181–190 of 212 posts
I don’t understand why people volunteer at hospitals. These are like the opposite of non-profits.
> don’t understand why people volunteer at hospitals They’re undeniably helping. Refusing to help one person because it might benefit someone else is a touch petulant.
They should be a well funded public service that don't make a profit in the first place.
Random things like cancer and genetic diseases happen, but an awful lot of disease is caused by personal choice. Drinking, smoking, unhealthy lifestyle, etc. Personal behaviors are the cause of a huge portion of our healthcare costs. I feel the same way about the recent auto insurance increases being caused by the shopping behaviors of others. Expensive EVs get completely totaled in accidents, and now everyone has to…
Make those things expensive and subsidize the health system. And of course don't push people into these things in the first place. The smoking industry for instance should have never been allowed to be that powerful (and maybe smoking would not be such a good thing).
Also make the healthier alternatives cheaper (e.g. healthy food should be cheaper than junk food).
This way, you mostly solve the problem by making people with unhealthy choices fund the heath system they therefore need.
But in any case you can't really think individually: those people with unhealthy lifestyles have probably been collectively making your life better by being part of the society on which you depend for pretty much everything. Who knows, maybe someone you saved by subsidizing their cure will save you from a bus accident tomorrow. It's complex.
This strikes at an issue we haven't really addressed enough in non-profits: how much community benefit do they need to offer? A non-profit simply means that there are no investors who can profit from the business. However, I think we haven't really thought enough about how much community benefit they need to offer to justify being tax exempt - and it's a hard problem. For example, let's say I run a non-profit hospita…
Of course it's hard to measure that benefit.
The hike idea of a “nonprofit” is dumb and ripe with abuse. Nonprofits still have to pay payroll, the phone bill etc. Why have someone deciding that they don’t have to pay taxes? They can certainly just show a loss for year after year.
The idea is that we want more of what nonprofits do. No taxes is an incentive. A nonprofit that turns a profit is presumably putting it to work eventually, such as adding a new wing. It's not as if they can do stock buybacks because there isn't any. There are many ways this structure is abused but the idea isn't absurd.
The hike idea of a “nonprofit” is dumb and ripe with abuse. Nonprofits still have to pay payroll, the phone bill etc. Why have someone deciding that they don’t have to pay taxes? They can certainly just show a loss for year after year.
Because a non profit cannot keep the profits (duh), thus all the extra money has to go back into the economy. Since every purchase has VAT they are effectively already paying a tax on their profits and shouldn't be further taxed
The special category doesn’t add anything to a legit charity but does help out fraudsters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that in the article, non-profit hospitals paid their top three CEOs $20 million. "The top three hospital administrators there made nearly $20 million in salaries."
The CEO is an employee of the board. From a non-profit perspective that’s no different than spending $20 million on a building.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are religious organizations that own hospitals. I was flabbergasted when I found out about this recently. Why would you be surprised at this? In (e.g.) Christianity, caring for the poor and sick has been one of the central tenants since its inception, so why wouldn't formal institutions be organized doing so? Before the welfare state—which is a fairly recent invention—the largest organization would have been…
> It can reasonably be argued that the very idea of taking care of the poor, etc, only came into Western civilization because of Christianity. You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity, or warfare or various other things humans have sometimes done and sometimes not done... The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Chr…
You can also argue for a Flat Earth, but all your arguments given would be bad: given that slavery existed before Christianity arrived on the scene, and early Christians (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa) argued against it, that would contain a bunch of bad arguments as well. The history of Western thought as outlined in (e.g.) Siedentop's Inventing the Individual shows how Christianity moved the needle from slaves to serfs to individual freedom:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18740986-inventing-the-i...
This can further be expounded on in Brundage's The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession illustrating how everyone—pauper to Pope—was afforded a fair shake at justice (due process in law) going back to (at least) the Middle Ages:
* https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo562094...
See also Whitman's The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial for an interesting run-down on that topic:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2187985.The_Origins_of_R...
> The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others.
And how many orphanages did the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans have? (Versus leaving children outside to die from exposure.) Or hospitals:
> The declaration of Christianity as an accepted religion in the Roman Empire drove an expansion of the provision of care. Following First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE construction of a hospital in every cathedral town was begun. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil of Caesarea in modern-day Turkey towards the end of the 4th century. By the beginning of the 5th century, the hospital had already become ubiquitous throughout the Christian east in the Byzantine world,[3] this being a dramatic shift from the pre-Christian era of the Roman Empire where no civilian hospitals existed.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hospitals#Roman_Emp...
The current-day 'Western values' are Christian values. The most recent instance of non-Christian values being practiced in the West would probably be Nazism, and before that Nietzsche's observation that you either accept a supernatural entity and have (e.g.) Christian values, or you have nihilism and morals are arbitrary (in After Virtue, MacIntyre outlines why any one system (by Kierkegaard, Marx, Kant, Hume, etc) is just as arbitrary as any other (agreeing with Nietzsche in the binary choice that is available)).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are religious organizations that own hospitals. I was flabbergasted when I found out about this recently. Why would you be surprised at this? In (e.g.) Christianity, caring for the poor and sick has been one of the central tenants since its inception, so why wouldn't formal institutions be organized doing so? Before the welfare state—which is a fairly recent invention—the largest organization would have been…
Great points. But you missed the mark. The discussion is about taxes not if religions should own hospitals. The same poor people you mention have to pay taxes while the religious organizations get special cuts. If we are blind to how profitable and mutually beneficial relationships hospitals and insurance companies have, there is nothing else to discuss.
This sub-thread is, as I was commenting on:
> There are religious organizations that own hospitals. I was flabbergasted when I found out about this recently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are they demanding that you are not? Everyone wants to be healthy and they want a medical system which helps them get there. If partying is a problem, they should be able to talk to a doctor about it, and it should be paid for as a part of the services provided by society.
Your expectations are unreasonable. The medical system is extremely expensive to operate. Highly paid physicians should be reserved for delivering the most complex care. If consumers need guidance on making healthier lifestyle choices then doctors aren't even the best source. Utilize cheaper professionals for that stuff: therapists, counselors, social workers, dieticians, personal trainers, etc.