"As grateful as I am to the director Matt Nadel for making "Cashing Out," a vital and outstanding film about a terrible time, it also made me angry-angry about an epoch in our nation's history that fewer and fewer people know about, which is to say the crisis, and how it affected gay men, their chosen families, and the economics of death."
"In the early to mid-nineteen-eighties, many young and middle-aged gay men were living more or less hand to mouth; if they were infected with AIDS -which was generally a death sentence until 1995 or so, when protease inhibitors began to make a radical difference to survival rates-their already precarious economic circumstances were upended, and so there was the ruin of their bodies, and the ruin of whatever infrastructure they'd managed to build during their too brief lives."
The AIDS crisis of the early-to-mid 1980s devastated gay men's health and fragile economic lives, frequently turning infection into a near-certain death sentence and destroying nascent personal infrastructures. Viatical settlements arose as a financial response, with companies or investors buying life-insurance policies and paying ongoing premiums in exchange for eventual death benefits. Terminally ill policyholders used the cash to cover medical expenses, travel, small pleasures, or to provide modest inheritances for chosen family. Investors profited by estimating life expectancy and covering premiums until payout, turning premature death into a calculable financial return and creating moral and economic tensions around end-of-life care.
Read at The New Yorker
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