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Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

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

#361
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there even standard practices to audit the effectiveness of charity? No accountability means they will always operate like a black box, and I’ve always thought black boxes create misalignments. Money goes in, and good feelings come out. It certainly serves a purpose, but not the intended one.

Yes, it's called Form 990 and it is a requirement to publish it on a yearly basis to retain non-profit status. You can search for any US-registered NGO here for example: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their execu…

> To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their executives.

It's dubious to say Google "competes" with Mozilla, because they pay Mozilla to develop Firefox to avoid antitrust issues, but it's easy enough to find CEO compensation for public companies.

https://www.sec.gov/answers/execcomp.htm

Of course people have published the numbers for well known companies:

https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/highest-paid-ce...

Also, "Other companies pay their CEOs ridiculous amounts, so we're going to," is a poor justification, and just shows Mozilla execs are there to enrich themselves, and don't really care about the browser or community. But I guess they can't spend all of the money on Pocket and AI.

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

#363
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expensive health treatments can easily bankrupt any western government. None of those developed countries can afford to spend their money indiscriminately on them. So instead they turn to waiting lists, death panels and very often saying no but not in your face (since that is politically frowned upon) but thought delays and countless committees and bureaucracy until the patient expires...

I know that's what you hear and read on Fox News and other "News Sources" daily. But here in Germany, there are no "death panels" or long waiting times for cancer treatment. Also we don't need "pre-auth" and other Bullshit before we start standard treatments. The real death panels are sitting in your Insurance Companies Offices as seen by the news coverage around United Healthcare et al lately

I live in Eastern Europe and my "news sources" are friends in hospitals asking us to donate for desperate causes.

Governments-paid treatments are god-sent but many times the funds are limited so they only cover older, cheaper treatments. Approval and funds for newer ones come so late, sometimes too late.

Germany has one of the most developed economies on the planet so naturally has more spend on healthcare. But that can change and when the money is tight, tough choices have to be made. I'd make those choices for myself rather than trust the State to do it for me.

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah.. so whose brain is washed with propaganda, yours or mine? Definitely mine right? Your convictions are as extremely deluded as a Palestinian suicide bomber's, to my ears.

Tell me which of the claims of fact I'm wrong about.

That's easy. All of your sentences in the original post sound insanely misinformed and wrong. I suppose now that I've made an assertion it's my duty to post links to articles disproving you? The rule is, you're the first to make the claims, you need to back them up.

But with the wonderful world of the Internet, we can find anything as "proof" that anything we claim is true. Want to see proof that the earth is a flat sphere? I can do that. Tons of videos and blogs from nutjobs out there. If you want to find proof about 10000 raped and killed children, I bet you can find blogs and tweets from Elon Musk's soup of shit.

Ironically I'll trust linked ChatGPT or Gemini responses more than tweets and blogs (but not from Grok, an AI that claims Elon Musk is more athletic than LeBron James). But I bet you already know that these AI systems are censored to not tell the world about those things you already know is happening, because these systems are controlled by the man!

Show me you're not an white-supremacist extremist nutjob...

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

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish I could have waited one year. 0/10, would not recommend that proceedure. FWIW, it's a very common, usually also scheduled long in advance (even in the US). Pretty much every man has to get one over 40; so it makes sense the wait list is long unless you've got something else going on.

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

#366
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The German health insurance system also has a deficit of 6 billion euro, while doctors are leaving the profession. Do you think that's sustainable?

Not everything needs to be profitable.

I lived under the very system this principle enabled and I can tell you that without the profit motive we were cold and starving since there was no motivation for people to work and sew clothes or grow food.

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

#367
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They are arguing that nepotism caused the lack of abundance, instead of the lack of abundance causing the nepotism as you are arguing.

Both are true. Because when the abundance runs out, people start using nepotism to get what they need. You can see it in the tech job market now. More and more good jobs are only through networking. Meritocracy alone was enough during the times of abundance.

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

#370
post #41

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

Right, how much are crowdfunding platforms and payment processors making off of the desperation of people who can't afford medical treatment?
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