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GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

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Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#201

Post by Gpetrium »

adsadadsad wrote: post #132
sawhit wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make your point without doxxing this guy

This is just an example I found. There's a new one everyday usually Thailand, Vietnam or Bali. Do you really think this guys close friends and family couldn't pony up $6000? It's not doxxing, no copy and paste, I've linked a random public shared GofundMe page of yet another someone begging for money, put in search term accident in gofundme whatever. I could easily choose the next result in the list but I don't see th…

GoFundMe is a way for people he knows to come together and donate without having to figure out where/how to wire the money directly to him. That includes auntie Jane, the one you haven't spoken to for 3 years but still cares about your well-being, whether you made stupid decisions or not.

Raising this guys' specific Fund is similar to the media defaming you on international tv. Chances are you would call a lawyer and ask him to take it down or raise a defamatory libel towards the business.

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#202

Post by vertex-four »

conanbatt wrote: post #178
vertex-four wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NHS “competes in the open market”, so to speak - you pay taxes to get free healthcare for everyone, then you can get private insurance which picks and chooses what it wants to treat and dumps complex cases back on the NHS. Routine treatment is also dealt with by some combination of the NHS and private pharmacies (for flu jabs etc), generally speaking. Unsurprisingly, private health insurance is not very popular h…

If you get private health insurance, do you get your NHS contribution back? Thats what would make it "competing" in the open market. If you have to pay for it no matter what, there is no competition, there is double charging.

There isn’t double charging, because private health insurance universally doesn’t cover the same things as the NHS does, and universally depends on the NHS to work with for anything they think might be too expensive to cover.

Given that we spend less money on healthcare than countries that do have healthcare “on the open market” like you suggest, I’d say this is a system that obviously works.

If there were an imbalance between what those countries provide and what we provide, and people were willing to pay for it, you’d see private healthcare providers successfully taking more money (up to what Americans spend) to make up the gap in service - but they’re not. Do you have an explanation for why that’s not happening?

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#203

Post by jniedrauer »

conanbatt wrote: post #83
jimrhods23 wrote: post #43

We need to get rid of health insurance companies. They are the reason all of our costs are massively inflated. The same thing is happening in education: universities know that a large percentage of students are getting financial aid, so the true costs are buried in a layer of bureaucracy. Fees and administrative fees continue to go up and the universities will always get their money. The students are then on the hook…

> We need to get rid of health insurance companies. They are the reason all of our costs are massively inflated This is not correct. Insurance is a very valuable service to prevent high-risk events, and applying insurance is a very hard problem. You need to do economics, operations, fight fraud, etc. What does create price insensitivity (and thus doesnt allow for the competition that drives down prices and increases…

You're misunderstanding the problem. Americans are not being bankrupted by annual checkups. Americans are being bankrupted by cancer and other serious health problems. And this is in spite of being insured. In practice, private insurance turns out not to be, as you put it "a very valuable service."

Given a choice between death and bankruptcy, most people will choose bankruptcy. There is no downward pressure on the cost of medical care because there is no alternative. It's a situation that capitalist market dynamics are just not equipped to address.

A state-run apparatus is the only thing that seems to work.

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#204

Post by anoncake »

Aloha wrote: post #37
Brendinooo wrote: post #31

>Or the Tennessee couple who want to get pregnant, but whose insurance doesn’t cover the $20,000 worth of “medications, surgeries, scans, lab monitoring, and appointments [that] will need to be paid for upfront and out-of-pocket” for in vitro fertilization. Would an ideal healthcare system cover in vitro for anyone, full stop? Took a buzz through the NHS requirements[0] and there are definitely restrictions. And in v…

From my perspective, it shouldn't. Yes, its cold and heartless to say so, but wanting children isn't a health issue.

Not being able to have children is clearly a health issue.

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#205

Post by zwkrt »

bigiain wrote: post #78
sharkweek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! It was supposed to be over the top satire with a comical tone, but then it just ended up depressing me because it started to feel far too realistic...

FWIW, it's not just you. And it's not new. "We are living in interesting times; in fact, they're so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF." -- Charlie Stross, Sep 2008 http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/09/avalanch...

Well Black mirror process this is untrue. I don't think I could be a writer for that show though, just watching it makes me sick.

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#206

Post by jdietrich »

conanbatt wrote: post #66
rosser wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In universal care you dont get access to 'clinical trials and research and things like that... [citation needed]

The US has substantial incoming medical tourism. If it really were strictly worse to european alternatives (more expensive or lower quality) europeans would not go to the US.

The main driver for EU-US medical tourism is the much weaker regulation in the US. In the best case, people from the EU travel to the US for innovative new treatments that aren't yet available in the EU; more often, they're suckered into paying huge amounts of money for quackery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burzynski_Clinic

The US has a similar relationship with Mexico; there are a string of clinics along the Mexican border offering unproven cancer treatments that would be difficult or impossible to market under US regulations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinica_0-19

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#207

Post by yardie »

jjordan wrote: post #79
jimrhods23 wrote: post #43

We need to get rid of health insurance companies. They are the reason all of our costs are massively inflated. The same thing is happening in education: universities know that a large percentage of students are getting financial aid, so the true costs are buried in a layer of bureaucracy. Fees and administrative fees continue to go up and the universities will always get their money. The students are then on the hook…

Maybe it's naive, but I always thought that Medicare played a big role in our inflated healthcare costs. Think about it: the number one demographic using the system has most/all their expenses covered by an entity that doesn't care how much things cost. Doctors and hospitals then price accordingly, and everyone else paying out of pocket gets screwed because the system is priced to favor its biggest users, who never s…

Medicare is very cost conscious. So much so that some care providers would rather not accept it.

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#208

Post by DanielBMarkham »

jfk13 wrote: post #191
pault wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason a reality show for funding healthcare is so plausible is that it would be filling a gap left by a corrupt and failing system. I don't think anyone believes that there is a gap in the administration of law enforcement and punishment in the US.

> I don't think anyone believes that there is a gap in the administration of law enforcement and punishment in the US. Take it up a level; I think quite a lot of people believe there's a serious gap in the oversight of law enforcement agencies in the US. Where's the public accountability? So - a reality show that follows police units, and lets the audience vote on which officers should be promoted, sacked, or jailed.…

I haven't seen an internet discussion yet where, whenever a gap is identified, somebody doesn't say something like "How can these people get away with this! There should be a law..." or something similar.

So sure. Find the gap, tell the sad story, then follow enforcement folks as they find the people responsible -- with the audience voting for whomever that is and what the punishment should be.

In the end the weak and vulnerable are rewarded, the evildoers punished. It's basically every Hollywood movie you've ever seen except the audience gets to vote on the outcome and real people are involved -- the ultimate in reality TV.

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#209

Post by arcticbull »

conanbatt wrote: post #184
arcticbull wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they absolutely are fixed by universal healthcare, as they are everywhere else on earth.

How is universal care going to reduce the shortage of primary care doctors? How is universal care going to eliminate patents for pharma? How is universal care going to make non-profit hospitals cheaper? How is universal care going to eliminate fee-for-service, which has the administrative costs that are the woes of care providers? How is universal care going to reduce healthcare spending?

(1) How is universal care going to reduce the shortage of primary care doctors?

I don't know enough about the reason for the shortage of doctors but I'd go out on a limb and say its probably not because they don't get paid enough.

(2) How is universal care going to eliminate patents for pharma?

It won't, and it shouldn't. Patents for pharma don't preclude successful implementations of universal healthcare anywhere else. There's a perception that in Canada "drugs are cheap" -- prescription drugs administered outside of hospitals largely aren't covered by OHIP. Provinces act as bulk buying groups and negotiate prices with pharma companies. You want to partake in the market, great, let's figure something out. It works surprisingly well. Patents are your temporary monopoly on creating an invention in exchange for sharing it with the world.

(3) How is universal care going to make non-profit hospitals cheaper?

By regulating fees for services, by lowering the price of drugs via negotiation and bulk purchase agreements, by eliminating marketing budgets, by eliminating insurance billing departments and by capping executive compensation. Hospitals and doctors are public servants elsewhere in the world, not elite rockstars who can bill as they so choose. That doesn't mean they're not well compensated.

Oh, and by socializing malpractice insurance. In the US high-cost states OBGYNs pay $85-200K/yr just in medical malpractice insurance. [1] In Ontario it's around $70K CAD.

(4) How is universal care going to eliminate fee-for-service, which has the administrative costs that are the woes of care providers?

By having a single table of rates that apply to everyone. Ideally with a single payer. This makes billing much, much easier.

(5) How is universal care going to reduce healthcare spending?

Everything I indicated above put together. If you want a concrete example Medicare does most of the above (they can't negotiate drug prices, and they're not single payer, and they haven't socialized malpractice insurance) but they're substantially more efficient. Medicare spends 2-5% of the budget on administrative, where private plans spend 12-18%. That's without recognizing some of the other savings I pointed out. [2]

[1] https://equotemd.com/blog/obgyn-medical-malpractice-insuranc...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/09/...

Re: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

#210

Post by arcticbull »

conanbatt wrote: post #183
arcticbull wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a fascinating perspective on medicine and research. Research should be paid for by the people and made available in the public interest. If a private entity does pay for the research they are entitled to protect their inventions for 20 years via the patent program. That doesn't mean buyers or buying organizations shouldn't be allowed to negotiate.

Research should be paid by the people with an interest to pay for research. And the government should put as little stops and costs into that process as possible. I would find it better that patents in pharma were eliminated, but also that the FDA approval process should be optional. If you want to save lives, you need to loosen up.

Oh, I see, having a conversation here probably won't be very productive. "If you want to save people, you should just let people try any old untested medical device, procedure or supplement, and wish them the best if that's what they want." That's how you kill people. There's a reason we have an FDA approvals process and it's not because the barbershop surgeons and snake oil salesmen were doing so well that big government needed to step in and ensure we didn't save so many.
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