🩸 Broken By Design – Part 1: The Engineered Crisis of Financial Toxicity

Aug 07, 2025 By AENTE Editorial Bureau

“Your Pain is Their Profit”

Once, the phrase “healthcare industry” evoked progress. Now, it’s the setup for the darkest of jokes — because what we call care has been transformed into an engineered machine of extraction, not healing.

Few examples are as chilling as financial toxicity — once a term used mainly for cancer treatment, now a reality across nearly all chronic conditions. It’s a quiet epidemic: families refinancing homes to pay for chemo, mothers skipping medication to put food on the table, children watching parents decline — not from disease, but from invoice-induced insolvency.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a glitch in the system. This is the system.

Domination in Disguise: The Illusion of Choice

Physician and insurance critic Dr. Eric Bricker recently revealed the labyrinth of subsidiaries controlled by the healthcare giants we think we’re “choosing” from. When you pick “Aetna” over “Cigna,” or “OptumRx” instead of “Express Scripts,” you’re really selecting between puppets on the same stage.

Four corporate empires — UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, CVS Health, and Elevance (Blue Cross) — own dozens of shadow brands designed to mimic competition while quietly coordinating through acquisitions and opaque pricing schemes. Their growth is fueled by cheap debt, not by improving patient outcomes.

“They want you to believe you have a choice. What you have is a hall of mirrors.” — Dr. Eric Bricker, AHealthcareZ LLC

Fraud, Legalized

The American healthcare system has birthed a new form of white-collar crime — fraud so deeply embedded in policy that it’s legal.

Consider:

Hospitals inflate prices by thousands of percent, hidden behind opaque “chargemasters.”
Insurers deny medically necessary claims to protect quarterly profits.
PBMs (Pharmacy Benefit Managers) trade patient access for kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies.
Pharma giants weave “patent thickets” — legal mazes designed to block generics and keep prices sky-high.

Every skipped dose. Every denied claim. Every emptied savings account. This is not a failed system. It’s one that has succeeded at something far more sinister.

The Point of No Return

The real damage isn’t only economic — it’s spiritual. Financial toxicity doesn’t just bankrupt people. It breaks them.

What happens to a society when survival becomes a luxury purchase? When hospitals post record profits while GoFundMe becomes the largest insurer for millions?

What happens when a 19-year-old with lupus must choose between her medication and her tuition?

What happens when an entire system is designed to profit from suffering?

The answer: we stop pretending it’s broken — and admit it’s working exactly as intended, just not for us.

AENTE’s Position: No More Illusions

At AENTE, we’re not here to integrate with this machine. We’re here to dismantle it. Not reform. Not patchwork. Revolution.

Our technology isn’t built to prop up price-gougers — it’s built to outlast them, through transparency, decentralization, and patient-sovereign economics.

We believe care is not a market transaction. It is a social covenant.