You’re as good as dead,’ we don’t accept that. We fight for our own lives,” Nadel says. “Okay, the government’s not going to help us. We’re going to band together and figure out how to do some weird stuff with our life insurance policies to get some money.’ But even beyond that, when you’re someone like Dee Dee who doesn’t have that resource, ‘I’m going to get up and become this voice. I’m going to put my face in the Georgia State Assembly, even though they don’t want to see me there, I’m going to put my face in the EEOC, I’m going to put my face in Congress, I’m going to put my face in the White House and become the first Black trans woman ever invited to the White House,’ which she was.”
At a time many Americans face the prospect of skyrocketing premiums for health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act, Nadel perceives lessons in the experience of those who took action in the emergency of the AIDS crisis.
“I really do see this film as an instruction manual from queer history for how we can all navigate the moment that we’re living in now because we’re seeing an unprecedented government retreat from health care,” he observes. “We have people kicked off Medicaid, tens of millions of people are about to see their health insurance premiums skyrocket because of the Obamacare tax credits expiring. This is once again, the government just neglecting people’s survival needs and telling them, ‘Well, you’re on your own.’ And leave it to queer people to have modeled what it looks like to respond to that. Yes, we do the ACT UP-style stuff. Yes, we resist. Yes, we protest. Yes, we demand. And in the meantime, we band together and we figure it out with whatever tools we have.”
Nadel notes, “That’s what I’m trying to do with this film. I’m trying to say, this AIDS history, this queer history is not just important for people with HIV. It’s not just important for queer people. It holds the survival keys to a very pressing reality that we’re all entering.”
English (US) ·