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Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

bbc.com

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Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

#351

Post by jack_tripper »

withinboredom wrote: post #319
jack_tripper wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't work like that in Austria. Or my doctor's were unwilling to fake urgency to bypass the waiting system for me. Anyway, do you not realize the fault with the system in your logic? Because if everything becomes urgent in order to bypass queues, then nothing is urgent anymore. It doesn't fix the problem, you're just scamming the system to get ahead of the problem.

In my case, there was no faking urgency. I was pointing out that urgency puts you in a different line that gets priority (basically, cancellations from the longer line). For some other things, you can travel further away to where there is less demand for what you need, and if you're willing, you don't have to wait as long. These are all different "lines" and they're the ones doing the schedule.

Ok but urgency is a different kettle of fish. Life threatening cases get urgency everywhere and immediate care everywhere.

Let's focus on the other part you said, "waiting 1 year" if it's not urgent. 1 year sucks no matter how you spin it around.

Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

#352

Post by intended »

jack_tripper wrote: post #225
intended wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the 2024 Economics Nobel disproves this. It showed that nations with strong institutions create wealth - and it was a causative link they proved, not simply correlation.

How does that disprove what I said about abundance or lack thereof in socialized systems? Feels like an orthogonal issue. Socialized systems don't work without abundance. How you generate that abundance is orthogonal to socialism since even countries that are wealthy on paper suffer from shortages and long waiting times in public healthcare leading to a gray-market of using connections to get ahead or more private us…

Hmm. In the framing you are using, I would say that wealth is first generated from strong institutions - socialism or not.

Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

#353

Post by buellerbueller »

hermannj314 wrote: post #301
eleveriven wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that families have to crowdfund lifesaving care creates the vulnerability but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it

Whether taxes, health insurance, the Church, or gofundme, technically all life saving care is mostly crowd-funded. Maybe not in some Wild West dystopia, but generally the pooling of funds seems to work better than solo funding. Involuntary, progressive crowdfunding through government threat of violence (taxes) seems to work better than the other methods and most consider it humane. Americans have shown little interes…

Taxes: the price one must pay for civilization.

Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

#354

Post by pixl97 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #293
dev0p wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to knowingly and willingly steal money from children that need that money to live.

> It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to We’re not billiard balls. We have agency. Nothing causes a human being to choose to commit immoral acts vs. immoral acts. A human being may be put in a situation that may entice that person’s corrupt desires (we used to call this temptation), and responsibility while mitigating culpability is possible when someone’s rational faculties are overwhe…

This really doesn't explain why particular places and times in history have much higher crime levels. If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history... it has not been.

Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

#355

Post by MSFT_Edging »

laughingcurve wrote: post #309
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it The incentives are there. Our economy runs on incentives. Create a vulnerable group and the sharks smell blood in the water.

Incentives don’t remove agency. They might have incentives… but these are awful scum who deserve nothing but contempt

No but it provides a framework to begin thinking about ways we can protect the vulnerable from these contemptible but totally predictable bad actors.

For example, families forced to publicly beg for money to provide their sick children with treatment. What societal structures enable this situation to occur? Who is profiting off of this structure?

Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

#356

Post by Retric »

bko wrote: post #312
tchalla wrote: post #41

The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.

There's a benefit to having a service tied to the individual receiving the service. For starters it put price pressure and competition on providing the service. When someone else is paying for something you don't have a signal of efficacy, in terms of pricing or quality. To put another way, if I were facing some terminal illness I would want to have full control of picking the service even if it costs money. Sure, I…

You’re confusing ideology with the way the world actually operates.

The general public doesn’t have enough information to make informed decisions when it comes to healthcare. This alone completely removes the usual market forces from providing any benefit when it comes to healthcare.

Cancer treatments don’t inherently cost that much money, the systems to ensure people are actually getting useful treatments are expensive. You can’t trust companies selling cures. You can’t trust every doctor when they have financial incentives to offer treatments. Insurance companies are in an adversarial relationship with providing treatments, which doesn’t result in efficient supervision here. Lawsuits offer some protection, but at extreme cost to everyone involved. Etc etc.

The net result of all these poor incentives is single payer systems end up being way more efficient, resulting in people living longer and spending less on healthcare.

Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

#357

Post by philipallstar »

binary132 wrote: post #342
philipallstar wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be, but who decides what to work on? Capitalism puts risk and reward off to the side, to be done by experts. Why take the risk if you have no reward, and, conversely, why give someone a load of money to allocate if there's no risk for them if it fails?

the problem is your framing of the problem, not the questions you posed. it seems to me like you’re assuming that the only metrics for risk and reward are profit and cost. let me put it this way: do you find there to be any intrinsic value to the invention of antibiotics, or is such a development only worth the money that it can make for its inventor / discoverer? do you think that the cost of developing such technol…

I would say your problem is the framing :) You're assuming an outcome because you know antibiotics work. What is the incentive to spend $10m on research for a particular drug? It's not "because we know it ends up in a cure for X", because we haven't done the research yet. It's "because we think this will reach enough people to be useful and we'll commit a lot to this thing vs lots of other options."

Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

#358

Post by charles_f »

bko wrote: post #312
tchalla wrote: post #41

The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.

There's a benefit to having a service tied to the individual receiving the service. For starters it put price pressure and competition on providing the service. When someone else is paying for something you don't have a signal of efficacy, in terms of pricing or quality. To put another way, if I were facing some terminal illness I would want to have full control of picking the service even if it costs money. Sure, I…

> it put price pressure and competition on providing the service

This is simply not true. Healthcare in the US is comparatively much more expensive than countries offering subsidized healthcare with comparable or better outcomes(1).

> it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system

Capitalism can't work in a market that's completely consolidated, and where people can't offer to not buy your service. Healthcare in publicly subsidized countries is much less expensive because it's regulated. Compare the price of simple drugs like insulin or asthma medicine if you need an easy example. Pharma companies still happily sell there, which is to say that the difference is pure profit on the back of sick people who don't have a choice.

My biggest grief against this individual payment system is moral though. I don't see the virtue in a system where kids have to put on a show to receive care. Or anyone for that matter, you'll give to a kid because they're cute and generate empathy, does it make someone ugly with no family less deserving of getting cured from cancer?

1: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

#359

Post by throwaway198846 »

jack_tripper wrote: post #334
throwaway198846 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Becuase you made an argument with a single supporting example yet didn't name any name that could be used to verify what you said and let other people judge the case nor have you explained at any point of there was any court procedure in Israel about extradition and whatever he ended up extradited. How are we supposed to disscus particulars like that? Resorting to sarcasm so fast that you aren't interested in genuine…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

#360

Post by barbazoo »

reactordev wrote: post #295
fireflash38 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's money to be made on arbitration of orphan crushing! If I don't do it someone else will.

Introducing “The Automatic Orphan Crusher 9000” complete with conveyor belt fed chutes and titanium jaws, no orphan can escape! Just place a piece of candy…”

Does it have AI?
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