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The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.
by tchalla 10mo ago
The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.
- dev0p 10mo agoIt'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.
- HlessClaudesman 10mo agoSome people seem to exist in a bubble where they believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them or their loved ones, so paying to improve society has no benefit to themselves.
- Hendrikto 10mo agoEven if you never personally needed health insurance (which is unrealistic), you’d still benefit from a better, safer, less cut throat society. Same with education. I am more than happy to pay taxes for an education system, even if I do not personally have children.
- catlikesshrimp 10mo agoThere are both private and public health care systems. Private care is a complicated scam, the small print is tens of times the contract. Public health systems vary with country. Private advocates say public sucks, until it is their turn to be scammed.
- mothballed 10mo agoWhat's 'paid' to the median child in education is a pittance compared to what the payers suck back out of them in old age during social security. Public education is largely a scam to put 'original sin' of debt of children to society so when they grow up there is some plausible explanation that "we're a society" and they must feed into the pyramid scheme.
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago> What's 'paid' to the median child in education is a pittance compared to what the payers suck back out of them in old age during social security. I'm not sure what nation you're from, but here, in the US, we pay a fairly significant part of our wages towards something called "Social Security." If we pay a lot, during our working time, we can draw more, after retirement (and it is nowhere near a living wage -it was never meant to be). In my country, we pay for education with property taxes.
- czl 10mo agoI hear you on intergenerational stuff. I just don’t think “public education is a scam” fits what most kids actually receive. Kids are not only getting classroom time. They inherit a whole baseline that previous taxpayers built: safer streets, clean water, courts that mostly function, vaccines, roads, libraries, stable money, and the accumulated tech and culture that makes modern jobs even possible. That bundle is huge, and it starts paying out long before anyone is old enough to “owe” anything. Also, adults are not literally trapped. People can move, downshift, opt out of a lot, or choose different communities. Most don’t, even when they complain loudly, and to me that’s a pretty strong signal the deal is at least somewhat reasonable. Not perfect. Not fair for everyone. But not a cartoon pyramid scheme either. If there’s a real fight worth having, it’s making the burdens and benefits less lopsided across generations, not pretending the whole social investment in kids is fake.
- DiscourseFan 10mo agoBut charitable causes perpetuate the problems by creating an industry around them rather than trying to find solutions for them. You can’t trust industry to solve civil problems like healthcare or housing, since they shouldn’t be problems in the first place. Its like trying to trust the free market to keep people from raping and killing each other—people will rape and kill with or without the market! Some level of coercion is necessary that free market principles cannot employ.
- sarchertech 10mo agoThis isn’t about free market vs single payer healthcare. These kids are from poor countries. Unless you’re arguing for rich countries to offer literal worldwide healthcare.
- gmerc 10mo agoYou mean what's happening right now in US healthcare?
- jonhohle 10mo agoThe fact that ACA is an insurance scam as opposed to healthcare reveals who is in control.
- ivape 10mo ago[flagged]
- cwillu 10mo ago“ Today a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last. This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health. We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age. This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness. I congratulate all of you ladies and gentlemen, all of you in the Congress, in the executive departments and all of you who come from private life, and I thank you for your splendid efforts in behalf of this sound, needed and patriotic legislation. If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time. ” --Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Atreiden 10mo agoI wish this was still what we meant by "Greatness" in America
- treetalker 10mo agoTrickle-down bread!
- lo_zamoyski 10mo ago> 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 overwhelmed, but the choice remains. Blaming systems for theft is scapegoating and an evasion of responsibility. (To make this clearer by distinction: a starving man taking bread from an overstocked warehouse during a famine is not choosing to commit an immoral act; he isn’t stealing in the first place, as some share of that bread is his).
- pixl97 10mo agoThis 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.
- lo_zamoyski 10mo ago> This really doesn't explain why particular places and times in history have much higher crime levels. This is neither here nor there. As I said, temptations can arise that make things more attractive to certain people given their conditioning and the habituation of their desires. But ultimately, at the end of the day, we can refuse to indulge even strong desires. To the degree that we are in possession of our wits, we are culpable. > If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history I have no idea how this is supposed to follow, or even what this means.
- h33t-l4x0r 10mo ago[flagged]
- vkou 10mo agoWhether or not non-productive individuals who don't do any work can own the means of production and reap the majority of the economic surplus from it is somewhat tangential to the question of who pays for whose healthcare. There are plenty of capitalist nations that provide public healthcare on a large spectrum of coverage and quality.
- nxm 10mo agoWith 2 month long plus waits for basic scans in countries like Canada
- trinix912 10mo agoStill better than months long fundraisers that aren't even certain to raise enough to cover the cost.
- stinkbeetle 10mo agoThe boy with cancer who is a main subject of the article and was scammed out of desperation to raise funds to cover his healthcare is in The Philippines. "Aljin says treatment at their local hospital in the city of Cebu was slow, and she had messaged everyone she could think of for help." The Philippines' constitution says access to healthcare is a human right. They have universal healthcare insurance, and public hospitals and medical centers. The next one is the girl from Colombia. Colombia has a mostly public (with regulated private) healthcare system with universal health insurance. The next one is from Ukraine. Ukraine has a government run universal healthcare system. Wikipedia tells me "Ukrainian healthcare should be free to citizens according to law," fantastic, but then it goes on, "but in practice patients contribute to the cost of most aspects of healthcare." In first world countries with social healthcare systems like Canada and Germany and Australia, people with complex illnesses do not get coverage for unlimited treatments either, or general costs of being sick (travel, family carers, etc). There are many cases of fundraisers for, and charities which try to help, sick people in need in these countries. Capitalism is not the reason not everyone with cancer is being cured and not chasing expensive treatments. Healthcare is something that you can throw unlimited money into. You'll get diminishing returns, but there will always be more machines and scans and tests and drugs and surgical teams and devices you can pay for. It doesn't matter the economic system, at some point more people will get more good from spending money on other things, and those unfortunate and desperate ones who fall through the cracks might have to resort to raising money themselves.
- nickpp 10mo agoI am curious: how else would you fund them? I sometimes donate & follow such cases and cancer treatments are expensive, especially experimental, custom ones. Worse, the rarer and more aggressive the disease - the more expensive the treatment and the slimmer the actual chances.
- hermanzegerman 10mo agoWith Universal Health Insurance as all other developed countries do
- nickpp 10mo agoExpensive 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...
- hermanzegerman 10mo agoI 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
- throw-the-towel 10mo agoThe German health insurance system also has a deficit of 6 billion euro, while doctors are leaving the profession. Do you think that's sustainable?
- pavlov 10mo ago
- Joker_vD 10mo agoNo, the root cause is that cancer exists. Or rather, that humans exist at all. It's all very well and dandy that you can say "actually, there is a larger structural problem underlying it all" when meeting something bad, but it doesn't make that particular bad disappear.
- NamlchakKhandro 10mo agoLLMs have found your post and ... You're absolutely right.
- KingMob 10mo agoAnd plane crashes are always caused by gravity.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- eleveriven 10mo agoThe 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
- xeonmc 10mo agoLocal man embezzles $20,000 meant to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine.
- 867-5309 10mo agothere is no trolley
- lionkor 10mo agoOrphan crushing machine operator: "If I don't do it, someone else will"
- selfmodruntime 10mo agoOrphan crushing proponent: "Why should I pay for orphans not to be crushed??"
- fireflash38 10mo agoThere's money to be made on arbitration of orphan crushing! If I don't do it someone else will.
- reactordev 10mo agoIntroducing “The Automatic Orphan Crusher 9000” complete with conveyor belt fed chutes and titanium jaws, no orphan can escape! Just place a piece of candy…”
- barbazoo 10mo ago
- huijzer 10mo agoWe have over the years raised billions (maybe trillions) for cancer treatments and we seem to have made negligible progress in actually curing cancer. Will it ever succeed? So maybe there is a root cause for your root cause?
- secretsatan 10mo agoThat doesn't seem at all right, even misleading, cancer survivability has significantly improved
- bruce511 10mo agoUnfortunately "cancer" is a very broad brush that covers a multitude of diseases. Plus the phrase "cure" does a lot of heavy lifting. People seem to see a win here as being "here's a tablet, all cancer is gone." So yes, we have spent an insane amount of money that can be ascribed to "cancer". (We've Also spent a lot on heart disease, diabetes and so on.) But yes, we have got an extraordinary return on money spent. Treatments and survivability of common cancers (breast, prostate etc) have gone through the roof. Better screening, better education and much better Treatments lead to much (much) better outcomes. Not all cancers are the same though. Some are harder to treat. Some rare ones are hard to investigate (simply because the pool is too small) but even rare cancers get spill-over benefits from common ones. In terms of "cure" - that's not a word medicals use a lot anyway. Generally speaking we "manage" medical conditions, not cure them. "Remission" is a preferred word to an absence of the disease, not "cure". In truth, we all die of something. Cancer is usually (not always) correlated with age, and living longer gives more opportunities to get cancer in the first place. So it's not like we can eradicate it like polio.
- HighGoldstein 10mo agoUntold trillions have been spent fighting wars and yet the cause of war hasn't been solved.
- nicce 10mo agoImagine if those trillions would be spent on research and healthcare
- throwaw12 10mo agoeasier said than done. Parents had enough problems to think about. In a similar way we can say that every shop in Amazon can create own digital shop themselves, but marketing, sales channels and distribution is not easy to acquire.
- ivape 10mo agoIs 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.
- input_sh 10mo agoYes, 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/ 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 executives.
- ivape 10mo agoHmmm. But who can audit the reporting? Evidently, this looks like something they can manipulate. Is the bottom line roughly: Money received: 1000 Money used for good: 800 Labor: 200 Is that it? Because I can assure you, that will not turn out well.
- sgerenser 10mo agoThe IRS can audit the reporting, and if you lie on egregiously you can even go to jail. Granted that is very rare, and we currently have an anti-IRS administration, but that’s the basic enforcement mechanism.
- Avicebron 10mo agoOk, so what your describing is a pinky promise. I'm guessing enforcement requires people which is magically _too expensive_ and therefore worthless.
- input_sh 10mo ago
- redleader55 10mo agoI think it's more complicated than this. People with incurable diseases are desperate and sometimes resort to unproven, dangerous and very expensive treatments. Unfortunately, most people don't have enough money for that, so in order to afford them they try to obtain donations to pursue the treatment they think will save them. Places like Turkey, China, etc are heavens for this kind of medicine.
- IAmBroom 10mo agoI think you meant to say "havens". Or, I hope you did.
- bko 10mo agoThere'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 would want "the best" specific to me and have someone else pick up the tab, but that's a fantasy, because no system or third party has as much skin in the game as me. That's why things like elective surgery are so cheap and competitive. The problem is why do these treatments cost so much? What prevents competition and innovation. And my argument it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system
- k1musab1 10mo agoTime 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?
- nickpp 10mo ago> 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 must treat any barriers of entry in a market with extreme care. The only "failed" or "captured" market is a strongly regulated one.
- jgeada 10mo agoMarkets can remain irrational, or colluding, far longer than you can stay solvent (or even alive). For example, while the Phoebus cartel only really lasted from 1925 through to 1939, 1000hr incandescent light bulbs remain the standard offering till present day. Profitable market manipulations are sticky. The whole notion that markets are efficient is just a mathematical construct that has become very dogmatic for people. But if you look into the details, markets are efficient under the assumptions of perfect information and infinite time. Neither of those conditions are present in the real world: we neither have perfect information nor infinite time.
- binary132 10mo agothieving and scamming are not caused by the existence of scarcity
- NedF 10mo ago[dead]
- micromacrofoot 10mo agoRight, how much are crowdfunding platforms and payment processors making off of the desperation of people who can't afford medical treatment?
- contravariant 10mo agoWhile that is indeed one of the causes, it does feel a bit like whataboutism to point it out on an article explaining the scam.
- IncreasePosts 10mo agoDo any real* societies have health care systems where everyone who needs cancer treatment gets the best available? * by real, I mean large societies that aren't propped up by some bizarre economic quirk...eg maybe the sultan of brunei can personally pay for everyone bruneian citizen to get the best cancer treatment. But that's not a scalable solution
- why-o-why 10mo agoThe replies to this comment make me so depressed.
- xnx 10mo agoPolitely, no. The root cause is 100% this a-hole scammer and his accomplices.