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The Hollow Men of Hims
An admittedly partial–but deeply troubling–case against America's most brazen medical grift, involving Chinese knockoffs, subscription traps, and prescription gas station sex pills.
We threw in Elizabeth Holmes for a lot less—though one suspects her fatal error was not the fraud itself but the transparency of it, the sheer crudeness of promising blood tests that did not work rather than the more sophisticated approach of selling actual drugs through loopholes so baroque that even their exploitation carries a patina of legitimacy. When Hims manipulates the compounding exemption to mass-produce patent-dodging weight loss drugs sourced from Chinese suppliers of dubious quality, they continue operating with impunity, their executives appearing on podcasts to discuss their vision for the future of healthcare with the serene confidence of men who have mistaken regulatory capture for moral authority. One imagines their executives possess the peculiar moral confidence of the megachurch pastor who has convinced himself that his private jet serves the Lord's work, combined with the dead-eyed certitude of the middle manager who has successfully optimized human suffering into quarterly growth metrics.
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