Hustling Humans

How Obamacare turned the Rehab Industry into the Biggest Insurance Scam of Them All and How COVID made it Worse

This is a continuation from my last essay, So You Wanna Be a Kingpin? I have seen firsthand too much of the devastation caused by the drug industry, legal and illegal. More than anything else, I believe our growing dependence on drugs is what is causing our downfall.

"It's like hustling humans. They'll take extra insurance money and pay you to live there and just let you get high because the owner's making bank." — Drew, a 21-year-old from West Virginia living in a sober home in Delray Beach, Florida.

A “body broker” is known as someone who rents houses to operate as sober homes.

Get the bodies in, any way you can. When they get out, even go so far as to give them drugs again, so you make sure they come back. It’s a despicable business and people need to get wise to it.

The rehab/recovery industry is one more con game that has the COVID-19 pandemic to thank for an even bigger boom than it ever had before. Of course, COVID is a scam, too, so you could say the recovery industry is a scam within a scam, surrounded by a lot of other health scams that we are all supposed to fall for or else we are the ones who are a danger to society—not the scammers.

The $6.3 Billion Growth in Addiction Therapeutics Market During 2021-2025 registered a Year Over Year (YOY) growth of 5.7% in 2020 and the market is estimated to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of almost 6% from 2021 through 2025.

The thing is, just like the Covid “vaccines” and any number of drugs the health industry provides, the recovery industry has nothing to do with recovery and everything to do with relapse. If people really recovered, where would be the profit?

COVID increased the demand for drugs from billions of people who had already been led to believe that drugs were the only solution for their physical and mental health problems.

According to the United Nations:

The COVID-19 crisis has pushed more than 100 million people into extreme poverty, and has greatly exacerbated unemployment and inequalities, as the world lost 255 million jobs in 2020.

Drug traffickers have quickly recovered from initial setbacks caused by lockdown restrictions and are operating at pre-pandemic levels once again, driven in part by a rise in the use of technology and cryptocurrency payments, operating outside the regular financial system.

Access to drugs has also become simpler than ever with online sales, and major drug markets on the dark web are now worth some $315 million annually.

Contactless drug transactions, such as through the mail, are also on the rise, a trend possibly accelerated by the pandemic.

Rapid technological innovation, combined with the agility and adaptability of drug traffickers who are using new online platforms to sell drugs and other substances, are likely to increase the availability of illicit drugs.

If you think your kids are just surfing the web aimlessly, think again. Parents need to understand that their kids are no safer inside the house than they were on the streets. In fact, it has become easier to obtain illegal substances. All they have to do is order them online. Instead of hanging out on street corners, dealers now hang out inside your child’s phone, right inside your house, breathing down your neck, 24/7 but you are unlikely to even know they are there.

The distinction between legal and illegal drugs is becoming harder to define. In 2021, drug pushers Johnson & Johnson and three of the largest drug distributers agreed to a $26 billion settlement over allegations that they were responsible for fueling the opioid epidemic.

“This epidemic was created by an army of pharmaceutical executives, who decided they wanted to put their profits above the health and well-being of the public,” observed Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.

They say the $26 billion will be put to good use, funding the recovery industry. Great. I guess that means more scammers getting rich while more people move in and out of recovery centers.

Create the problem, then create a solution, just like every other industry from computer viruses to the viruses we now are told we cannot fight off naturally, to the drugs we are told we need for depression and anxiety, which are now labeled as mental “diseases” just like heart disease or cancer.

2017 was a year when everyone in the media seemed to be talking about corruption within the recovery industry. What did all those exposes accomplish? Absolutely nothing. The industry marched on.

It’s quite incredible the disconnect between truth and corruption. It doesn’t seem to matter what the truth is, the machine must continue making a profit, no matter how many lives it destroys in the process.

Humanity has developed a split personality. On the one hand, we have people like Naomi Wolf, Dr. Michael Yeadon, Dr. Robert Malone—the list goes on and on—bringing up their statistics on deaths and injuries as a result of the mRNA genetic therapies inflicted upon people and the insane protocols during the pandemic crisis such as lockdowns and masking.

On the other hand, this article was just published in NPR, a media outlet that the majority of people in the country would say they trust, stating:

4 ways the world messed up its pandemic response — and 3 fixes to do better next time

Here are the four ways that countries messed up:

1. Countries failed to coordinate and cooperate.

2. Nations didn’t do their homework

3. Inequity was a “wicked accomplice” of the virus. In other words, we didn’t share!

4. The public was infected by a plague of resistance.

Notice they do not say lockdowns and masking were failures. Nope, anyone suggesting such a thing is guilty of spreading mis/disinformation. Then they talk about how they didn’t do enough “sharing.” A country that had more deaths from COVID than any other country in the world—and more people vaccinated—saying “sorry” for not sharing their disastrous policies is the height of arrogance. Any country who did not implement the policies of the United States and the UK would be insane to implement them now. How have they turned such a massive failure into a success?

Here are NPR’s three fixes:

1. People of the world let’s cooperate!

2. Create a combo-platter of preventive and curative measures: Vaccination-plus!

3. Expand the World Health Organization

Wow, One World Government, here we come! The only answer: more drugs!

And if you don’t agree, you are spreading dangerous disinformation—which I am doing right now.

How much higher will the death toll go? We have all kinds of strange things happening. Mysterious things like the Epoch Times telling us that:

2022 Excess Deaths All Around the World Raise an Alarm.

As one example, Scotland’s COVID-19 Recovery Committee is undertaking an inquiry into the cause of excess deaths in Scotland since the start of the pandemic.

Data from the Scottish Government shows that deaths in Scotland are 11% above the average for this time of year and have been above the average for the last 26 weeks.

What is unclear, is the extent to which this is being caused by the COVID-19 caseload, or the indirect health effects of the pandemic.

You can read articles like this from the Spectator, Australia, stating:

A strange new medical anomaly has doctors baffled as it sweeps across the country. Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS) is on the rise, and it’s tragically claiming the lives of healthy young adults, sometimes in their sleep.

Essentially, people are dying without displaying any prior sign of illness. They simply do not wake up after going to bed or collapse during the day.

It’s enough to send all of us running for the medicine cabinet, or maybe asking our kids for their dealer connection online.

Rehab, get ready for an even bigger flood of addicts in the years to come. Especially when Bill Gates bombards us with dire warnings such as “the world got lucky with the COVID-19 pandemic” and how he thinks the next one could be “society-ending” with a “fatality rate that is much higher than the coronavirus death toll.”

Bigger than what we are experiencing now? Just let me pop another pill.

Who’s the biggest body broker of all? Bill Gates, maybe? It seems like he’s the top dog when it comes to overall scamming on just about everything to do with health—in the entire world.

But if we stick to this one aspect of rehab/recovery, Barack Obama is our go-to man.

You could say that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also called “Obamacare,” may be the biggest insurance scam in history.

The industries that profit from our current health care system wrote the legislation, heavily influenced the regulations and have received waivers exempting them from provisions in the law. This has all been done to protect and enhance their profits.

In the meantime, the health care crisis continues. Fewer people, even those with health insurance, can afford the health care they need because of out-of-pocket costs. The ACA continues that trend by pushing skimpy health plans with low coverage and restricted networks.

This is what happens in a market-based system of health care. People get only the amount of health care they can afford, rather than what they need. The ACA takes our failed market-based system to a whole new level by forcing the uninsured to purchase private health plans and using the government to sell and subsidize them.

The Affordable Care Act was signed in 2008, requiring every healthcare provider to cover substance abuse treatment. So began a path of greed and abuse, leading not to recovery, but to an increase of 170% in drug abuse and suicide between 2009 and 2019. Nearly 92,000 people died from drug overdoses overall in the U.S. in 2020. This represents the largest increase ever recorded in a calendar year and reflects a nearly five-fold increase in the rate of overdose deaths since 1999. (1)

With money pouring in, unscrupulous scammers opened “treatment centers,” where desperate families are manipulated and deceived, and the most vulnerable, the young, pay the highest price—a never-ending cycle of drug addiction, recovery, relapse, that destroys any hope they may have once had to live happy, independent, clear-minded lives.

What’s a scam anyway? A dishonest scheme, a fraud, a swindle, a racket. Everybody thinks they’re too smart to get scammed.

But when you’re scammed, you don’t know it, do you? Or if you do, most people will be too embarrassed to admit it. They will convince themselves that it wasn’t bad at all. In fact, they might even congratulate themselves, twisting the lie to mean by losing money they actually saved more. Sort of like buying things on sale. You buy twice as much, adding things you don’t really need that you wouldn’t have bought otherwise, congratulating yourself that you saved money when you really spent more. These people will turn around and get scammed again, and again, just to prove how enjoyable it was.

It was like that with the Covid shot. After the first, came the second, and by then, you are in too deep, having invested too much of your health into this lie, so how ca you admit the truth that it didn’t work. Even after you get sick a couple of times, you justify it to yourself. Next thing you know, you’re taking a third, and a fourth. And by then, you are a diehard believer. And you just might die. But you will never admit you were wrong.

Sort of like…drug addiction.

Fauci with his feisty New York accent, intellectual glasses and down-home style. He sold the world the biggest lie in history. Obama was right there, behind the scenes, with his smooth-talking, Hollywood glamor and stylish class. He sure knows how to wear a suit and his smile is worth a billion bucks.

What a pair those two make.

Did you ever know a scammer that wasn’t either cool or feisty or both?

We’ve all watched the movies immortalizing scammers and either swooned over those guys or wished we could be them. Think of The Sting, Paper Moon, Catch Me If You Can, Ocean’s Eleven—it’s a long list. Obama would fit right in with guys like Paul Newman, George Clooney, and Robert Redford.

Movies are entertainment, although these days we are having a hard time remembering that. Truth is such a downer. Give me a good story and wrap it in a TikTok vibe. Please, don’t strain my mind with more information than it can handle. A three-minute blast of overstimulation—then on to the next three-minute blast. Don’t think on it too much. Move on. Move on. Then, take a pill to help with the anxiety. Did you ever consider what that is doing to your brain?

Snap out of it. It’s time Americans admit we are being scammed and get angry. If not for our own sakes, then for the sake of our children.

In every possible way, our children have become food for the industrial complex. Get a kid to pee in a cup and one test can be worth $10,000.

Besides juvenile hall, I used to teach my creative writing program in some of the most expensive rehab facilities in the country. I remember there was one way up in the Malibu hills, with a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean below. The place looked like a castle. In a lot of ways, the young people in these facilities seemed more lost than the ones in juvenile hall. At least the incarcerated poorer youth had identities that they could be somewhat proud of—their gangs. These rich kids were lost and rudderless. But both groups are perfect fodder for the drug/recovery industry. The revolving door is well-oiled. You can check out some luxury rehab facilities here.

Juvenile hall is a nightmarish place that purposely takes away a child’s humanity. I will write about that more later. But these swank sober living homes, I used to joke that I wished I could check in there. They had a masseuse, acupuncture, yoga classes and surfing classes. There was a French Chef who made the most delicious meals. They had constant therapy in the most paradisal setting.

And yet, there was always some disaster happening. Kids going for a hike and finding hallucinogenic wildflowers, ingesting them and having to be rushed to the hospital. I remember arriving one afternoon to be told that one girl had thrown herself off the balcony the night before. She, too, had been rushed to the hospital. Thankfully, she was going to be okay, the balcony hadn’t been very high.

Back in 2017, one of those popular articles was by Megan Kelly, who did an excellent expose of Florida’s “billion-dollar drug treatment industry.

Thousands of addicts arrive here each year from Ohio and West Virginia, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, hoping that at one of South Florida's many drug treatment centers, they'll find recovery. And some do.

But an investigation by NBC News has found that many of these vulnerable patients have become grist in an insurance fraud mill. Crooked treatment centers partner with "body brokers" and operators of so-called "sober homes" to find patients with good health insurance. Brokers and sober home owners offer those trying to get clean free rent and grocery store gift cards, cigarettes and manicures in exchange for going to a specific treatment center, which pays kickbacks for every client.

Once they've reeled patients in, these treatment centers bill their insurance tens of thousands of dollars for often questionable counseling, costly and potentially unnecessary drug screens, and exotic laboratory tests. Some treatment centers not only overlook drug use — they encourage it. To Florida's worst operators, relapse doesn't mean failure. It means profit.

Kelly tells the story of Michelle Curran and her drug addicted daughter who she sent to rehab in Florida, called the Rehab Capital of America. Curran’s daughter was sent from home to home. Curran's insurance would be charged more than $600,000 by the seven treatment centers Mikaya attended between January and June of 2016. Below are some of the bills Michelle Curran received for her daughter’s rehab.

Mikaya Feucht died of an overdose after six months in at least seven rehabs in South Florida, including Reflections, a facility whose owner has pleaded guilty to health care fraud and sex trafficking. Her mother, Michelle Curran, provided NBC News with a copy of a bill showing the total charges submitted to Mikaya's insurer, Cigna.

Curran said that in May 2016, she learned a man named Kenny had allegedly provided her daughter drugs so she would relapse. When she overdosed, he allegedly left her on a sober home lawn for the first responders to find.

Kelly’s article continues:

Delray Beach Mayor Cary Glickstein estimates that his city of 66,000 has about 700 sober homes that house up to 7,000 people in recovery.

"These kids are just cycled through different houses," said Glickstein. "There's no supervision. Many times, they're supervised by convicted felons, people that are trafficking drugs while they're supposed to be supervising kids in recovery."

Body brokers. The actual definition of a body broker is a firm or an individual that buys and sells cadavers or human body parts.

This is now a term used in the recovery industry for the pied pipers who go out luring youth into rehab. What have our children become, nothing more than body parts to be hustled for profit.

There is no limit to how angry a person should get over this. There is no excuse to remain complacent.

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