In Honor of Tatiana Schlossberg
A Second Open Letter to Those Who Continue Her Work
Written with deep respect and in admiration for a woman who had the courage to name the system that was failing her.
The Tatiana Schlossberg Health Accords
I read the letter Tatiana Schlossberg wrote about her diagnosis in The New Yorker the day after she wrote it, responded by writing her an open letter about how it had moved me, and then set about implementing the changes in my platform that her words inspired before sending it, so I could back it up — and I never got the chance to. She was not writing a personal essay for her own benefit. She was filing what became a final dispatch from a frontline she’d covered her entire career, for other people. A truly selfless act. At that point, there really was no other reason to write it. She didn’t ask for pity. She asked us to see the system clearly.
I read that essay and I recognized everything.
What I Know
The only times in my life I’ve had medical coverage were when my mother took a job as a speech therapist so her entire paycheck could be absorbed by insurance premiums for one year — that’s when and how my wisdom teeth were removed at 16 — and then during three separate periods when I was on active duty under Tricare. That’s it. Four windows in fifty-two years.
I know what it’s like to sit in a parking lot doing math, looking at the pet store across the street, considering getting “your dog” antibiotics because you can’t afford to take your child to a doctor. When Tom Hanks’ character in The Terminal deliberately lied about the translation being “goat,” instead of “father,” I felt it. I know the calculation. I know the duty, and the care, and the desperation and the shame of making it. Of the necessity.
I know what it’s like to have a tooth infection spread until you can barely chew or breathe without two ibuprofen every three hours to keep the swelling — which had spread to the roof of your mouth — down. For weeks. To find underground medication to keep the infection at bay for one more month to save your kidneys while you wait for that one day a year when a dental clinic does free extractions. To stand in a line of hundreds for hours that winds around the building and through the parking lot to the sidewalk down the street, grateful for the chance to have teeth pulled, with an insufficient anesthetic (I’m a redhead) because the alternative was worse.
I know what it’s like when your three-week-old first son is diagnosed with a 98% chance-of-death aortic coarctation at a free clinic by an East Indian immigrant doctor who caught a whisper on the stethoscope and checked above and below because she was an outstanding doctor. To watch him go into emergency surgery on a tiny aorta with blood vessels so small the surgeons used robot scalpels and sutures to repair it with another blood vessel split and spread over the cut-out part to strengthen it. To see the scar they left when they entered between his ribs under his tiny left arm — a small mark that, twenty-nine years later, has migrated to his back as if he’d been in a swordfight, though what really happened is that strangers saved his life with almost no other lasting effects, a $200,000 operation at a teaching hospital because it fit in a program for a procedure invented 5 years before. And how grateful I still am for Ronald McDonald House, because the other affordable option was on the sand at the beach or in the hospital parking lot in Galveston. We got lucky.
I was Facebook friends with a woman who had cancer. Every week she posted — not about the cancer, but about her husband and three children under ten, and the agonizing decision of whether to try treatments that might save her life but would leave crushing debt for the people she loved when it didn’t work. That last week before she died, still trying to raise money with crowdfunding pleas, still trying to work through the half-measures of chemo they’d second-mortgaged the house for — it was heart-wrenching. No one should have to choose between trying to save their life and the livelihood of the survivors.
I had a friend in Officer Candidate School who I ran alongside on his last PT test, encouraging him to make the cutoff time. He made it. Then he was denied his commission — because he was twelve years in remission from testicular cancer, and the military didn’t want to be responsible for his potential bills. All that work. All that recovery. Denied because of what might cost them money.
These should not be common problems. But I know, from experience, that they are.
Why I Won’t Stop
As a freshman in high school, there was a guy named Kurt who pulled out the short hairs on the back of my neck every day, saying “Rooster Tail!” He was a full two feet taller than me and outweighed me by forty pounds. There was nothing I could physically do.
Faced with daily misery, I decided that if I could not win, I would rather lose on my own terms so I at least respected myself. My voice trembled as I told him:
“Until you stop, I will fight you every single time I see you. And we both know I will lose. And the next time I see you, we will fight. And I will lose again. And the next. And the next. I will do that for as many times, and as long as it takes, until you stop. Because I will not ever give up. Ever. One way, or another, you WILL stop.”
That’s when he stopped. Not because I could beat him — I clearly couldn’t. But because he realized I would never stop trying, and the effort wasn’t worth it to him.
That desperate choice unlocked something. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might. Whether failure or success, no effort is wasted. Over many years and many partial successes or outright failures, it’s difficult to not learn anything about how to do it better next time. As long as you keep going. Even when you don’t win. Especially when you lose.
So I designed a system that lets people try over and over with the smallest possible cost and the greatest benefits I can engineer. I realize there are obstacles and pitfalls, and I’ve done the best I can to anticipate them. But this gives me hope. And I hope it gives you hope too.
As Roxanne said in Megamind: “The Megamind I knew would never have run from a fight, even when he knew he had absolutely no chance of winning. It was your best quality.” I’m in it for the long haul. Not because I’m Megamind — I’m more like The Bruce, wanting to believe, like William Wallace does.
What She Showed Us
Tatiana spent her career documenting what extractive systems do to living things: to environments, to communities, to the human body. She understood — deeply, rigorously — that individual crises are systemic failures wearing a personal face.
Her diagnosis was not an exception. It was the rule, made visible by someone with the platform to name it. One in five Americans who use insulin ration their doses. People die from medication costs the way they once died from lack of sanitation — not because the cure doesn’t exist, but because the system prefers profit to people.
She didn’t accept that. Neither do I.
The Tatiana Schlossberg Health Accords
In her honor, we are naming our healthcare initiative The Tatiana Schlossberg Health Accords — a commitment to build what should already exist: a way for communities to pool their purchasing power for medications and health products, the same way they can for groceries. A way to earn more after your regular job — and perhaps eventually replace that job — so you can save into a medical savings account that lets you take your child to the doctor for a prescription you already know they need, and to the dentist for preventative care that will spare them years of pain and future health problems. You know, the basics.
And what I call the Swoop. I don’t imagine we can pay for all the major medical that is really needed anytime soon. But we, collectively, might be able to cover the living expenses of families facing terminal illness — the rent or mortgage, the groceries, the light bill, the lawn that still needs mowing — and maybe make them a lasagna while we’re at it. So they can sit at the hospital where they belong, and focus their efforts where they’re needed most.
This is not a memorial. It is a mechanism we are implementing.
I don’t have pharmacy partnerships yet. I don’t have manufacturer relationships. I don’t have cold chain logistics for insulin. I have a platform that lets communities coordinate, and a commitment that when we figure out how to extend that to healthcare, we will.
The same transparent pricing. The same Cost + 20% margin model that underpins the rest of the platform. The same principle: help each other help ourselves. The intent is mutual aid with infrastructure, not one-off crowdfunding.
We can do better. We have to.
What We’re Asking
We need people who know what I don’t know. In a perfect world, we’d have Alex Oshmyansky — the person who helped Mark Cuban build Cost Plus Drugs from a cold call, a builder who understands how to turn outrage into operational reality — and I’ve sent him a letter asking for 3–5 hours of his time per month to that effect. But since I pray for potatoes at the end of a hoe handle, I’m also asking here, because I only know one thing about this initiative: that we will do it. I need experienced people to show us how, and to take the lead. In return, I am offering my patent portfolio, which can be viewed at Cephas.LianaBanyan.com.
I don’t have money. I just have ideas. And heart. And I’m pretty stubborn.
Specifically, we need:
- Someone to lead this — with deep knowledge of pharmaceutical supply chains, healthcare access, or medical ethics, and a commitment to cooperative structures rather than extractive ones
- Pharmacy partners willing to explore cooperative purchasing models
- Legal guidance on medication access and compliance
- Community health partners — clinics and patient networks who will help us get this right
We are not asking for donations. I wouldn’t know what to do with them at this stage — so I’m asking for expertise, partnership, and the kind of people Tatiana would have trusted, who do.
For the Record
This letter was written after Tatiana Schlossberg’s passing, in the spirit of the work she left behind. We have no affiliation with her estate or family. We use her name because her work earned it — and because naming things honestly, as she always did, is the beginning of fixing them.
If her family or estate has concerns about this designation, we will honor any request they make. The initiative can be renamed. The commitment cannot.
With utmost respect for her life, her work, and the systems she insisted we could build differently —
Jonathan Jones Founding Manager, Liana Banyan Corporation
406-578-1232 Support@LianaBanyan.com Cephas.LianaBanyan.com
“A true selfless act always sparks another.” — Klaus
Join Us
Be among the first to know when the Health Accords initiative launches. $5/year membership. Help each other help ourselves.
FOR THE KEEP.