Healthcare: Protest Rap Against Insurance Denials and Profits Over Patients
Healthcare
Healthcare by Apollo iEro: Holding a Mirror Up to an Industry That Profits From Death
The Second Single From The Elements
"Healthcare" is the second single from Apollo iEro's album The Elements, and it opens with a warning: "This the medicine / Welcome to the elements / Where you won't like the evidence." The whole track works on one idea. Eric holds up a mirror to society, and here the mirror is pointed at the American healthcare system. What it shows is ugly. An industry that is supposed to keep people alive makes some of its biggest profits by deciding who does not get care.
This is protest rap in its rawest form. It is angry, profane, and deliberately uncomfortable. The anger isn't random, though. Every line traces back to a system millions of Americans deal with every year: health insurance claim denials, prior authorization delays, medical debt, and a political system where money decides what Congress will and won't fix. To understand the song, you have to understand what it is reflecting.
"I'mma Kill All of You, That's What Their Underwriting"
The line that best explains the song comes in the middle: "I'mma kill all of you / That's what their underwriting." Underwriting is the process insurers use to assess risk, price coverage, and decide what they will and won't pay for. Eric's point is that when a company builds its business model around denying claims, it is putting a number on human lives. A denied surgery, a delayed cancer treatment, a rejected prescription, or a hospital stay cut short is not just a line on a spreadsheet. For many people it is the difference between recovery and a preventable death.
The lyrics take that cold math and say it out loud in plain language. The insurer never says "I'm going to kill you." It says "not medically necessary," "out of network," or "prior authorization required." The outcome can be the same. The song removes the euphemism and shows what the paperwork means for the patient. In recent years, lawsuits have accused major insurers of using automated algorithms to cut off care for elderly and sick patients at scale, which is exactly the kind of mechanized denial the track is aiming at.
This is why Eric frames the whole song as a mirror. The violence in the lyrics is the violence already in the system, turned around and pointed back at the people who design it.
Record Profits and the Death of Someone You Loved
The hook comes back to one pairing again and again: "It's just record profits and death of someone you loved." That line is the thesis of the song. On one side of the ledger, health insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants report record earnings and reward shareholders. On the other side are families who lost someone because care was denied, delayed, or unaffordable.
For-profit healthcare in America builds this conflict into the structure. A company that makes money by collecting premiums and paying out as little as possible has a direct financial reason to say no. Every denied claim improves the bottom line. The lyrics put it bluntly: "Cuz it effects our bottom line if we don't." When the priority is profit over patients, the patient becomes a cost to be reduced.
The hook also says "Sound familiar, you little bitch don't play dumb." It's aimed at executives who act surprised when the public reacts with anger. Eric is saying they know exactly what their systems do, because the systems are working as designed.
"This the Sentiment You Cultivate"
One of the most important lines in the song is "This the sentiment you cultivate." When UnitedHealthcare's CEO was killed in Manhattan in December 2024, the public reaction shocked a lot of people in power. Instead of mourning, huge numbers of ordinary Americans flooded social media with their own stories of denied claims, surprise bills, and relatives who died waiting for approval. The anger had been building for years, and that moment exposed how deep it ran.
"Healthcare" is written from inside that anger. The song doesn't hide from the rage people feel. It asks where that rage came from. Eric's argument is that an industry that treats human life as disposable should not be surprised when the public stops treating the industry's leaders with sympathy. The lyrics call this "consequence for actions / you've never addressed." When a system shows no care for the people it denies, it produces a public that feels no care in return. The song is a portrait of that sentiment, not a set of instructions.
Eric's own framing is that calling for the death of a healthcare CEO is no different from what the denial system already does to claimants every day. That is the mirror at its sharpest. The song forces listeners to notice that one kind of death is treated as unthinkable while the other is treated as routine business.
The Billionaire's Child: Flipping the Scenario
The hardest verse in the song asks the billionaire class to picture themselves in the position of a sick, uninsured family: "Make care take forever / Then when they get sick / Put a gun to their head / And charge them billions to live."
This isn't a literal suggestion. It is a thought experiment in the form of a rap verse. Eric is describing what already happens to working-class Americans, just in a different setting. When a parent is told their child needs treatment that costs more than they will earn in a decade, and the only alternative is watching that child suffer, that parent is being held hostage. The gun is the price tag. The ransom is life savings, a mortgaged house, a GoFundMe, or bankruptcy. Medical debt in America remains one of the leading causes of financial ruin for families.
The verse makes the wealthy imagine that exact scenario scaled up to their own level of wealth. If it would be monstrous to do it to a billionaire's child, the song asks, why is it acceptable to do it to everyone else's? Moving the pain from the powerless to the powerful exposes a double standard most people have learned to ignore.
The same verse draws a parallel to Palestinians, pointing out how much suffering people are trained to look away from. The message is that selective empathy is the problem. People in power are comfortable with suffering until it comes to their own door.
America Is Rigged: Money in Politics and Healthcare
"What's healthcare like? / America's rigged." The song places the healthcare crisis inside a bigger critique of American politics. Early in the track, Eric raps that the powerful are "busy buying Congress / And buying the polls." This is the core of the argument: the system is broken because it is profitable for it to stay broken.
The pharmaceutical and health products industry is consistently the biggest lobbying spender in Washington, spending more year after year than almost any other sector. Insurers, hospital systems, and drug makers pour money into campaigns and lobbying to shape the laws that govern them. The result is a country where universal healthcare, which exists in most of the developed world, is treated as politically impossible.
Eric describes America as a plutocracy, a system governed by the wealthy. In that view, privatized healthcare is not an accident or a failure of policy. It is the responsibility of the billionaire class, which designed it, profits from it, and protects it through political influence.
"They Think They're in Control": Healthcare as a Tool of Control
The line "Listen to me, they think their in control" works on two levels. Eric delivers it as if the healthcare executives were speaking to the public, and at the same time as a warning to the listener about what those executives believe. They think they're in control, and in many ways they are.
This is a theme Eric develops at length in his book Farming Humans. Healthcare is one of the most effective tools the elite have for controlling working-class Americans. When health coverage is tied to employment, people can't leave bad jobs without risking their family's access to care. They can't start a business, take a risk, go on strike, or push back against an employer, because losing the job means losing the insurance. When those same jobs don't pay a living wage, the arrangement becomes wage slavery. People are tethered to work not because it supports them, but because the alternative is going without medical care.
Fear is part of how the system holds together. Working-class voters are repeatedly told that single-payer healthcare would be a disaster, that taxes would crush them, and that they would lose their choice of doctor. Meanwhile, the current system already restricts choice through networks and denials and already drains families through premiums, deductibles, and copays. The song's answer to that fear is a reminder: "remind them they bleed, and they need to pay the toll." The people in control are human, and they are not beyond accountability.
Breaking the Social Contract
In the final stretch of the song, Eric turns to political philosophy: "Society a bargain / You're not upholding your side." The social contract is the idea that people accept laws and give up some freedom in exchange for protection and a fair shot at a decent life. The lyrics argue that the wealthy have broken that bargain. The contract "was there to protect them, but they don't really care."
This is the moral root of the song. If society is a deal, and one side keeps taking without giving back, the other side eventually stops believing in the deal. When a person does everything asked of them, working, paying taxes, and paying premiums, and is still denied care when they need it most, the bargain has failed them. The anger in "Healthcare" is the anger of people who feel the contract has been voided by the other party.
The lyrics end the section with a question aimed straight at those who put money first: "Let me ask you what it's worth." What is a life worth to a system that measures everything in dollars?
The Case for Universal Single-Payer Healthcare
Beneath the rage, the song points toward a solution. Eric believes the healthcare system should not be for profit. As long as insurers and drug companies make money by limiting care, patients will keep losing. The answer is universal, single-payer healthcare: one public system that covers everyone, removes the profit motive from coverage decisions, and treats medical care as a right rather than a product.
In Eric's view, America will never be the greatest country in the world without it. A nation that can't guarantee its citizens access to a doctor, and that lets people die over claim denials while companies report record profits, can't claim to be the best at anything that matters. The song's repeated line, "What a country / where the only thing that matters is about making money," is both an insult and an invitation to become something better.
Not Against Healthcare Workers
It's important to be clear about who the song is aimed at. "Healthcare" is not an attack on nurses, doctors, aides, technicians, or anyone else who does the actual work of caring for patients. Many of those workers are exhausted, underpaid, and just as frustrated with insurance companies as their patients are. The anger in this track is directed at the executives, shareholders, and lobbyists who profit from the system.
That's why Eric released a companion track on the same day. Under his Eric Leo 108 name, he put out "Good Faith," a positive song about healthcare and the people in it. The two tracks work as a pair: one exposes the machinery of profit and denial, and the other honors the human care the system should be built around. In the blog post for "Good Faith," Eric writes about how privatized healthcare has shaped his own life, how his labor power has been exploited to keep access to care, and how the system has taken away his ability to live a normal life.
What the Mirror Shows
"Healthcare" is not a comfortable listen, and it isn't meant to be. It is conscious rap that refuses to be polite about a system that is not polite to the people it harms. The profanity, the violent imagery, and the cold tone are all part of the mirror. Eric takes the hidden brutality of the American healthcare system and says it out loud in its own logic.
The song ends with "Kill the serpent" and "You deserved this," leaving listeners with the weight of what they have just heard. The serpent is the system itself: coiled around the country, feeding on premiums and denials, and squeezing tighter every year. Eric's music, like his books, is meant to make people see it clearly. Once you see it, the song argues, you can start demanding something better.
Thanks for reading! Please comment!
Other Related blog(s): Lyceum Recordz, The PsychoSocial Philosopher
Comments
Post a Comment