Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickthemagicman | Hacker News Reader

I quit donating to charity after I found out that Red Cross only gives a small fraction of its donations to charity the rest is spent on Administration costs.

Just like colleges and the healthcare industry.

Got to pay all those vp's of vp's of vp's.

View on HN

It's not a "small fraction". You're probably confused with Susan Komen. Red Cross has it's faults, but if they can serve more victims by hiring more effective people with 6 figure salaries, aren't they doing more good?

By analogy, the main rocket on the space shuttle has two stages of fuel pumps...powered by rocket fuel. So you could say that's inefficient, why not run fuel straight from the tanks into the rocket. But it can't pump enough in to get enough thrust unless it uses some of its fuel so that it could burn even more fuel.

My personal charity gripe is the blood bank. They make it out like you're a hero, meanwhile they bill the patient thousands of dollars. They hide behind "but people with disease might donate if we paid them", well they pay people for plasma. And they have to test for HIV anyway (not only that, HIV isn't even a death sentence anymore). If they want my blood they can donate it to the patient or give me 50% of what they bill.

So every blood drive is basically free money for the medical industry. We get the feeling of doing good while they charge the patient probably excessivly large amounts of money behind out backs Thays so sleazy. My aunt got bit by a rattle snake and her emergency room costs for one afternoon in the E.R were 48000 dollars. All they did was give her anitvenom and observe. I'm sure that would cost next to nothing in another country. Such a sketch industry.

As to the Red Cross, It also feels pretty sketch.

https://www.npr.org/2014/12/04/368453320/red-cross-misstates...

There are very significant issues with the Red Cross and how it spends money. For example: https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...

> NPR and ProPublica went in search of the nearly $500 million and found a string of poorly managed projects, questionable spending and dubious claims of success, according to a review of hundreds of pages of the charity's internal documents and emails, as well as interviews with a dozen current and former officials.

> The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people, but the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six.

By all means, donate to a deserving charity. The RC probably isn't one.

I remember that story when it broke. But I thought there was a good reason why they didn't build houses. I can't remember, but it was something like the people didn't own the land they lived on, so building would have been giving the land owner a free house, not a hurricane victim. Or else armed thugs would steal any structure built.

That's a good reason not to donate to the red cross. There are other organizations out there with extremely high efficiency ratios and noble missions, and you shouldn't let one highly publicized rotten apple poison the rest.

You quit donating to charity because one specific charity is egregiously bad? Isn't that a bit like ceasing to eat because you had something yucky once?

... one specific charity was accused of doing something bad.

The Red Cross is frequently accused of having excessive management costs and mismanaging funds; if you do a little research (a) they appear to have reasonable overhead (b) a lot of the accusations seem to come from competing charities with higher overheads.

Not transparent enough for me!

https://www.npr.org/2014/12/04/368453320/red-cross-misstates...

Just out of curiosity, can you find a source for the "26% spent on fundraising" figure? Charity Navigator only goes back to the 2000s and never shows anything near that.

Charity Navigator: https://www.redcross.org/about-us/our-work/international-ser... Haiti spending: https://www.redcross.org/about-us/our-work/international-ser...

Yeah I just donate to actual organizations that are changing the world like the ACLU.

...

They're a charity. You didn't stop donating to charity.

Thanks for the correction!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com