The Corporate Takeover of Massage

Perhaps you have seen some of the many articles about the impact of for-profit schools on people and on taxpayers.  The New York Times just wrote another one recently.

Not that long ago, massage therapy was loosely regulated in most states.  Industry leaders, composed of massage school owners, the AMTA (American Massage Therapy Associates), COMTA (the school accrediting company) and NCBTMB (the testing company) joined forces to hire lobbyists to create regulations.  Essentially they went across the country state by state to impose tough regulations.  In Massachusetts they hired Lynch Associates lobbying firm.  Their lobbyist attends most of the massage board meetings.  

Why did they do this?  Altruism?  Activism?  To protect the people?  Hardly.  Moneyed interests created a system to assure their profits:  Laws restricting who can be a massage therapist, who can teach massage therapists, and who can get federal financial aid.

Very recently, Vermont's legislature repulsed the efforts of the corporate interests, ruling that the potential for harm by massage therapists is "remote and speculative."  In many states however, the corporate interests were successful in raising the bar very high by requiring that schools be accredited and graduates get tested.  That seems benign enough on the surface.  After all, an accredited school is a good school, right?  And a student that passes a written exam is a good massage therapist, right?  It protects students from bad schools and the public from bad therapists, right?

Consider this.  To become accredited costs a school about $40,000, with annual renewal in the tens of thousands.  COMTA is a private company with a near-monopoly on accrediting massage schools.  You have to pay them their cut if you want to offer your students federal financial aid. That is how the big money people set it up.   The magic number of school hours that maximizes the amount schools can get from federal financial aid is 650 hours.

So, accredited schools can charge high tuitions and get paid by federal financial aid.  This has led to rampant abuse by for-profit schools, called predatory recruiting:  Schools inflate students’ expectation of future income and convince them to apply for federal financial aid.  The schools are paid up front.  Then, when the student doesn’t earn what s/he thought and can’t make the loan payments, the taxpayer is left holding the bag, and the student is left with ruined credit.

One can argue that all these players form a cartel that maximizes profit and minimizes competition at the expense of the people.

It is happening in many industries, not just massage.  If you google “for-profit education” you will find many, many articles describing the injustices done to unsuspecting, hard-working people just trying to get ahead. The system does a great job of getting their money and making them jump through excessive hoops.  Then it leaves them broke, distraught and bearing the burden of tens of thousands of dollars in loans to pay back or ruining their credit.

I saw the injustice of this system years ago when I wanted to be a massage therapist.  I saw that the system works well enough for some people:  people with money, people with wealthy parents, and people with supportive spouses.  But those people already have many options.  If you are someone who is raising children alone, someone who doesn’t make much money, or someone who can’t do some of the unnecessarily tough science classes, you’re out of luck.  The system won’t work for you, unless you are willing to sign on the dotted line for a loan that you are told you will be able to pay back, because you will be making so much money.  Single parents, minorities, and people for whom English is a second language are especially hurt by this system. 

The accrediting and testing companies are privately owned organizations, not government regulatory bodies.  Almost monopolies, they are a part of the racket, designed to profit from the industry.  Even though COMTA is a “non-profit”, it pays its executives handsome salaries.  I know a woman who owns many trade schools as a “non-profit” simply because that is a good business model, and maximizes her income.

This predatory system so angered me that I joined forces with a physical therapist, Alexei Levine, and opened a massage school for the people.  We are in our tenth year.   We chose not to be accredited, and we pass the savings on to our students.  We give scholarships generously, and we have done everything we can to make this education available to people from all walks of life.  We have a pay-as-you-go program, and we never take a penny from anyone until we have earned it.  We charge about one quarter of what the big corporate schools charge for tuition.  Our students leave here not owing anything to the government.

The actions of massage boards across the country, headed by owners of big massage schools, have put many small independent schools out of business by raising requirements unnecessarily high and making the costs prohibitive for the small school owners.  To us this constitutes a conflict of interest.

Small schools like ours should be protected from the big corporate forces, which have the resources to put their competition out of business by manipulating the legislative process. 

We hear about the same thing happening in the childcare industry.  The big moneyed interests are hiring lobbyists to pass onerous rules that are putting the small day care providers out of business.  Who would you rather have watching your kids, the mom down the street who cares about her neighbors’ children, or some big corporate day care provider who hires caretakers at minimum wage?  As always, it is the small operators and the public who are harmed, despite the assurances of the big guys that they are doing it for the “public good.”

Many of my students are single mothers.  After nine years of teaching them, and being one myself, I can tell you that no one works harder or deserves a break more than a single mom who wants to make a better life for herself and her kids.  When my beloved Barack Obama talked about his vision that “I am my brother’s keeper,” we at The Massage School said, “I am my sister’s leg up to a better life.”  We help them to achieve that better life without backbreaking loans to pay back.