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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

#401

Post by lenkite »

nickpp wrote: post #381
k1musab1 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down. What is it that still makes you believe that two (or n-number) of providers won't collude to charge an astronomical amount for a life-saving treatment?

> Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down. Collusion and cartels never work on the long run. It's an unstable equilibrium, the incentive to reduce prices to capture more market is too great. > What is it that still makes you believe Competition. It's the only force keeping humans honest. That's why we mu…

> Collusion and cartels never work on the long run.

Define "long run" - they have been already proven to have worked for years and in some cases even decades.

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

#402

Post by almosthere »

rkozik1989 wrote: post #400
almosthere wrote: post #396

[flagged]

If you actually cared so much about victims of fraud you wouldn't be mad about a fraudster getting caught. You'd care about all the victims, not just the ones who were victimized by Somalis.

[flagged]

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

#403

Post by philipallstar »

marcusb wrote: post #243
philipallstar wrote: post #241

To be clear: the children are not scammed. They're (unwitting) paid photo props. The people giving are scammed out of millions.

I think the kid in the article who got $27k raised in his name for cancer treatment, received $0 in cancer treatment from those funds, and subsequently died of cancer definitely got scammed.

If I come up to you and show you a photo of an elephant and keep the $100 you gave me to help it, did you get scammed, or did the elephant?

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

#404

Post by cowpig »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #85

It's worth noting that if the suspect is in Israel, and he nerds to be tried in the US it might be an uphill battle trying to get him extradited. https://jacobin.com/2023/02/israel-law-of-return-extradition...

Side-note: imagine how much work law enforcement has put into these kinds of cases over the years only for the perpetrators of fraud to be pardoned.

Can't imagine how many people who work in law enforcement are furious with the current administration.

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

#405

Post by bko »

Retric wrote: post #356
bko wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expens…

> 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.

Why is it always "the general public" and not "I". Do you have enough information about decisions? Can I take away some of your rights? No, of course not. Everyone else is dumb except me.

I'm sorry but I refuse to believe some unelected, anonymous bureaucrat has my best interests in mind or can even know me anything about me such that I want to allow them to make health decisions for me.

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

#406

Post by bko »

k1musab1 wrote: post #318
bko wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down. What is it that still makes you believe that two (or n-number) of providers won't collude to charge an astronomical amount for a life-saving treatment?

Because if something sucks, someone comes up with something better and sells it for a profit. This is the history of pretty much every other good or service that is not heavily influenced by regulation and artificial barriers to entry

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

#407

Post by neilv »

jjcob wrote: post #57
throwaw12 wrote: post #34

I have reported these ads to YouTube multiple times, because I tracked down their scam websites, but YouTube didn't delete them anyway. Common pattern they had was: - similar or same domains - same messaging on their website YouTube could have taken action, but it choose not to

I'm still waiting for the tech world to wake up and realise that the online ad machinery and user tracking software that the brightest minds of our generation have been working on are just a way to efficiently connect scammers with their unsuspecting victims.

It would help to stop saying "brightest minds of our generation", like we stopped saying "smartest guys in the room".

They are not the brightest, just the ones who sold out others and grabbed the money, with ethics and morals not being sufficient personal barriers.

Calling them the brightest just feeds their belief that they merit the money, and they don't have to ask the real reason they have so much money.

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

#408

Post by Retric »

bko wrote: post #405
Retric wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expens…

> 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. Why is it always "the general public" and not "I". Do you have enough information about decisions? Can I take away some of your rights? No, of course not. Everyone else is dumb except me. I'm sorry but…

> Do you have enough information about decisions?

Me personally, No.

I don’t have enough information to make informed decisions here and you don’t either. Off the top of your head, how well educated is your dentist? You after all made an informed decision picking them. So how well did their background compare to others in your area. What where your concerns about their dental programs weaknesses and how was that offset by… Except no let me guess that never entered your mind did it.

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

#409

Post by bko »

jgeada wrote: post #384
bko wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because when you're dying you have no bargaining position. You can't just wait it out. And you're just a single client, whether you personally die or not does not meaningfully change their bottom line. So it is a highly asymmetric bargaining situation where all the incentives are poorly aligned. Of course it is exploitative.

Okay, you have no bargaining decision when you have N providers, so we should get rid of all providers with a single provider because only then you'll be in better bargaining position.

And now your death will have a meaningful change to the career bureaucrat or politician that made the decision that led to your death.

Because power of an individual vote is much more powerful than the power to take your business elsewhere. That's if you can find out the responsible party that makes these decisions and they're not appointed but elected, otherwise you'd have to mount an influence campaign on the politicians with 90% re-election rate to change said bureaucratic leader.

Makes a lot of sense.

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

#410

Post by cluckindan »

doodlebugging wrote: post #391
cluckindan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent. Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application. Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.

Social mores are synonymous with morals and it is our social mores or our moral values that form the basis of our legal systems where we use those mores (moral values) to define the actions that fall into the categories of right versus wrong and help us define how we should treat each other and what an appropriate societal sanction should be when someone steps over the line and does something to violate our social mo…

”To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong.”

No one has suggested that. My comment about theocracies was referring to the way religious morals direct lawmaking in theocracies, leading to things like death penalties for homosexual acts and zero tolerance of religious critique (denial of freedom of expression and persecution of political opposition).

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