LifeLine Medications: The Full Picture

This document provides the detailed economics behind the LifeLine Medications initiative. For the human story, see the Letter to Tatiana Schlossberg.

The System Problem, Not The People Problem

I use the Little Red Hen story as a framework for how the platform works—not as a morality tale, but as a systems diagnostic. The problem isn’t that people won’t help. It’s that they don’t know how to help. Or they’re afraid. Or they’ve been burned before. Or the system is rigged so thoroughly that helping feels impossible.

So instead of asking “who will help me make the bread,” we built infrastructure that asks: “what do you need, and who can provide it, and how do we coordinate fair exchange?” as operational design, that isn’t a fairy tale.

Nine years ago, I started building something that was supposed to come true a year from now; but 6 months ago, and then last month, current events galvanized me to retrofit it to use phased construction—and Kaizen techniques to “build the plane while flying it” to launch a year early. The only part of that that matters is that this can help people now, since we are launching… as hopefully, you read this.

How LifeLine Medications Works

One of our seven initiatives is LifeLine Medications—a non-profit business structure funded by Liana Banyan in a sustainable model, dedicated to one purpose: making affordable medications accessible to everyone who needs them, through direct community coordination.

1. Community Demand Pooling

People who need the same medications coordinate their orders together, creating volume buying power that individuals don’t have.

2. Direct Manufacturing Relationships

We connect directly with licensed compounding pharmacies and international suppliers who meet FDA safety standards but bypass the insurance-pharma pricing cartel.

3. Graduated Payment System (The Tab)

Pay what you can now. As your situation improves, you pay forward into the system. If it never improves, you never pay more. The community covers the gap.

4. Position Funding Model

Service workers—the pharmacy techs, logistics coordinators, customer support specialists—don’t work for wages. They work for medallions (ownership stakes). As the guild succeeds, they succeed. Their incentive isn’t to deny claims or minimize costs. It’s to help more people, because more people helped means more value for everyone.

5. Transparent Pricing

Every medication shows the actual cost breakdown: manufacturing, shipping, coordination, reserve fund. No hidden margins. No negotiated rates that only insiders get. Everyone pays the same fair price.

This Isn’t Charity

This isn’t a nonprofit begging for donations. This isn’t a startup promising to “disrupt healthcare.” This is mutual aid with infrastructure. This is the Little Red Hen inviting everyone to the bakery and showing them where the oven is, and how to plant wheat.

Why This Matters Beyond Any Single Diagnosis

LifeLine Medications is the same philosophy applied to healthcare access. It’s not about finding you a coupon. It’s about building a system where medication access isn’t determined by how much suffering the market will bear.

And if it works for medications—if we can prove that communities can coordinate their own supply chains, negotiate their own terms, and take care of each other without waiting for corporations or governments to fix what’s broken—then the model works for everything else too.

  • Food access
  • Housing
  • Childcare
  • Legal services
  • Every basic human need that’s been turned into a profit extraction mechanism

What Happens Next

We have only what we actually have—a working 4 portal website RIGHT NOW that is the culmination of 9 years of work and 47 years of thinking about it. What we need is people. When you have the right people, everything works together with a common purpose, and the barriers are overcome one by one, no matter what they are.

I have lots of ideas and I’m a hard worker, so I’ll be fine. But have you ever stood by while a child slowly starves to death next to you as you hold a bag of bread? Or dies from preventable disease because of politics or the fact that that child, or worse somehow, their parent, doesn’t have enough money to pay for the cure THAT IS AVAILABLE AND CHEAPLY replicated? Me neither. And I’m not going to start today, or ANY day. It’s simply not good enough, and we can change it, IF WE FEEL LIKE IT.

I feel like it. And I’m absolutely confident that I’m not the only one.

In the military, the Sergeant in charge of the Privates can hack a trail through the densest jungle in ANY direction. But the Lieutenant tells them which direction to go, so they don’t waste effort in the wrong jungle. So the Lieutenant better be right with lives on the line.

Further Reading

For more detail on how the economics actually work:

All available so anyone can check the math, then start a Project on the site to improve on it.