71–80 of 233 posts
Dear Roy, It is unfortunate you are dealing with this. I am so sorry and hope for the best. The Handshake founders had an airdrop pre allocated for you in the Handshake Blockchain [1] so there is about $64,000.00 in there that you can claim under marples.name as of writing. [1] https://dns.live/top.html
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The problem with healthcare is that "basic minimum" is wildly subjective. Healthcare is still very expensive. There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really don't have that kind of societal overabundance, not yet. So how much do you spend per patient? Are there certain diseases that you don't spend any publi…
The only reason it costs millions to treat cancer patients is because of medical patents allowing companies to extract profit margins of several thousand percent (or more). In countries like Australia, where drug companies have to negotiate a fair price with a single government agency, the cost of treatment is an order of magnitude lower.
MRI machines are not expensive because of "patents". They are expensive because they are expensive devices that utilize superconducting magnets which need a constant supply of liquid helium.
Various drugs are expensive because (regardless of patents) there aren't enough patients to justify mass-production, so the price stays high. Sometimes even with mass production drugs are hard enough to make that the price still stays high.
Doctors are not cheap to train, so their services will always be expensive until we replace them with robots.
There are a plethora of reasons why medicine and healthcare is expensive beyond "patents" – remove patents from the equation and you can still easily spend millions per patient for various diseases.
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The way I see it, we already have that world, with capitalism functioning as a filter. I worked my ass off to reach financial independence, now I'm dedicating the rest of my life towards helping other people. I've proven to be capable of using the system to a degree where I can do whatever I want, which allows me the freedom to help other people full time. It's not a perfect system, but I doubt UBI will be much bette…
Much of that “desperate need” is created , or worsened , by capitalism.¹ It isn't just a matter of “working hard”. Say you're a brilliantly capable developer for three months out of every year, have around four months of chronic pain and bad mental health unpredictably breaking up the remaining time. Unless you're wealthy, capitalism doesn't let you get to a situation where your bad mental health doesn't disrupt that…
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The problem with healthcare is that "basic minimum" is wildly subjective. Healthcare is still very expensive. There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really don't have that kind of societal overabundance, not yet. So how much do you spend per patient? Are there certain diseases that you don't spend any publi…
> There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really don't have that kind of societal overabundance, not yet. My Mum in Australia had a rare and aggressive form of lung cancer, discovered at stage four. She had almost three years of radiation, chemo, all the associated drugs, scans, treatments and even two diffe…
The decision is simple for you, because it's your mom. The decision is not a simple one for a society.
We do not yet live in a post-scarcity world. Spending on one thing by necessity means less spending on something else.
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The problem with healthcare is that "basic minimum" is wildly subjective. Healthcare is still very expensive. There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really don't have that kind of societal overabundance, not yet. So how much do you spend per patient? Are there certain diseases that you don't spend any publi…
This complexity was one of the major reasons the Affordable Care Act’s public option was eliminated. There was going to be a group of people who made these decisions. But when the public found out they were deemed as “death panels” that would get to chose who would live or die.
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UBI + Government funded, free healthcare for everyone. It makes no sense that, with all the excess industrial supply that we have today, that we refuse to provide a basic minimum standard of living for all human beings.
Most (all?) advanced countries have government funded free healthcare for everyone. It’s UBI that’s the hurdle.
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The only reason it costs millions to treat cancer patients is because of medical patents allowing companies to extract profit margins of several thousand percent (or more). In countries like Australia, where drug companies have to negotiate a fair price with a single government agency, the cost of treatment is an order of magnitude lower.
This is not true. MRI machines are not expensive because of "patents". They are expensive because they are expensive devices that utilize superconducting magnets which need a constant supply of liquid helium. Various drugs are expensive because (regardless of patents) there aren't enough patients to justify mass-production, so the price stays high. Sometimes even with mass production drugs are hard enough to make tha…
Of course, if these treatments are more common at the same price, the social costs might be too high and we'd have to let people live or die depending on their financial situation or ability to fundraise.
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Cancer requires clinging to glimmers of hope. Yes, he felt that way at the time and yes, he wrote it down, but these improbabilities are all anyone ever has, its not over till it’s over. I read that post too, going from a tiny undetectable bump under the skin that only his partner noticed, to unbearable pain pressing against his spine making him unable to sleep and think clearly. It seems like 4 months were wasted ju…
> Cancer requires clinging to glimmers of hope. Does it, though? Is there anything that suggests the mental state of the patient is a factor in the efficacy of treatment? Pieter Hintjens has written a bit against the "fight" model.
I've been using a website for 15 years or so that had a similar situation. The creator/maintainer got a short prognosis, but made an effort to ensure that his service would outlive him. Even though I'll never meet Josh from Spamgourmet his work continues to make my life a little bit easier on an almost daily basis. I hope Roy's legacy is able to continue in the same way and that he gets some comfort from that.
Despite having only months to live, Josh was working on a plan to shut the site down in an orderly fashion as long as he was still able to notify all users, but then his son stepped in and took over part of the operation.
I’d like to donate but the PayPal app just spins :-/ I’ll try web