No Cure For Profit

The War on Illusion, Episode 5: Why the System Needs You Alive, But Not Healthy

The past months have gone by so fast, and it’s been absolutely crazy.

If you’ve been reading the recent briefings, you know what we are building. Just 12 days ago, on December 16th, I officially incorporated Sovereign Systems LLC. We mapped out the transition from a solo blog to a fortified “Compound” with a gradual rollout of the new architecture throughout January and a full hard launch by February.

But to understand why this expansion matters so much to me,
why I am pushing so hard to build a fortress around this mission,
you have to go back about a month.

Back to November 11th.

At that time I didn’t have the LLC. I just had the obsession.

For those of us with extreme ADHD, hyperfocus isn’t just “concentration.” It’s a survival mechanism. It’s the brain’s desperate attempt to outrun gravity.

I was in the grip of that fever. I was spending every waking hour thinking about Substack, analyzing the growth, and trying to figure out how to escape the gravity of my day job. My mind was entirely in the abstract. I was living in the strategy, the content, and the future. I was constantly running scenarios on how to improve the publication because I believed the only limit to what we could build was my own focus.

Then the pain set in.

It didn’t care about my content calendar, my ambition, or my neurochemistry. It started as a knot and turned into a knife.

One minute I was planning a media empire and the next I was curled up in the passenger seat of my dad’s car, unable to speak, watching the streetlights blur as he drove me to the emergency room.

By the time they wheeled me in the “Architect” was gone. I was just a body in failure.

But then something happened that brought the reality of the Vertical War into sharp focus.

The guy who came to take my vitals and temperature wasn’t a stranger. I knew him. Not from the hospital, but from the other side of the counter. I sell him his coffee every other night at my job at the gas station.

He looked at me and I looked at him. In that moment the abstraction vanished. We weren’t “Provider” and “Patient.” We were two guys from the same town grinding through the same shifts and trying to survive the same economy.

And he wasn’t the only one. The staff was incredibly kind. You could see the strain in their eyes as they were visibly crammed, understaffed, running on fumes, and forced to process patients like units on a conveyor belt. But they still treated me with dignity.

This wasn’t even my first time in this position. This was my second abdominal surgery. Years ago I had an intussusception in my intestines. The surgeon who saved me that time lives a stone’s throw from my house.

These are my neighbors. These are good people.

But good people are trapped in bad architecture.

Because as I lay there pumped full of morphine and antibiotics, staring at a water-stained ceiling tile, the human element faded and the System took over.

I wasn’t afraid of dying. The surgery is routine and we had conquered the infection. I was afraid of the Bill.

And I was afraid of the Silence.

I was doing the math in my head. I was calculating deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums, and lost wages while a surgeon was cutting into my abdomen. I was terrified that a single signature on a consent form would wipe out five years of savings.

But I was also terrified of losing the momentum I had just started to build. I know how this game works. In a saturated online atmosphere silence is death. I was lying there incapacitated and haunted by the fear that if I blinked, if I took time to heal, the opportunity I was clawing out for myself on Substack would evaporate.

I realized then that I wasn’t a “patient” in a sanctuary of healing. I was a hostage in a negotiation I didn’t know was happening.

I was trapped in the Biological Siege.

We have already mapped the outer walls of this prison. We mapped the Housing Cartel in Episode 2, the Food Cartel in Episode 3, and the Energy Cartel in Episode 4.

But this is the most intimate extraction site. They don’t just want your rent. They don’t just want your grocery money. They want to monetize your own biology.

This is the story of how they turned the human body into a subscription service.

THE GOLDMAN CONFESSION

Let’s start with the motive.

Most people cling to the comforting lie that the healthcare system is “broken.” They say it is inefficient, bloated, and bureaucratic. That is a fantasy. The system is working exactly as designed. It is a highly efficient machine optimized for a single goal which is metabolizing human sickness into shareholder yield.

We don’t have to guess at this motive because they didn’t whisper it in a back room. They printed it on letterhead.

In April 2018, Goldman Sachs released a biotech research report titled “The Genome Revolution.” It was meant for the eyes of investors, not patients. In it, analyst Salveen Richter asked a question so cold it should be carved on the tombstone of American medicine.

“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”

Read that again.

It wasn’t a philosophical question. It was a fiduciary warning regarding cash flow.

The report analyzed Gilead Sciences, a company that had committed the ultimate sin. They developed a cure. Their treatment for Hepatitis C worked. It was a scientific miracle with cure rates exceeding 90%.

And because it worked, because it actually cured the human beings who took it, Gilead’s revenue crashed. They ran out of customers.

Goldman’s verdict was brutal and devoid of humanity. They cited Gilead as a case study and warned that the success of the Hepatitis C franchise had “exhausted the available pool of treatable patients.”

The financial system looked at a miracle and saw a failure. They learned the lesson that “Cures” are bad for business because they destroy the Total Addressable Market. “Chronic Management” is the Holy Grail because it keeps the customer forever.

A cure is a one-time transaction with a low Lifetime Value. A treatment is a lifetime subscription with infinite value.

This is why the entire weight of the pharmaceutical industry has shifted away from antibiotics that kill the infection and end the revenue stream. Instead they have pivoted toward metabolic management like Insulin, Statins, GLP-1s, and Antidepressants.

They need you in the “Goldilocks Zone” of biological failure. Sick enough to need the product. Alive enough to swipe the card. Never cured. Never dead. Just maintained.

THE METABOLIC HEDGE

Before we look at the machinery I need to make a confession.

I am not writing this from a position of biological purity. I don’t live on a homestead eating organic kale I grew myself.

I work at a gas station.

I live in the belly of the beast. My diet consists of far too many energy drinks to keep me awake for the night shift. I eat salty snacks because they are cheap and available. I have a weakness for candy that borders on a vice.

I am not immune to the engineering. I am just as captured by the hyper-palatable dopamine hits of the food supply as anyone else.

But that is exactly why this next part is so terrifying.

If the business model relies on a steady stream of broken bodies, you don’t wait for people to get sick by accident.

You farm them.

You build a closed loop where you own the cause and the effect.

In Episode 3: The Hunger Games, we exposed the Food Cartel. We showed how companies like General Mills, Kraft Heinz, and PepsiCo are owned by the “Big Three” asset managers known as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. These companies saturate the food supply with high-fructose corn syrup, seed oils, and processed sludge designed to override your satiety signals. These are the very signals I fight to ignore every time I walk past the candy aisle.

Now look at the Pharma Cartel. Look at the companies making the new “miracle” weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro. The giants here are Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly.

Look at the shareholders. The top owners of Eli Lilly are Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street. The top owners of Novo Nordisk are BlackRock and Vanguard.

This is the Metabolic Hedge. The financial system profits from the cause and the cure. They have vertically integrated your sickness.

The Asset Managers own the food companies that pump the population full of processed sludge. This causes the obesity epidemic, the diabetes crisis, and the metabolic collapse of the American worker. That is Profit Stream A.

The same Asset Managers own the pharmaceutical companies that sell you the lifetime injection to manage the obesity caused by the food. That is Profit Stream B.

When you buy the Doritos, BlackRock gets paid. When you get diabetes and buy the Insulin, BlackRock gets paid. When you get tired of being fat and buy the Ozempic, BlackRock gets paid.

You are running inside a casino where the house wins on every spin of your metabolic health.

THE 1942 TRAP

Why is the American worker so terrified? Why is the spirit of rebellion so quiet? Why do we accept a system that bankrupts us for getting sick?

Because they found a way to weaponize our own survival instinct against us. They put a gun to our heads called “Employer-Sponsored Insurance.”

In almost every other developed nation health coverage is a right of citizenship. In America it is a privilege of employment. This isn’t an accident. It is a labor control mechanism.

It started by accident in 1942. To fight inflation during WWII, the government froze wages via the Stabilization Act. It became illegal for companies to offer higher salaries to attract talent.

But the factories were desperate for workers. If General Motors wanted to hire a welder away from Ford they couldn’t offer him more cash because the government said no. They needed a new currency.

So they found a loophole. The War Labor Board ruled that “fringe benefits” didn’t count as wages. Corporations started offering health insurance not because they were generous, but because it was the only legal way to bribe workers to join them.

In 1954 the IRS codified this by making those benefits tax-exempt.

What started as a corporate loophole became a citizen’s cage.

Economists call it “Job Lock.” Millions of Americans stay in jobs they hate. They stay in jobs that underpay them, abuse them, and crush their souls solely because they are terrified of losing their health insurance. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that this tether suppresses new business creation by up to 25%.

That is a quarter of American innovation strangled in the crib because the potential founder couldn’t risk losing their coverage. You cannot quit to start a business. You cannot strike for better wages. You cannot take a year off to care for a dying parent.

If you leave the “Wage Cage” you lose your biological security.

This is personal. This is exactly why I am still behind the counter at the gas station. I have skills. I have drive. I have a mission. But when my appendix burst, the only reason I didn’t lose everything was that I had maintained my “compliance” with a corporate job.

I have two scars on my abdomen now. One from the intussusception years ago and one from November. Two zippers in the flesh. Two reminders that my physical survival is contractually obligated to my employment.

Those scars aren’t just surgical marks. They are reminders of the leash. The system says, “Work for us, or die in debt.”

And every day it gets harder.

Every day I walk into that station my head is full of blueprints. I am mapping out the expansion of Common Sense Rebel, planning the new “Compound,” and designing the next heavy round. I can see the fortress we are building. I can see the future.

But then I have to put on the uniform. I have to stand behind the register and sell lottery tickets and cigarettes for eight hours, watching my time bleed away, knowing that I am tethered to this spot not by choice, but by the necessity of staying alive in a system designed to kill anyone who steps out of line.

It is a specific kind of torture to have a mind full of escape plans and a body locked in a cage.

THE ALGORITHMIC CARTEL

In Episode 2, we exposed RealPage, the algorithm landlords use to fix rent prices. We proved that landlords stopped competing and started colluding.

Guess what? Hospitals and Insurers have one too.

It’s called MultiPlan.

This is probably their most boring method of extraction. It doesn’t have the cinematic flair of a secret meeting or a government conspiracy. It’s just an algorithm quietly running in the background, denying thousands of claims per second.

But that boredom is the point. When resources are owned by the very few they don’t need to be dramatic to fuck you. They just need to change a variable in a spreadsheet.

MultiPlan is a data analytics firm used by major insurers like UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, and Aetna to determine how much to pay for out-of-network care. This isn’t a small operation. MultiPlan processes over 370,000 claims a day and boasts to its investors that it “identifies” over $23 billion in savings annually.

How do they “save” that money? By suppressing payments to doctors and transferring the balance to you.

Instead of competing to offer you the best coverage, the insurers all use the same algorithm (DataGuard) to calculate the lowest possible reimbursement rate.

But the real smoking gun is the “Shared Savings” contract. Many insurance contracts include a clause where the insurer charges your employer a fee based on how much money they “saved” them.

If the bill is $300 and they pay $300, they save nothing. They make no fee.
But if the bill is $4,000 (a fake price) and they pay $300, they claim to have “saved” $3,700. They then charge a percentage of that “savings” as a fee.

The result is that the insurer wants the hospital to charge an insane price. The higher the list price, the bigger the “discount,” and the bigger their commission.

They aren’t negotiating for you. They are collaborating with the hospital to inflate the sticker price so they can charge you for talking it down.

Is this illegal?

The antitrust lawsuits are flying, but as of right now? No. It is standard operating procedure. That is the true horror. If this were a guy in an alley with a lead pipe it would be a crime. But because it is a Delaware Corporation using a proprietary algorithm to “optimize claims processing,” it is a business model. The theft is codified in contract. It is boring. It is bureaucratic. And it is absolutely devastating.

And on the hospital side, you meet the Chargemaster. This is the secret list of prices for every item in the hospital. A Tylenol pill is $15. An IV bag of saline that costs $1 to manufacture is $800. A CT Scan is $4,000.

These prices are fictions. They are arbitrary numbers invented to maximize extraction from the uninsured and to create a fake “discount” for the insurers.

How do we know they are fictions?

Because when the government (Medicare) pays for that exact same CT Scan, they pay about $300. And the hospital accepts it. The hospital stays in business. That means the real cost is closer to $300. The $4,000 price tag isn’t based on economics. It is a 1,200% markup designed solely to terrify you into buying insurance and to give the insurance company a fake “discount” to negotiate against.

The price has no relation to value. It is purely a function of leverage. If you don’t have leverage, you get the rack rate.

THE BIOMEDICAL SURVEILLANCE STATE

Finally, they aren’t just taking your money. They are taking you.

While they drain your bank account they are cataloging your collapse. They aren’t just treating you. They are tagging you.

While you are navigating this maze, terrified of the bill, they are quietly building a high-resolution digital dossier on your biology.

(Note: Many clinicians will tell you they hate this. But they are the ones typing the codes. They have the power to omit the non-medical surveillance tags, the Z-codes for “poverty” or “housing” that have zero to do with your immediate treatment, but they log them anyway to satisfy the algorithm’s hunger for risk data. Whether out of fear, apathy, or “value-based” bonuses, they have chosen to comply. And in this war, compliance is complicity.)

In 2019 the curtain slipped. It was revealed that Google had secretly harvested the health records of millions of Americans via a partnership with Ascension. Names, dates of birth, lab results, diagnoses—all transferred to the Google Cloud in the dark. Technically this was legal under a HIPAA “Business Associate” loophole. Ethically it was a data heist of 50 million lives without a single patient being asked for consent.

But the most dystopian update is the Z-Codes. The system has expanded ICD-10 codes used for billing diagnoses to include “Z-Codes” for Social Determinants of Health.

Doctors are now incentivized to log non-medical surveillance data like Z59.1 (”Problems related to housing”), Z59.6 (”Low income”), or Z62.819 (”Upbringing”).

They claim this is for “Whole Person Care.” They argue that because poverty correlates with poor health, they need to track it to help you.

Correlation is not causation. Just because I am broke doesn’t mean I am broken. By turning poverty into a medical code they aren’t treating the cause, which is the economy. They are red-flagging the victim.

Your personal struggle is no longer a circumstance. It is a data point sold to brokers like IQVIA and Veradigm to adjust your “Risk Score.”

If you are poor, if you are stressed, if you have an unstable home—the system tags you. Not to help you, but to price you. They are building a credit score for your biology, and in the next episode we will show you how they are building one for your mind.

The verdict is clear. Your health is the asset. Your data is the packaging. Your fear is the revenue stream.

THE BIPARTISAN LOCK

Right now you are probably trying to fit this into a political box. You are wondering which party is the villain so you can vote them out. You want to believe there is a political solution. You want to believe that if you just vote harder, the cavalry will come.

Look at the ledger.

The cavalry isn’t coming because they are on the payroll. If you look closely you will find that the “Medical Cartel” is the most bipartisan entity in Washington.

The Blue Team passed the Affordable Care Act. The public was told it was “socialism.” The reality was a bailout for insurance companies. It legally mandated that every American must buy the product of private corporations, guaranteed by federal subsidies. The stock prices of UnitedHealthcare and Cigna exploded after the ACA passed.

I have to be honest here. I benefited from this. For my first abdominal surgery—the intussusception—I was young enough to be covered under my parents’ plan because of the ACA’s “Under 26” provision. That provision saved my life and protected my parents from bankruptcy. But we must look at the cost of that protection. The “Benefit” was real, but it was the bribe used to sell the Mandate. They gave us the “Under 26” rule and the “Pre-Existing Condition” ban—essential, humane protections—but they only did it by locking the entire country into a permanent, subsidized contract with the Insurance Cartel. The safety net was real, but it was woven inside a cage.

The Red Team screams about “market forces” but aggressively protects the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) and the Patent Thickets that prevent generic competition. They ensure the “free market” never actually reaches the drug counter.

To be fair, they handed us the flashlight. The Hospital Price Transparency Rule enacted by the Red Team is the only reason we know about the Chargemaster fiction. They forced the hospitals to post the prices online. Without that move I wouldn’t have the receipts to write Part IV of this report. But transparency without competition isn’t a market. It’s just a menu in a prison cafeteria. They let us see the prices, but they refuse to break the monopolies that set them. They turned on the lights, but they left the doors locked.

The spending tells the truth. In the 2024 election cycle, the Pharmaceutical and Health Products industry spent over $370 million on lobbying. They gave 54% to Democrats and 46% to Republicans.

They don’t pick sides. They buy the whole board.

Whether you vote for the party of “Equity” or the party of “Liberty,” the outcome is identical. MultiPlan still fixes the prices. BlackRock still owns the shares. You still pay the bill. The war isn’t Red vs. Blue. It is the Lobby vs. Your Life Expectancy.

A Note on the Outliers

Does this mean every single politician is corrupt? No. There may be outliers. There are candidates who refuse corporate PAC money and who aren’t bought by Pharma or Insurance. Finding them, vetting them, and supporting them is a critical tactical objective for the future. We should look for them. But we cannot wait for them. The house is burning right now. We cannot stand in the flames hoping a politician we haven’t met yet will eventually turn on the hose.

THE SOLUTION

SOVEREIGN HEALTH

The “Biological Siege” is designed to make you feel helpless. It relies on you being afraid of your own body so you will pay any price for safety.

I know how the steps below sound.

To the average person this sounds impossible. It sounds like “crazy health nut” paranoia. It sounds like a lifestyle that requires a homestead and a trust fund.

The natural instinct is to reject it and say, “I’ll just vote. I’ll vote for the candidate who promises to cap insulin prices.” But we both know that candidate is funded by the same lobbyist writing the price tags.

And I’ll be honest: I struggle to do this myself. I work at a gas station. I am surrounded by the “Poison” for eight hours a night. I eat processed trash constantly because it is cheap, it is there, and I am tired. I am not writing this from a position of purity. I am writing this from the mud.

But the alternative is surrender. The alternative is handing your body over to an algorithm that views your sickness as a revenue stream. The rebellion begins the moment you decide to fight back, even imperfectly.

1. Exit the Loop: Radical localization of diet. Stop eating the “Poison” (General Mills/Kraft). Buy raw ingredients from local producers (The Phalanx). Starve the metabolic hedge.

2. Reject the Fear: Your body is designed to heal, not to be managed. Stop viewing every symptom as a deficiency of pharmaceuticals.

3. Build Parallel Care: We must support Direct Primary Care (DPC) doctors—physicians who do not take insurance, do not use the codes, and work directly for the patient.

They want you sick, tired, and terrified of losing your job. The most revolutionary thing you can do is be Healthy, Sovereign, and Free.

THE REBEL’S CONTRACT

📢 EARN FREE PAID ACCESS!* (Option 2)

This publication is not a hobby. It is an escape tunnel being dug in real-time.

I work a job that extracts my time and energy to keep this machine running. Every paid subscription buys back minutes of my life from the gas station, allowing me to focus entirely on forging weapons like this dossier.

📜 Option 1:
Deploy Capital (The Investor)

If you have the means, upgrade to a Paid Subscription. You aren’t just buying content. You are funding the Forge. You are the reason this investigation exists.

📜 Option 2:
Deploy Signal 📢 (The Recruiter)*

If you cannot afford to pay, you can still earn your place in the War Council. We have activated the Referral Program.

If you share this publication and recruit new readers, the system will automatically unlock paid access for you as a commission.

• Recruit 3 Readers: Earn 1 Month of Paid Access.

• Recruit 5 Readers: Earn 3 Months of Paid Access.

• Recruit 25 Readers: Earn 6 Months of Paid Access.

👉 How to Do It (Simple Instructions):

You don’t need to be tech-savvy. You just need to use the right button.

1. Make sure you are logged in to your account.

2. Click the “Share” button below.

3. The system automatically attaches your unique referral ID to the link.

4. Post it, text it, or email it. When people click your specific link and subscribe, you get the credit.

This isn’t charity. It is a labor exchange. If you cannot fund the war with money, fund it with signal. Help us expand the Phalanx, and you will share in the spoils.

(All primary sources, filings, and financial reports are compiled in the Research Engine Link below)

• Goldman Sachs Report: “The Genome Revolution” (April 2018).

• MultiPlan Investigation: NYT / Politico Antitrust Filings.

• Job Lock Analysis: NBER Data & 1942 Stabilization Act History.

• Google/Ascension: Project Nightingale Whistleblower Documents.

• Shareholder Data: 13F Filings for Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, General Mills (SEC.gov).

To the War Council:
This is why we fight. Not just for lower prices, but for the right to own our own lives.

-The Operator