Where This Industry Began
In the late 1980s, people dying of AIDS were abandoned by their government and, often, their insurers. Many held one valuable asset: a life insurance policy that would pay out only after they were gone. The viatical settlement — selling that policy for cash while still alive — gave them what the system refused to: choice, care, and dignity in their final months.
I was there at the beginning. When my own partner was dying, I helped broker one of the first sales of a life insurance policy by a person with AIDS, and went on to build one of the first gay-owned and operated settlement companies. That history is the subject of Cashing Out, the Oscar-shortlisted New Yorker documentary, on which the Life Insurance Settlement Association served as an executive producer.
The Same Story, a New Generation
The viatical market evolved into today’s life settlement industry, which now serves seniors and the terminally ill. The product changed; the underlying truth did not. There is enormous value locked inside life insurance policies, and powerful incentives for the people around that value to keep its owners in the dark.
Today the person most at risk isn’t a young man dying of AIDS. It’s an 80-year-old being quietly steered toward lapsing a policy worth six figures — by people who profit when she doesn’t ask the right question.
Financial protection isn’t a niche issue. It’s whether the most vulnerable are treated as customers to serve — or marks to exploit.
Financial Elder Protection Is the Through-Line
Everything I’ve done — brokering, appraising, testifying — comes back to one idea: the most vulnerable person in a transaction deserves to know what they actually have. That was true for a dying man in 1989, and it’s true for a widow in 2026.
Keeping Memory and Accountability Alive
The partnership with the National AIDS Memorial around Cashing Out isn’t nostalgia. Honest storytelling about the past is how you protect people in the present. An industry that remembers where it came from is harder to weaponize against the people it was built to serve.