Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

>[copypasta] half understood content with additional spin

then what you are reading is not journalism.

Hardly surprising given the contrast to the level of journalistic integrity on display at the Beeb recently.

I have a theory that it doesn't. Which set of companies' logic is more likely?:

Is LadyCailin a "tree-hugging liberal"? LadyCailin clicked on a lot of Sierra Club and PETA ads, so yes. Good, we will add LadyCailin to this list.

Is LadyCailin an "extremist right-wing nazi"? LadyCailin clicked on a lot of prepper and gold ads, so yes. Good, we will *also* add LadyCailin to this other list.

OR

Is LadyCailin a "tree-hugging liberal"? Well, they clicked on these ads, so we think so, but then they clicked on these other ads, so we're not sure. Then she clicked on these other ads, now we don't have any idea.

Speaking from personal experience: Because some people have used my phone number and email address as their own, I get emails for one political party and text messages for the other political party.

It doesn't make my ad profile useless to the people sending me ads.

Give your phone number to both U.S. political parties. Congratulations you will get spammed by both. I doubt they are cross-checking.

Morals are fundamental to the process.

>Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent.

Morals, our value system developed by our own experiences that determine how we as individuals define right and wrong are the foundation of ethical boundaries that we impose on the groups that we form or join. Ethics are tied to morals.

Harm and intent are judgements that we make either as individuals or as group members when we look at actions and consequences (apply our moral and ethical guidelines) so that we can determine whether sanctions are necessary and reasonable based on our own shared value system.

Then you make a statement that appears to suggest that morals and ethics are unrelated when in fact, our individual morals form the foundation of ethical constraints that we impose on the groups in our societies just as they are the foundation for our religious value systems. In your either/or proposition here you apparently separate laws from morals. I disagree because laws, which follow from our own moral values and are just codified statements defining our own ethical framework so that we can all color between the same set of lines.

>Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application.

Then you impose the burden of religion or theocracy with your last statement. This statement implies to the casual observer that since you reject morals (in the second statement) as a basis of laws in favor of laws based on ethics that those which are based on morals exist only under a theocratic framework. Since group ethics follow from shared individual mores this does not make sense.

>Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.

Morals, ethics, laws are entangled and require no religious framework for their application though as your examples demonstrate, it is possible to create a system where mores shared and recognized by all are subverted to serve a religious doctrine which is itself a permutation of an ethical system used to capture local groups and to impose a specific reward/sanction value system to aid compliance.

EDIT: I think that your use of "Unless" makes it easy for a reader to interpret the second statement as part of an IF/THEN type of statement implying a conclusion that you have defined in your third statement.

You're explicitly allowing ethics to form the basis of laws in the first part of your second statement and then using the "but" to disallow moral judgments as a basis. This is the IF part of the dialog.

The Unless follows and ends up defining the THEN part of the conclusion so that a reader can interpret your statements to conclude that IF ethics can be the foundation for laws THEN a system of laws based on moral judgments must form the basis for a theocratic system, of course.

Sometimes a homeless person needs a blanket, or a bus ticket, or just a safe place for a few hours.

If you don’t want to give money, that’s your prerogative, but don’t simply assume food. Ask.

I’m old enough to remember the Moonies with flowers at the airport[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/Ls_qFlF2gHw?si=znZJsjki-QLq5J1A (this actually was inspired by real behavior)

Once you meet a real poor, it's obvious. You meet them outside of reasonable business hours, they are obviously a native, ashamed to ask for help and actually like to have a conversation.

The actual homeless people here have access to government support and shelters, those beggars don't as they're not here legally.

Some are genuine. People who went into debt, with health issue that prevented them from ever repaying it, fleeing from families so as not to burden them...

Smugglers who were found out, left with an unpayable amount of debt while the politicians that used to protect them went without punishment.

This always reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes short story - The man with the twisted lip

> They're easy to recognize, because they're very forceful in their begging, relying more on intimidation than compassion.

This is very common in India. These so called beggars harass and target people at their weakest and happiest moments like at funerals or birth of a child, wedding or housewarming parties. I've heard of these people earning enough to own houses in multiple cities.

I'll take "Things That Never Happened" for $200, Alex.

Public health systems vary with country. Private advocates say public sucks, until it is their turn to be scammed.

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.

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.

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 have three second-hand cancer experiences from family here in Australia (Dad, Mum and my half-sister - under 35/yo). All three were detected early thanks to regular checkups and screening (covered under Medicare), treated in major hospitals (Dad was in a rural hospital, Mum and half-sister in Metro major city hospitals) and are all alive and certainly not in debt. The biggest cost was parking at the hospital, drinks from the vending machine and the PBS medication (all PBS medicine costs $31.60 for adults, and $7.70 for concessions).

Any PBS medication has the full-cost price printed on the label for reference, more often than not the printed prices go from $300 - $2,000, but I remember that these aren't the full price anyway since our government collectively bargains for cheaper prices on OS medication).

I can't imagine having to pay for treatment AND the insane full price of medications, it must be so much more stressful for families going through cancer treatment.

Americans, don't let the media and your government tell you otherwise. Universal healthcare is cheaper [0] and more effective than whatever archaic system you have now.

I am so god damn proud of our system in Australia, it's not perfect, but damn it's so efficient for critical care, thank heavens for Medicare and the PBS.

Oh and for those that say "well doctors aren't paid very well"... they are. My brother-in-law is a surgeon and he's doing pretty well for himself, bought a new Audi last month for his wife, heading to Europe for a month-long holiday with his family and just moved into a new house.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?most_...

So then you would expect life expectancy in the US to be higher than in Germany, France, UK?

It is not.

As we all know, American insurance companies never deny coverage, nor do you ever have to wait in an American hospital. /s

Even with waiting lists, people get healthcare. They get better health outcomes per $ spent. America can provide excellent cutting edge healthcare, which is especially great if you can afford it. At some point, you have to decide whether having most of the bell curve taken care of, is more / less important in terms of rhetoric and priority.

[1]https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor... via https://truthout.org/articles/6-in-10-americans-back-medicar...

Now maybe when I stop working that may be a different comparison. And its not like there is a choice, voting for a D doesn't magically get German healthcare.

You need to show that it has a chance of working (literature etc...) and it will be reviewed by a doctor from the "Medical Service" which is independent from the Health Insurers.

If they decide it should be paid, it will be paid (which is most of the time the case).

Otherwise you can go through the social courts. (No court costs for the insured person. You can get a lawyer reimbursed if you're poor)

Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

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?

The same people that audit your taxes, roughly with the same consequences for lying. Except the IRS is far more likely to send unannounced auditors to NGOs than they are to send them to for-profit companies or individuals. It's more of a hassle to get/retain tax-free status than it is to simply pay your taxes like everyone else (as it should be).

> Is that it?

Let me guess: you haven't clicked on "view filing", which leads to a roughly 20-pages-long document.

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.

Pure misanthropic fantasy pretending to be sophisticated economics.

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

This is basically a religious belief at this point. It's how a perfectly ideal free market might work, but we don't have any of these, especially in healthcare.

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.

I trust government staff far more than the decision of unregulated, greedy corporations who literally exist to extract the most money from whatever process they're trying to sell you.

I'm sorry to tell you that this is, but unelected bureaucrats are constantly making health decisions on your behalf. You may not want government bureaucrats, but bureaucrats already work in your employer's HR department, deciding on which insurer to partner with, and with what benefits. They are at your insurance company, doctors office, and hospital administration, negotiating and deciding which procedures and drugs are available to you without ever asking for your opinion. Bureaucrats you didn't vote for infest drug company's research and finance offices, determining the availability and cost of your present and future care. None of these even pretend to act in your interests.

I'd rather have some government bureaucrat preside over all the other predatory bureaucrats. I sure as hell wouldn't be make well-informed decisions in the ER, or after getting a cancer diagnosis. Further, it is impossible to compare provider quality and final costs for elective, cosmetic procedures when I'm under no time pressure or stress.

But seems some prefer to believe a theoretical argument with no evidence to back it up.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”