The Tatiana Schlossberg Health Accords

A Tribute to the Journalist Who Wrote Until the End

The Letter I Wrote (November 2025)

Can I Take a Second?

An Open Letter to Tatiana Schlossberg

Dear Ms. Schlossberg,

I read with great sorrow your New Yorker piece about your diagnosis and the maybe year you have left. About the medications that might buy you more time, if you can afford them, if your insurance approves them, if the system deems you worthy of another sunrise.

I’m a stranger, but I’m writing anyway. Not because I can fix what’s broken in your body. But because you’ve spent your career documenting what’s broken in our systems, and I think you’d like to know it can be changed. I have the math, and the application, live and working, to prove it.

Not My Problem

This isn’t about my business. This is about 1 in 5 Americans who use insulin playing Russian roulette every month by rationing doses because of cost. And such. About the system designed to extract maximum profit from maximum desperation as a business model. Medical crowdfunding by itself is a zero sum game made necessary by unacceptable, abhorrent practices that must be changed, or just replaced. A modern Les Misérables — even this very morning I read that even more foxes are in charge of even more henhouses. And with Christmas coming, what will Grandma spend her prescription money on?

What We Built

One of our seven initiatives is LifeLine Medications — a non-profit structure dedicated to making affordable medications accessible through direct community coordination. Community demand pooling. Direct manufacturing relationships. Transparent pricing. Workers paid in ownership stakes, so their incentive is to help more people, not deny more claims.

This isn’t a nonprofit begging for donations. This isn’t a startup promising to “disrupt healthcare.” This is mutual aid with infrastructure.

What I’m Asking

You’ve spent your career documenting broken systems. And unfortunately, you’re now very familiar with this one.

So here’s my actual ask: Will you run it? Or give it to someone who can do it better than me?

I’m willing to hand over the entire project to someone YOU trust to do it well.

I don’t know the name of a single pharmaceutical representative to ask, or to avoid. But you do. Or someone in your orbit does. Your article reached me and what we need is people, to be reached. Even two hours of your time might be enough to save generations; including this one. That sounds rude and audacious to me even writing it, to ask you for anything at all. But you wrote that article for a reason. And I think this might be an answer to that reason.

If you have ever seen African army ants cross a river, it’s an inspiring spectacle. They link together and BECOME the bridge. Pretend this is a seed.

With Utmost Respect,

One army worker ant,

Jonathan Jones
Founding Manager, Liana Banyan Corporation
November 2025

P.S. — I’m not trying to be Valjean, I’m trying to be the Bishop. One of many.

What This Has Become (February 2026)

That letter was written three months ago.

I don’t know if it ever reached Ms. Schlossberg. I don’t know if she read it. What I do know is that her article — written while she was facing terminal diagnosis, while she could have been doing anything else, while every day mattered more than most of us will ever understand — that article reached me.

She wrote about broken systems while living inside the consequences of one.

She did her job. Until the end.

That deserves a name.

The Swoop

There’s something in her article that stayed with me beyond the medical details.

She acknowledged what I call The Swoop — the recognition that she was, in many ways, fortunate. Her condition didn’t affect her as severely as it affected so many others. She had access, resources, awareness. And yet she chose to write about those others — the ones for whom the system fails completely, every day, without the platform to speak.

That’s The Swoop: when you feel fortune’s wing brush past you while watching it miss others entirely.

It would have been easy to write only about her own situation. Instead, she expanded the frame. She showed compassion for everyone the system affects even more than it affected her.

That’s the standard.

When you build infrastructure for yourself, build it for everyone behind you too. That’s what she modeled. That’s what we’re doing.

See also:

• The Jimmy Kimmel Letter — Another parent who used their platform to speak for those without one
• Cardboard Boots — Why we send our last dollar to someone else’s child
• The Facebook Friend — The mother who faced an impossible choice

The Facebook Friend

I was Facebook friends with a woman who had cancer, and would post about it every week in vain attempt to stave off the long-term effects she knew it was going to have on her family.

She wrote about how she felt about her children under ten and her husband, and the decisions they had to make about whether to try to save her by taking on lifelong debt that would outlast her by 50 years if it didn’t work.

And that last week before she died, with the half-measures of some chemo they managed to second mortgage the house for, and its effects, still trying to raise money with crowdfunding pleas for the debts she knew would ruin the future for them, still trying to work, were heart-wrenching.

No one should have to choose between trying to save their life and the livelihood of the survivors.

That’s not a medical question. That’s a system failure. That’s why the Health Accords exist. That’s why Do The Swoop exists. That’s why we built this at all.

The Tatiana Schlossberg Health Accords

We hereby dedicate the following to the memory of Tatiana Schlossberg:

Article I: The Health Accords Name

All governance documents, patent filings, and operational procedures related to LifeLine Medications and community health coordination shall be collectively known as:

The Tatiana Schlossberg Health Accords

Article II: The Governing Principle

“Document what is broken so others can build what heals.”

Healthcare access innovations within Liana Banyan shall be governed by this principle — named for a journalist who documented environmental destruction while facing her own health crisis, and kept writing anyway.

Article III: What the Health Accords Cover

Article IV: The Dedication

Every patent filed in Bags 12, 14, 15, and 18 shall include this dedication:

“The Tatiana Schlossberg Health Accords — in memory of the journalist who documented what was broken so others could build what heals. She wrote until the end.”

Article V: The Standard

Healthcare innovations within Liana Banyan must meet the Schlossberg Standard:

Why This Article Matters

I have built systems for decades. Technical systems. Economic systems. Governance systems.

But I have never encountered someone who, facing their own mortality, chose to spend their remaining time documenting the system that was failing them — not to rage, not to despair, but to explain it so others might change it.

That is what journalists do at their best.

That is what Tatiana Schlossberg did.

I don’t know if she would have wanted her name attached to this. I don’t know if she would have approved of what we’re building. I don’t know if she ever saw that letter from a stranger in Montana.

But I know this:

She wrote until the end.

And because she did, I read it. And because I read it, I accelerated. And because I accelerated, LifeLine Medications is now documented, patented, and ready to launch.

Cause and effect.

Her article. This infrastructure.

The Tatiana Schlossberg Health Accords.

For Those Who Document

To every journalist, researcher, whistleblower, or witness who documents broken systems at personal cost:

You might never see the seed grow.

You might never meet the people you help.

You might write something that sits unread for years, then changes everything.

Keep writing anyway.

That’s the standard she set. That’s the standard we honor.

Related Documents

“In memory of Tatiana Schlossberg, who documented what was broken so others could build what heals.”

For the Keep.