Investing in Community Acupuncture

This blog post is 3 things: a long overdue follow up to my Jobs Post #2: Investment; an excerpt from the text that a bunch of us are feverishly writing for the new POCA website; and a kind of illustration of one of the reasons why we STILL haven’t actually started signing anybody up for POCA. That would be because our lawyer has to review everything to make sure the securities disclaimer is in the right place on the membership forms. And why do we need a securities disclaimer? Read on, comrades.

Investing in the People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture

Wikipedia
defines a cooperative as “a business organization owned and operated by a group
of individuals for their mutual benefit.” This “mutual benefit” can take many
different forms. Workers’ cooperatives, for instance, allow their members to
accumulate equity in the business that employs them. Many consumer
cooperatives, such as REI, offer patronage dividends to their members, meaning
that members receive a refund of money they spent on purchases at the co-op.
For cooperatives that provide equity or patronage to their members, the initial
fee to join the co-op is a membership “share”, which means a one-time purchase
of ownership in the business, which entitles the members to receive a portion
of the business’ profits in the future.

POCA
is different. Becoming a member of POCA does not mean accumulating equity or
owning a share or receiving any financial dividends at all. POCA is not set up
to make a profit, so it can’t share profits with its members.

When
you join POCA, you are investing in POCA. You are investing in the community
acupuncture movement by joining a group of people who own and operate the
business that is POCA. Your membership basically represents your investment.

But
why would you want to invest in a business that doesn’t make a profit?

Community
acupuncture is based on a social business model. A social business is designed
to produce “social dividends”, in this case, acupuncture treatments that are
affordable for people with ordinary incomes, and living wage jobs in community
acupuncture clinics. These treatments and these jobs benefit society as a
whole; that’s why we call them the social dividends of community acupuncture.
However, balancing the need to keep the treatment price low enough to be
accessible to as many people as possible, with the need to provide living wage
jobs to the people who work in the clinics, means that the community
acupuncture operate business model operates on a very slim margin. Clinics,
even when they are very successful, make just enough money to exist and to keep
producing those social dividends. There is no money left over for profits.

After
a number of years, observing a lot of clinics, it’s pretty clear that this is
not about the entrepreneurial savvy of the clinic owner or a need for better
advertising or what patients pay on the sliding scale; it’s more fundamental
than that. For a community acupuncture clinic to truly be profitable in a basic
capitalist way, it would either have to raise its prices substantially or pay
its workers much less. In other words, to make a profit and create a financial
dividend, it would have to sacrifice one or both of its social dividends. And
so even a very successful community acupuncture clinic will never attract
typical capitalist investors, because if a clinic is doing what it is designed
to do, it will not produce any financial dividends, which is what most
investors want to see. One of the purposes of POCA is to make it possible for
people to invest in community acupuncture who are not typical capitalist
investors, and who want more of the social dividends that we do have, rather
than the financial dividends that we don’t have – more affordable treatments,
more living wage jobs. It is particularly important that the people who
personally benefit from the affordable treatments and the living wage jobs have
a way to invest their resources – time, energy, money – to create more clinics,
as opposed to hoping and waiting for some investor with deep pockets to come
along, recognize what a great resource community acupuncture is, and say, hey,
we need more of these! Because we could be waiting a very long time.

And
so investing in POCA is all about investing in a group of businesses that don’t
make a profit and that never will, no matter how hard they work or how smart they
work. It stands to reason, then, that a cooperative that supports these
businesses wouldn’t generate any financial dividends, either.

But
there’s even more to it than that. John Weeks, who arguably knows more about
the business of integrative medicine in this country than anybody else,
recently wrote a post in The Integrator Blog in which he suggested that
integrative medicine itself – not just community acupuncture – is fundamentally
unsuited to making money in the typical capitalist sense. Integrative medicine
has been struggling financially for a decade or more, since venture capitalists
tried investing in several high-profile projects that failed spectacularly.
Undeterred, the general public continues to want access to integrative
medicine; it’s not the venture capitalists, however, who will be helping them
get it. John Weeks believes that the economic value in integrative medicine is
actually not in generating profits but in saving money that would otherwise be
consumed by the skyrocketing costs of healthcare. (Doesn’t saving money for
society sound like a social dividend?) He suggests that the integrative
practice community learn to stop being defensive about our lack of value to the
venture capitalists of the world and start being assertive about our value to
everyone else; in other words, the true economic value of integrative medicine
can only be seen in light of the common good.

Returning
to the question of why would you want to invest in a business that doesn’t make
a profit –many of us believe that the real problem with healthcare in this
country is that it DOES make a profit. It makes profits far too well, better
than it takes care of patients, better than it looks after the needs of
providers. If you believe that healthcare shouldn’t be about profits, invest in
POCA. If you want to create healthcare that is fundamentally about the common
good, invest in POCA. The dividends you receive as a member won’t be financial,
but we promise that they will be valuable.

Author: lisafer