"The campaigns with the biggest apparent international reach were under the name of an organisation called Chance Letikva (Chance for Hope, in English) - registered in Israel and the US."
Chance Letikva is registered with the US IRS as a charity. They've filed a Form 990. Location is Brooklyn, NY. [1] Address is listed. It's a small house. It's also incorporated as CHANCE LETIKVA, INC. in New York State. Address matches. Names of officers not given. There's one name in the IRS filing, listed as the president.
Web site "https://chanceletikva.org" has been "suspended". Domain is still registered, via Namecheap.
Some on the ground digging and subpoenas should reveal who's behind this.
The article says they visited both the US and Israel registration addresses and didn't find the organisation's offices. I was impressed by the amount of "on the ground digging" by the journalists here!
It's really not that hard to find someone to go to check a address, redditors do this all the time. It should be expected as basic journalism, especially with high claims.
Check an address and interview anyone resident there in a way that gets useful answers to the questions at hand.
In this instance it was a bust because no one useful was there. But if the mastermind behind the whole operation was there you’d want a professional to ask them questions. Because once they know they’ve been rumbled they’re probably going to disappear.
Why does every discussion have to wind up with a digression thread about how "real" or, even worse, "basic" journalism is something from a sepia-tinged golden age of muckrakers getting blitzed with Dorothy Parker? People are trying. There's lots of shıt masquerading as journalism, but this ain't it.
Pretty impressive work. I always wondered what all those correspondents do that news organisations employ all over the world. I guess that's one of those things.
I’m… not sure what’s there to wonder, really. They do the exact same thing as reporters back home: journalism. Meaning write articles and do investigative work required for writing articles, whether going to press conferences, finding people to interview, or something like this, called investigative journalism.
A news piece in a foreign affairs section is likely to have been written by a correspondent because that’s what their job and specialty is. If it’s an op-ed or a commentary or analysis piece, even more so. It’s not like you can do good journalism without boots on the ground, no matter how connected the world is these days.
I agree - I noticed this as well. Also feels like it such an upsetting story that someone was motivated to really to the bottom of it. They also probably knew that if the story got traction people would be running down there own checks.
I mean it does feel like that should be standard operation for journalism on bigger stories but I think our expectations from journalists have really fallen over the last 5 years with all the slop coming in.
The behavior that this article outlines is outrageous. But it makes me uncomfortable for this to be the kind of place where anonymous strangers self-investigate lurid allegations against random accused, no matter how disturbing the allegations.
Most of us don’t have the tools or the time to do it properly, at least on here; and that can end badly [0]. It rarely achieves a thoughtful considered outcome, and there are other places to do that kind of thing if you want to—some of those communities, like Bellingcat, seem pretty well-practiced in their methodologies, and their findings seem to have accordingly high impact.
is it normal for these places to have 0 liabilities? That alone seems like it ought to raise a flag - if you're not spending the money...
Edit: Clicked through some of the other entries in there and yeah, usually liabilities are relatively close to incomes. How the system didn't catch this is beyond me.
Sometimes just a little bit DNS research can yield a lot of useful results.
Looking at the passive DNS records for the domain chanceletikva.org shows it references the email address davidm@yeahdim.co.il.That email address is tied to multiple website registrations for a person by the name of David Margaliot, and also Shoshana Margaliot.
A search on this name in Domaintools finds the name David Margaliot tied to at least 25 domains, including ezri.org.il, which is a very odd site that features a huge image of a young child who is apparently in the hospital holding a gift wrapped box with a teddy bear. The site asks for donations but has a strange mission statement: Ezri Association promotes life-saving innovation through a surveillance drone project for emergency response teams, the establishment of an international medical knowledge database, along with other technological initiatives".
I'll probably continue the rest of this in a follow-up story.
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.
Oh, they know that. It's very lucrative. At this point it's scams all the way up to the US presidential cryptocurrency.
However it's also a tricky business to be the adjudicator of what is and isn't a scam. You're going to have to deal with a lot of complaints from "legitimate businessmen".
I'm waiting for the non-tech world to wake up and hold companies that act as willing accomplices liable for the crimes they tolerate on their platforms.
The tech world knows this. They are raking in money off of these scams. People with a rudimentary moral compass leave, those without stay, which makes it even less likely that industry will self-sanitize. The rest of society, out of survival instinct if nothing else, will have to force it to stop anti-social and fraudulent practices. Same as many other industries.
I'm waiting for the tech world to realize that "the brightest minds of our generation" don't actually work at google, because if you are that enormously bright you don't want to work for ads or in an opaque megacorp.
Why does anyone think a brilliant mind would enjoy that? So they could make a little bit more money?
Do you honestly think brilliant people, the smartest of our generation, care about money?
IME, Google software devs aren't even the brightest minds in the parking lot.
Completing large engineering projects says nothing about individual capability, and nothing about how Google deploys shitty AI moderation and about how Google employees insist it's great and perfect and never does anything wrong gives me any reason to believe they are even competent.
It's literally a meme that people started repeating in earnest without a second thought.
Don't you think a brilliant person would work somewhere, like, interesting?
In economies where you aren't rewarded for individual competency (because software management couldn't pick out individual competency if it screamed at them), highly competent people aren't going to play the game, they are just going to find something to pay the bills and work on hobbies.
The smart people are often where the money isn't, because they are rarely driven by monetary pursuits.
There was a period when I was constantly showered with these ads whenever I visited YouTube. It quickly became clear that it was some kind of scam, but YouTube didn't do anything about it for years.
Yes, which is one of two reasons why I use a blocker called adnauseum. It an adv locker that “clicks” on every single ad it sees, as well as hides it from my view. This makes my ad profile useless, and also costs them money.
you should probably think about the fact that ad platforms expect and design for fraudulent and bot clicks before you assume that this actually costs anyone money.
The question is, is the scammer taking donations from kids with cancer or Google the more worthy entity to profit from the situation? It's a tough decision.
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.
see Meta, which is operating like a crime syndicate, leveraging higher fees on scammers "to discourage" them, retaining their impact on supply side auction prices and well knowing many don't pay with their own credit cards.
They didn't care about being a huge driver behind a genocide, why would they possibly care about people getting scammed out of cancer fundraiser donations. Once you find out that someone has worked at any point for Meta past say, 2020, you know everything you need about them.
Same. Even if they delete one it's usually delayed for 2-3 days. The worst part about scam ads is that they surface a day later from a different account with 0 changes to the ads themselves. You would think Google would fingerprint the assets but in the end they just don't care.
There's no incentive for them to comply with your request. Like Facebook, scam ads are a revenue stream for Google. The profitability usually offsets any negative PR or fallout that results from these platforms turning a blind eye to the point where their budget accounts for some percentage of scam income, leaving them to pick and choose when to take action while they actively make their platform increasingly hostile to users who want to protect themselves from said ads.
They also had a pattern of loudly crying kids in the beginning of the video, I thought they were faking, after a month they changed the style of start.
Yep. Lately I've been getting dozens of scam ads for pulse oximeters being sold as Glucose meters, with a big ol' FDA logo plastered over the top of the video. A flagrant violation of regulations around medical device marketing.
Here's Google's response:
We understand you are concerned about the content in question, but please note that Google's services host third-party content. Google is not a creator or mediator of that content. We encourage you to resolve any disputes directly with the individual who posted the content.
What struck me is that when I reported an ad with an Elon Musk deepfake selling some crypto scam, I got an email back from Google saying that after reviewing the video they found nothing wrong. I don't understand how this is not actionable in court- I mean, you did act on a report, you declare you manually reviewed the content and that it's good for you? I don't get it.
Really makes me think that the justice system should have a wide margin for discretionary sentencing. I get that in some sense fraud is fraud, but there is one thing preying on people's greed, and another preying on compassion, charity and vulnerable children in desperate need. Scams based on greed (or other vices) are in some sense limited crimes, since their success punishes what is low, but scams based on what is best in us are much wider in their social impact, since they also disincentivize what is most noble.
The argument is that scams based on exploiting goodness causes a lot more harm compared to the ones based on exploiting greed. Because it trains people that doing good deeds is not worth it (they might be scammed.) And even if the rate of such scams are low, just reading about them makes people afraid of potential consequences of doing good deeds. So I absolutely agree that such scams should have very harsh punishments, because they do not only have immediate consequences, but they degrade trust in our society.
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 mores or does something that we consider immoral.
By comparison it is pretty obvious that most societies have similar moral values - stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, charity is right, etc. in spite of the differences in religious interpretations that end up preventing so many of us from simply coexisting as equals.
To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong. Morals are simple rules that humans have developed over generations of interactions that allow them to apply reasonable judgements to fellow humans based on observations of how those fellow humans interact with strangers and kin.
Religions likely have as part of their foundations, an explicit acknowledgement or recognition of the societal mores that governed human interactions before any one of our ancestors invented or postulated out loud about phenomena that they all experienced but did not yet have the science or understanding of the natural world to reliably explain, thus compelling them to invent entities that controlled those phenomena. Those who chose to believe in these inventions could rest easier knowing that something somewhere was either looking out for them or they could be wary of angering that entity to prevent bad things from happening to them or their kin.
In short, morals and ethics exist outside of any religious dogma so the suggestion that they are a constraint imposed on any society through religion is simply inaccurate since it is not necessary for any person to be religious in order to hold another accountable .
”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).
You started off with a suggestion that on the surface implies that morals and ethics are unrelated to perceptions or definitions of harm and intent.
>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.
Indeed! However, law is not a definition of moral right and wrong; rather, it is a spatiotemporally varying definition of societal and judicial rights, permissions and restrictions of conduct which are usually grounded in the locally prevailing morals.
Law in a democratic society is a manifestation of so-called social contracts considered binding for members of that society.
However, law in a non-democratic society can be the complete opposite, to the point of enabling immoral conduct, including but not limited to legal crime, persecution of political opponents, ethnic cleansing and offensive warfare.
It’s subjective. It’s always subjective. A person can convince themselves they’re right to conduct all sorts of heinous acts if they simply alter their perspective enough.
> maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent
Retribution is a real component of justice. When it's ignored, people take the law into their own hands.
Harsher sentences for despicable crimes makes sense. Automatic sentence enhancers are cruel. But automatically giving the judge the power to sentence for longer based on the victim's profile is not.
Great journalism. I hope the authorities bring this person to justice and arrest them for fraud.
I saw this ad a few months ago on YouTube and flagged it as a scam when I couldn’t find much information about the company. Never donate money through random sites. If you use platforms like https://www.gofundme.com/, at least you have the option to file a complaint if you find something suspicious.
> I hope the authorities bring this person to justice and arrest them for fraud.
They haven’t scammed nor inconvenienced a rich, well-connected person, so unlikely anything will happen. Remember that online fraud is effectively legal (10% of Meta’s revenue is from scam ads by their own estimates) as long as you only target the poor.
These scam campaigns have been going for years with people operating in the field across many countries - if there was an incentive to stop this it would’ve been done already, but since everyone’s making money why bother?
> file a complaint if you find something suspicious
Which will be piped to /dev/null, just like reporting scams on social media.
Tangentially related - If you aren’t aware, there are out of court settlement bodies which exist as part of the DSA.
If you have content which is removed, or a moderation decision you wish to dispute, you can go to one of these bodies to get it reviewed. It cannot go to dev/null.
This doesn’t address whether flagging scams resulted in action. The bigger picture is the mismatched incentives for tech. Platforms are not quite incentivized to care about responding to user complaints, and do not give out information that lets us know what is happening independently.
To get to the point that complaints are actioned, those incentives need to be realigned. The ODS pathway, if used more frequently, increases that revenue and market pressure.
The ODS system is new, and I expect it will have tons of issues to discover. I wouldn’t be surprised it it is already weaponized.
On the flip side, platforms haven’t been tested or queried in this manner before.
As a not-Israeli Jew the reluctance of the Israeli government to send alleged criminals for trial overseas doesn’t make me happy, but I also remember that there are some reasons for this.
Unfortunately many countries have blanket extradition bans. US is one of the worst - it caused a lot of tension in the past when they wouldn't extradite IRA bombers but got UK to agree to extradite anyone US wanted.
No, but the pattern of criminals of Jewish background fleeing to Israel for protection after commiting a crime, is too often to ignore.
Same thing happened in my post communist country and the neighboring country too. Perp stole tens of millons through a banking scam in the 90s, then fled to Israel because he was Jewish and claimed persecution.
At which point should the pattern be acknowledged?
And did you ask Israel for extradition? What his name was? And is this pattern actually unique to Israel or would you find other examples of people escaping to where the law can't reach them? If Israel wanted to convict a dual citizen who fled to your country, what is the required process?
Everyone associated with this seems to be Jewish. Israel is a haven for criminals of all types, we just care extra about any haven for pedos and rapists, but white collar criminals are terrible, too
Yes most are really scams, often also adults that claim for their poor small children with the same sign for decades (maybe that are eternal young children, that also are stable across different parents, because they also share that across different people sometimes) or whole families, that suddenly surround you. I mean these are also poor people, but the money you donate to them, won't go to them.
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.
Sadly, this. There are even networks. I know a person who begs on a specific interval of a subway line, has been for at least a decade, and has been pretty violent towards actual beggars who did not know the rules.
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.
Some of those are also human trafficking victims (at least in Europe). There are gangs that illegally bring them over the border, force them to beg on the streets, and take the money they get.
The actual homeless people here have access to government support and shelters, those beggars don't as they're not here legally.
The first trick is having a bit of local knowledge. If (say) they're outside begging money "for food" at the same time as the local homeless shelter is serving a free dinner...yeah.
> there are some people who will dress up homeless but are actually just begging for profit.
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 think parent commenter was talking about random people "working"[1] for charities and stopping you on the street. If one wanted to donate, why would they do it through a stranger on the street and not directly to their website?
However, if you give a homeless person money and they go buy drugs, I think you effectively made them poorer. I would advise giving them food instead.[2]
[1]: Word in quotes because there is no way to verify their identities.
[2]: I've literally seen a person asking for money get offered free fries at McDonald's and denying them. Beggars don't get to be choosers.
Let them buy what they need I think. They dont have the ability to stop being addicted in 60 seconds because logic. If that were possible we could collapse the entire weight loss industry, gambling, need for AA and NA meetings, entire narco infrastructure at the click of a finger.
Not every homeless person needs or wants food at every single time. Certainly not fast food fries covered in salt that get nasty if not eaten right away, that’s not a meal.
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.
Who am I to judge what they do with their money? I couldnt possibly know if they are allergic to something. Also not every homeless person is an addict. Even beggars can have agency over their resources. An addiction is not for me to solve, first things first should be to cover their basic needs, only then you can work on an addiction. Money is the easiest thing to give.
As a former homeless person, good on you. I will say, don't feel pressured to, a chat or a nice comment actually means as much, it reminded me I was human.
Oh its usually accompanied with a chat, here in Germany often times they just need some money to stay the night somewhere. However some just tell you whatever story to get their next high. Whatever floats their boat, to me its just sad that such a rich country doesn't help them while actively making being homeless harder for them. It's almost christmas and really cold out there, I know there are so many people freezing to death. What good does my money do when I invest it into some imaginary assets or kept it on my bank forever...
That can cause perverse incentives such as children taken out of school so they can beg full time, such as this - https://archive.is/32Btf five of them are now dead as a result.
In some American cities I’ve noticed a lot of seemingly homeless women with kids standing on street corners, that are actually Romanian scammers (“gypsies”). People have caught them drugging their babies to make them compliant with sitting under the hot sun all day. And at the end of the day they climb into a Benz because they aren’t actually in need. It really sucks for the people who are truly in need.
These are really common in Germany as well. It is often the same people in the same places and they have business hours, coffee breaks and shift rotations.
True should just ignore them like reasonable people and let them freeze in winter so the authorities can pick up their bodies and dispose of them.
Did you ever buy a friend of yours a wine for birthday? Or did you go to McDonalds with your kids? Congrats you contributed to their suicide.
I've worked with an organisation that was on the receiving end of a popular charity, and they definitely got something (new playground equipment for disabled children). Can't say how efficient the charity was, but there are definitely charities that don't keep all the money for themselves.
Why should somebody donate to somebody else's luxuries if they could spend it on their own luxuries?
Anyway, yes, direct donation is always better, be it to some random guy down on his luck in the street (unless they have just missed their bus and need ticket money for the next one and so for 3 years in the same bus station) or to some trusted person/group who actually does deliver the stuff to the area. Way too many random NGOs have popped up in Europe promising to do good things, just transfer money to their bank account and they will take care of it all for you.
Again some Israeli connection in a scam, search google and browse "fintelegram" you will see the biggest and baddest financial crime actors are all based in israel.
So what? Every Israeli now is a scammer? Are you racist?
Do you know how many scammers are from India? Do you know how many scammers are from the US? Jeffery Epstein was from the US, is every US citizen now a pedophile?
How the country origin is related to them being scammers? They're scammers because they're shitty people, it's not related where they're from.
The vast majority of fraud have noting to do with Israel wage theft is enormous everywhere and have nothing to do with Israel, the biggest fraudsters in history (mostly scams on USA investors like Theranos and 2008 crisis) according to quick Google have nothing to do with Israel. The obvious attempts to mafacture a negative image couldn't be more obvious.
"They were always looking for beautiful children with white skin." But most of the children in the video appear to be non-white. So they're not even good at anti-affirmative-action?
Great investigative journalism. And so, so sad that these hopeful parents were scammed. Terrible that someone could do this to a child. The conclusion doesn’t give me hope though. The alleged scam organizations didn’t respond to questions and … that’s it? No one is going to jail?
there's also "remand" or detention before trial. One example where this is common is when there's a flight risk, or a risk the subject will influence the investigation.
I am strongly against the death penalty, so I dont want to imagine a scenario in which this happened. Maybe there should be regulations in place making it so that only registered groups can start donation campaigns. Its a legislative failure. So many crimes are legislative failures...
That's probably too harsh, unless it can be proved without doubt that exactly and only due to this X (many) children died and would (with high probability) live otherwise. Thats China level of dealing with similar situations, plus probably harvesting organs for additional profit afterwards and sending bullet receipt to the family.
There are many existing punishments - go after all their wealth, family and connected business, trusts etc. Simply ban them from western financial world. Publicly shame them and make their name a curse to spit on. Properly harsh jail and making sure all inmates know who arrived, I wouldn't expect kinder treatment than pedophiles get. And so on.
The 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
This framing is disingenuous. We're meant to say "tear down the orphan-crushing machine!" But in this case there's no machine, only human mortality. You're substituting a simple question ("why are we crushing orphans?") for a complex one ("who should pay for poor children's healthcare?")
No but it provides a framework to begin thinking about ways we can protect the vulnerable from these contemptible but totally predictable bad actors.
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?
Whether taxes, health insurance, the Church, or gofundme, technically all life saving care is mostly crowd-funded. Maybe not in some Wild West dystopia, but generally the pooling of funds seems to work better than solo funding.
Involuntary, progressive crowdfunding through government threat of violence (taxes) seems to work better than the other methods and most consider it humane. Americans have shown little interest historically in doing the humane thing, unfortunately.
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 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
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 expensive. You can’t trust companies selling cures. You can’t trust every doctor when they have financial incentives to offer treatments. Insurance companies are in an adversarial relationship with providing treatments, which doesn’t result in efficient supervision here. Lawsuits offer some protection, but at extreme cost to everyone involved. Etc etc.
The net result of all these poor incentives is single payer systems end up being way more efficient, resulting in people living longer and spending less on healthcare.
> 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.
The whole "anonymous bureaucrat" shtick doesn't land anymore. The purpose of having long-term non-political staff is so that operations don't change on a whim when some rogue director comes in and wants a second Ferrari. The reason government spends more AND is paradoxically more efficient is because most of the work of those bureaucrats is tracking, reporting, and reconciliation. That's the whole deal. Congress passes laws and in those laws is usually an obscene and near impossible amount of auditing.
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 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'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.
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.
Sure, in that regard bureaucrats make sure my grocer has full shelves. There are likely dozens if not hundreds of people responsible for my local grocer just to make sure I have food.
I have no problem with bureaucrats. I want a choice. If I come in one day to find the shelves empty, I go somewhere else. If they make it difficult for me to check out, or are too expensive, I change. I just want choice.
You can choose to listen to the same unelected anonymous bureaucrats. Just log on to FDA or whatever, and follow their advice (e.g. follow the food pyramid). Only one of us wants to remove choice from the other, and that's the difference.
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 must treat any barriers of entry in a market with extreme care. The only "failed" or "captured" market is a strongly regulated one.
Markets 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.
> 1000hr incandescent light bulbs remain the standard offering till present day
This proves in fact that all the cartel did was establish a standard, an optimal average between various tradeoffs when building an incandescent lightbulb: brightness, cost, efficiency and life span. Yes, the cartel behaved anti-competitively. The effect on the market? Nil.
> perfect information and infinite time
There is absolutely no requirement for this for markets to work. Markets work just fine with partial information and just-in time. When new information and new market participants appear, markets will self-correct. The only way to prevent markets from working is through government intervention.
In facts, free markets are the only system we have that works with incomplete info and reacts in real-time. Central planning will happily decide on incomplete info then never adapt. We saw that during communism when the Party decided allocate X resources for production of Y and it always resulted in a glut or shortages. Central planning doesn't work.
It's the obvious reality around me here in Eastern Europe. We were starving under communism before 1990 but are now enjoying the amazing wealth capitalism brought.
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
> Because if something sucks, someone comes up with something better and sells it for a profit.
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.
Do you not use private businesses or something? Do you not shop at a private grocer or order things from Amazon or use a private search engine?
Probably 99% of what I consume comes from private companies and the services generally get better over time, with some exceptions. Compare that to an experience with the TSA.
> it put price pressure and competition on providing the service
This is simply not true. Healthcare in the US is comparatively much more expensive than countries offering subsidized healthcare with comparable or better outcomes(1).
> it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system
Capitalism can't work in a market that's completely consolidated, and where people can't offer to not buy your service. Healthcare in publicly subsidized countries is much less expensive because it's regulated. Compare the price of simple drugs like insulin or asthma medicine if you need an easy example. Pharma companies still happily sell there, which is to say that the difference is pure profit on the back of sick people who don't have a choice.
My biggest grief against this individual payment system is moral though. I don't see the virtue in a system where kids have to put on a show to receive care. Or anyone for that matter, you'll give to a kid because they're cute and generate empathy, does it make someone ugly with no family less deserving of getting cured from cancer?
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.
All empirical evidence shows that single payer systems work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost, than the US system. In fact, so much better that a single payer system is what Congress has chosen for itself!
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.”
> All empirical evidence shows that single payer systems work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost, than the US system.
Agreed. Also, all empirical evidence shows that free-markets work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost than either. Just look around at any less-regulated and thus free-er markets. Or just "reject the evidence" - your choice.
> die
I am middle-aged so I used plenty of health services in my life. I always had choices when in came to price and level of care and treatment. None of them were for the "dying" case. But I do have an insurance specifically for that case. I am a rational being so I plan in advance. No need for a government bureaucrat to decide my health care for me just in case some day I may be incapacitated.
When you have to choose a provider or you die, there won’t be a real downward pressure on price because there is no need to form a cartel to feed on this. You can see this in every single market of utility or de facto utility segments.
Some 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.
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.
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.
But 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.
This 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.
> 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).
This 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.
> 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.
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.
”
I 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.
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 executives.
> 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.
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.
The 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.
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.
Do 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
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.
Whether 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.
In terms of waiting times to see a doctor or specialist (the only cases where stats for the US seem to be available), the US looks a touch better than average in waiting times for healthcare within comparable countries: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025....
Ahead of Canada, sure (they come worst here in both scenarios) but behind countries like the UK, Germany & the Netherlands that do have universal health care.
I prefer that over people having to start a GoFundme whenever they get sick. My relatives in Germany get necessary treatment as needed. There is the myth of no wait times in the US but from my experience there are also of wait times here.
The 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.
If you think there aren't long waits for non-emergency treatment in the US, you are lucky or a moron.
I needed a sleep study. An inpatient sleep study is booked 3 years out here. Good insurance.
Seeing that sleep study doctor in the first place just to get sent a $150 gadget that listens to me sleep? I waited two months. The follow up appointment? 3 months.
Do you know why non-emergency care waits that long? Efficiency. Turns out, hospitals want to not spend extra money on doctors they don't need whether they get paid by the government or this weird industry called "insurance" we have developed.
Go head, tell me about how you can get any treatment or any scan in a week without fail in our wonderful overpriced system.
In the US, twenty day wait list for a broken toe, seven month wait list for a neurologist, five month wait list for a deviated septum surgery, and good luck finding a PCP taking new patients.
This quality of service costs me and my wife ~$23,000/year.
Sure, we can walk into urgent care and get seen. I've also never had a problem walking into a walk-in clinic in Canada, either. The clinic's lobby and the doctor's car in the parking lot isn't as nice over there, though.
In capitalism it is easy and transparent: price, with the side effect of aligning society interests with those of the selfish individual.
Of course the strange and heavily regulated US health-care system is obviously far far away from a free market.
In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries, friends and network of connections. The side effect is that the most productive individuals are discouraged and punished, with the whole society lagging in effect.
Case in point: the EU that started lagging the USA so much in growth that ended up having to beg for basic defense when a blood-thirsty neighbor came hungry for land.
Rather, crony capitalism with no real competition (cartelisation in the absence of strong regulation). This invariably leads to Imperialism ... We see this with BiGTech today and the phenomena of "digital imperialism".
Capitalism is the reason those treatments exist in the first place. I don't see many cutting-edge cancer treatments coming out of Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
Market economy. Capitalism is a name for the bad thing-- "the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others". Those who argue for a market economy usually claim that with their rule, it won't be accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, with them assuring us that there will be free markets and competition.
Both actual capitalism, i.e. the bad thing, and this which can plausible be argued to be well-functioning market economies, are is often stabilized by adding elements of communism to the system-- publicly funded education, healthcare etc. This is one of the reasons why I as a vaguely socialism-influenced whatever I can reasonably be said to be see communism, i.e. a system characterized by the distribution principle "to each according to his need" as less revolutionary than the socialism distribution principle "to each according to his contribution". Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
Even in a pure unadulterated market economy that doesn't publicly fund healthcare you would expect to be able to protect yourself from high-impact low-likelihood events by means of an insurance. I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
> I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
The market is just reacting to the regulatory environment and all the political patches and shortcuts of same done to appease voters over the last 100 years. Fix that and the market will sort itself out.
Basically the US has mixed the worst aspects of for profit healthcare with the worst aspects of socialized healthcare. It underperforms while still costing obscene amounts of money.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
Probably, but that isn't really something I say anything about in what I wrote. Instead, what I wrote is basically a terminology quibble with the use capitalism instead of market economy.
I don't think your statement is true absolutely, I think it's very possible to have pure market economies that are quite well-functioning, i.e. not monopolies etc., where many people are very rich but with some people being really poor, even to the point of not being able to afford healthcare or healthcare insurance, so I don't think it's guaranteed to be true, though I think it's mostly true.
> Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
You won't have to worry about distributing advanced cancer medications when they don't exist in the Communist version, because they weren't discovered. You can't fulfil a need with a drug you never risked a giant amount of funding and effort to discover.
You literally have the communist distribution principle for education at the primary level in the US, and it's a stabilizing element that allows you to stabilize your system despite having one of the harshest market economies in the world.
So I don't understand how your comment really relates to mine. My comment is basically me quibbling about terminology with the terms capitalism and market economy.
"the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others"
This allows decentralised decision making for large grained resource allocation - for example should we build a factory for shoes, or for toothbrushes? - and is a good thing, as central planning has been demonstrated to not work if applied to the whole economy. (the converse, no central planning to any of the economy, has also been demonstrated to not work!)
However that accumulation can be (and nowadays usually is) orchestrated by a corporate entity, which in an ideal world would be almost entirely beneficially owned by retirees on an equitable basis.
What has gone wrong, is that the benefits of productivity enhancements (since 1970?) have flowed to capital more so than to workers - which not least prevents them from forming capital themselves (savings/pensions), hence rising wealth inequality.
Maybe, and you really believe that, then you do believe in capitalism as Louis Blanc defined it, even though he invented it as a way to characterize something which he regarded as bad.
But this kind of thing, i.e. capital accumulation by some to the exclusion of others, is, I think, objectively problematic in that it's not really compatible with free markets since capital ownership will be barrier to entry once capital has in fact been accumulated by some to the exclusion of others.
I agree that it is decentralized though, but sort of like how feudalism is decentralized.
My point is that socially beneficial capital intensive projects require, well, a large lump of capital. This can be organised by the state (command economy), or through allowing private accumulation of capital - but here I do include corporations, and indeed financing through loans. It would be quite possible for individuals to have much the same wealth (perhaps modulo time to retirement?), and to be pooling it as share owners of said corporations. This would still be a capitalist system - but a fairer one maybe!
What are you suggesting is the alternative? Please don't reference small homogenous countries the size of Minnesota as something that will work for the US.
No, 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.
I 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.
Thanks. I never understood why intelligent people, comparing for example the German to the US system can even blink and decide that the German system doesn’t work.
Yes, there is quite a bit to improve in the German system. No doubt there. But if I compare it to the abysmal situation in the richest country on this planet, I am left standing awestruck asking myself why. I really, genuinely cannot wrap my head around.
It's largely not up to people. 59% of Americans support Medicare for All[1], including over 1 in 3 Republicans, but how many politicians even talk about it?
If you vote republican, you do not "support medicare for all" no matter what you say to the poll.
Your vote has consequences, and republicans have been voting for people who objectively and loudly tell their voters that they have no intention of doing those things.
It's time for people who vote republican to own that they suck at picking who to vote for.
Tons of them also say they want recreational weed, but it's only republicans working to prevent that in most states, often literally ignoring citizen's initiatives and court cases to accomplish that.
I would take my insurance over public German healthcare in an instant. I would not trade.
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.
That doesn't say how you would fund it, only what form of insurance is in place.
If the US were to shift to that model today, a country already heavily in debt would have to either take on more debt PR increase revenues in a manner that they wouldn't have been willing to in order to fund our already growing debts.
The debate over whether public or private healthcare is better is all well and good, but first we should be debating how the US would pay for it in the first place.
A Single-Payer-System would also be cheaper in the US. Nobody expenses as much on administrative cost, nobody pays so much as a % of GDP on Healthcare as you, still you have the worst health outcomes of all developed nations.
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
There's also an often-overlooked issue, which is that some of the crowdfunded treatments are for things deemed "experimental" or whatever other label and thus not covered for even an insured person. This situation exists in both public and private healthcare systems. I'm not arguing in favor of a for-profit system with this, but people often miss this when they haven't personally run into uncommon health problems.
If a treatment isn't approved yet, you can usually submit a request for getting it paid.
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)
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 am yet to see any western nations go bankrupt for universal healthcare.
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.
Private/public here in Japan works okayishly well. I have never heard of anyone getting bankrupted over medical bills, and have had loved ones going through surgeries and other complex issues.
Theres a (now old) memo that specifically outlines which talking points carry most salience amongst the audience. Those terms are present here in your comment. (Luntz - The language of Healthcare 2009)
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.
I don't know, are your opinions about life and reality made up or you're just so credulous you are repeating whatever you see on social media?
Is it so hard to believe in today's day and age that somebody tries to learn and understand how the world around works using observation, published facts and deduction from as close to first principles as possible?
Is there a legitimately good reason for all those treatments to be so expensive, or is that, to a large degree, capitalism extracting capital from the market? Why is American insulin so expensive when compared to that from other countries?
> Is there a legitimately good reason for all those treatments to be so expensive
We can't really know, since only free markets can determine the price of a good or service (it's driven by supply and demand) and health care market is tightly regulated.
> Why is American insulin
Because of the regulatory barriers not allowing other providers to enter and sell insulin on the US market.
We 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?
Unfortunately "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.
There are more than 200 known types of cancer, and most are very fundamental and serious. It's not something which can be easily prevented or even fixed by just taking some pill or eating different. Yet, progress has been very phenomenal over the decades. Cancer can be cured to some degree, people can survive, but progress goes type by type.
According to this US government site, 5-year survival rates across all cancer sites have improved from 50% to 75% between 1974 and 2017. (For men it started at more like 40%).
That’s not utterly transformative but I wouldn’t call it negligible either.
The brain cannot function outside the body. The brain needs your bone marrow to make red and white blood cells. The kidneys and the liver to filter and break down metabolic waste. Various other hormonal systems that affect how the brain works (c.f. the HN favorite "gut-brain axis"). A brain separated from the body could survive for a few weeks, but long term it would certainly die from neuron loss (i.e. dementia).
I remember there was a flood of similar campaigns on Facebook a couple years ago. Multiple pages, some posts sponsored, some gaming the algorithm, very similar messaging. All about children suffering from cancer. All leading to scammy-looking domain names, some using IDNs. I had been wondering where the catch was, then got tired and just started reporting and blocking them until they stopped.
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.
False equivalence. In your straw man, the elephant isn't misled into believing that by posing for a photo it could be "helped," nor is it possible to communicate such an idea to an elephant. In the story, money was raised for the boy's cancer treatment, and that money was improperly withheld, denying him the treatment those funds could have provided. He was harmed by that, and by being misled into thinking he could get treatment by appearing in the video, he was scammed. Lying to the family and stating the funds weren't raised is also scamming them.
But, of course, you know that, but you would rather dig and (try to) play semantic games than admit you are wrong. Do better.
I mean Musk almost singlehandedly has killed hundreds of thousands of kids worldwide in 2025 alone by destroying USAID medicine and basic nutrition distribution, while it literally rots in warehouses now
If we are going to have cancer stories and gun violence stories daily in the news, shouldn't the kids dying be a daily coverage?
Credit to BBC who every few weeks does show the kids dying in the hospital but US news does not mention it anymore since the summer
Still dying. More in 2026. Even more in 2027. Even more in 2028.
Even if USAID is restored in 2029 it will take awhile to rebuild and all those dead kids aren't coming back ever.
Oh and they didn't just quietly die. They suffered for weeks, months and died
Musk did that. But yeah keep using X and buying his cars
These campaings? I've paid some minimal cursory attention to 2 pretty randomly chosen charities - once i donated an old car, and another time i thought may be to subscribe to do math tutoring to children, the tutors were unpaid volunteers, and i just looked into what financial info was available for that non-profit ... well after those 2 times i've never even thought about any dealing with any non-profit, etc. and the stories in the news like when a famous radio talk show host would fund raise huge money to be later paid from his non-profit to his vacation ranch business, all in the open daylight, don't surprise me at all or all those stories of Trump's charities.
It is disgusting that those with health issues are scammed. I do think these instances require extra time on sentences. As someone who was a regular at a cancer hospital in my life, there is nothing harder than seeing a child and a parent who are clearly going through so much at a hospital at 8am. You realise all that they have gone through the whole time, and how much their life has changed, possibly permanently. It is hard for an adult, of course it is, but children have done nothing for this to happen.
Of all the people that you can scam, why go for children with cancer. I guess you think they are an easy target because they are desperate? Pure sociopath mentality. Crab mindset.
In case any sociopath is reading this: just go for old rich people. They are also desperate because they are alone, seeing their relevancy wane, and their deaths are closer every day. A single successful scam will represent a bigger return of your invested time and effort than, compared 10 successfully scammed children with cancer. And they might not even make a fuss if you steal some money from them, it will make them look weak and it will only represent a small percentage of their wealth.
And you are less likely to be killed by a mob, as a bonus.
I feel like I'm missing the "Jew hate fest." Genuinely I don't see it here, except maybe one comment saying that Israel does not extradite criminals. . . Which is pretty neutral in tone to be honest.
There is 1 (one) comment that is definitely very dodgy [0]. Saying 1 comment out of 250+ is a "fest" however, is of course the tried and true tactic of "anything remotely negative of anything connected to the country or any of its citizens must be racist".
What does one man living in Canada have to do with how much people in Israel love children? There have been many frauds of cancer in children. Here https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-14/sa-couple-alleged-fak... is one, an Australian couple asking donations for a fake cancer. Is it reasonable to believe Australia doesn't like children because of it? No in fact it so ridiculous that even asking it is frankly stupid.
It was a quip about Israel military explicitly killing children. Not very tasteful, but it clearly wasn't about this particular scam.
By the way, indiscriminately bombing children seems to be more acceptable than opening fire on them for some reason, so maybe Israel military should stick to its guns.
If the scammer were Muslim, many people would have no issue ascribing blame to swathes of people with the same religion, calling the religion itself cancer.
Huh, maybe people can ask for donations to be cured of that "cancer"...
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.
"Why do you care about genocide in Gaza when you don't care anything about the Uyghurs in Xinjiang?" This tactic is just so tiresome and people aren't falling for it.
Chance Letikva is registered with the US IRS as a charity. They've filed a Form 990. Location is Brooklyn, NY. [1] Address is listed. It's a small house. It's also incorporated as CHANCE LETIKVA, INC. in New York State. Address matches. Names of officers not given. There's one name in the IRS filing, listed as the president.
Web site "https://chanceletikva.org" has been "suspended". Domain is still registered, via Namecheap.
Some on the ground digging and subpoenas should reveal who's behind this.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/852...
In this instance it was a bust because no one useful was there. But if the mastermind behind the whole operation was there you’d want a professional to ask them questions. Because once they know they’ve been rumbled they’re probably going to disappear.
Hardly surprising given the contrast to the level of journalistic integrity on display at the Beeb recently.
>[copypasta] half understood content with additional spin
then what you are reading is not journalism.
In most cases, if you aren't paying for it, it is not journalism.
A news piece in a foreign affairs section is likely to have been written by a correspondent because that’s what their job and specialty is. If it’s an op-ed or a commentary or analysis piece, even more so. It’s not like you can do good journalism without boots on the ground, no matter how connected the world is these days.
I mean it does feel like that should be standard operation for journalism on bigger stories but I think our expectations from journalists have really fallen over the last 5 years with all the slop coming in.
Most of us don’t have the tools or the time to do it properly, at least on here; and that can end badly [0]. It rarely achieves a thoughtful considered outcome, and there are other places to do that kind of thing if you want to—some of those communities, like Bellingcat, seem pretty well-practiced in their methodologies, and their findings seem to have accordingly high impact.
[0] e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-22214511 … and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi
Edit: Clicked through some of the other entries in there and yeah, usually liabilities are relatively close to incomes. How the system didn't catch this is beyond me.
At what point do audit requirements kick in for charities?
Namecheap and scammers -- I dare you to name a more iconic duo.
Looking at the passive DNS records for the domain chanceletikva.org shows it references the email address davidm@yeahdim.co.il.That email address is tied to multiple website registrations for a person by the name of David Margaliot, and also Shoshana Margaliot.
A search on this name in Domaintools finds the name David Margaliot tied to at least 25 domains, including ezri.org.il, which is a very odd site that features a huge image of a young child who is apparently in the hospital holding a gift wrapped box with a teddy bear. The site asks for donations but has a strange mission statement: Ezri Association promotes life-saving innovation through a surveillance drone project for emergency response teams, the establishment of an international medical knowledge database, along with other technological initiatives".
I'll probably continue the rest of this in a follow-up story.
Common pattern they had was:
- similar or same domains
- same messaging on their website
YouTube could have taken action, but it choose not to
However it's also a tricky business to be the adjudicator of what is and isn't a scam. You're going to have to deal with a lot of complaints from "legitimate businessmen".
... the crimes they actually make a lot of money from.
Why does anyone think a brilliant mind would enjoy that? So they could make a little bit more money?
Do you honestly think brilliant people, the smartest of our generation, care about money?
IME, Google software devs aren't even the brightest minds in the parking lot.
Completing large engineering projects says nothing about individual capability, and nothing about how Google deploys shitty AI moderation and about how Google employees insist it's great and perfect and never does anything wrong gives me any reason to believe they are even competent.
It's literally a meme that people started repeating in earnest without a second thought.
Don't you think a brilliant person would work somewhere, like, interesting?
In economies where you aren't rewarded for individual competency (because software management couldn't pick out individual competency if it screamed at them), highly competent people aren't going to play the game, they are just going to find something to pay the bills and work on hobbies.
The smart people are often where the money isn't, because they are rarely driven by monetary pursuits.
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.
- People who want to work in tech because it was a stable and/or lucrative career
- People who just want/love to code
- People who loved tech / think tech is cool
There’s also a degree of counter-culture that used to be part of the mix, which got jettisoned as tech became mainstream and mapped out.
The current state of Tech is unpleasant and alarming.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampan...
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Their incentives contradict healthy behavior… :(
Here's Google's response:
...which is a lie, among other things.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.
By comparison it is pretty obvious that most societies have similar moral values - stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, charity is right, etc. in spite of the differences in religious interpretations that end up preventing so many of us from simply coexisting as equals.
To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong. Morals are simple rules that humans have developed over generations of interactions that allow them to apply reasonable judgements to fellow humans based on observations of how those fellow humans interact with strangers and kin.
Religions likely have as part of their foundations, an explicit acknowledgement or recognition of the societal mores that governed human interactions before any one of our ancestors invented or postulated out loud about phenomena that they all experienced but did not yet have the science or understanding of the natural world to reliably explain, thus compelling them to invent entities that controlled those phenomena. Those who chose to believe in these inventions could rest easier knowing that something somewhere was either looking out for them or they could be wary of angering that entity to prevent bad things from happening to them or their kin.
In short, morals and ethics exist outside of any religious dogma so the suggestion that they are a constraint imposed on any society through religion is simply inaccurate since it is not necessary for any person to be religious in order to hold another accountable .
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).
>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.
Law in a democratic society is a manifestation of so-called social contracts considered binding for members of that society.
However, law in a non-democratic society can be the complete opposite, to the point of enabling immoral conduct, including but not limited to legal crime, persecution of political opponents, ethnic cleansing and offensive warfare.
Morals are fundamental to the process.
Could we even say laws are the society’s objective morals?
Retribution is a real component of justice. When it's ignored, people take the law into their own hands.
Harsher sentences for despicable crimes makes sense. Automatic sentence enhancers are cruel. But automatically giving the judge the power to sentence for longer based on the victim's profile is not.
I saw this ad a few months ago on YouTube and flagged it as a scam when I couldn’t find much information about the company. Never donate money through random sites. If you use platforms like https://www.gofundme.com/, at least you have the option to file a complaint if you find something suspicious.
They haven’t scammed nor inconvenienced a rich, well-connected person, so unlikely anything will happen. Remember that online fraud is effectively legal (10% of Meta’s revenue is from scam ads by their own estimates) as long as you only target the poor.
These scam campaigns have been going for years with people operating in the field across many countries - if there was an incentive to stop this it would’ve been done already, but since everyone’s making money why bother?
> file a complaint if you find something suspicious
Which will be piped to /dev/null, just like reporting scams on social media.
If you have content which is removed, or a moderation decision you wish to dispute, you can go to one of these bodies to get it reviewed. It cannot go to dev/null.
This doesn’t address whether flagging scams resulted in action. The bigger picture is the mismatched incentives for tech. Platforms are not quite incentivized to care about responding to user complaints, and do not give out information that lets us know what is happening independently.
To get to the point that complaints are actioned, those incentives need to be realigned. The ODS pathway, if used more frequently, increases that revenue and market pressure.
The ODS system is new, and I expect it will have tons of issues to discover. I wouldn’t be surprised it it is already weaponized.
On the flip side, platforms haven’t been tested or queried in this manner before.
https://jacobin.com/2023/02/israel-law-of-return-extradition...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-55795075.amp
Though that case, returning an alleged, now convicted child rapist took decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malka_Leifer_affair
As a not-Israeli Jew the reluctance of the Israeli government to send alleged criminals for trial overseas doesn’t make me happy, but I also remember that there are some reasons for this.
Can't imagine how many people who work in law enforcement are furious with the current administration.
Same thing happened in my post communist country and the neighboring country too. Perp stole tens of millons through a banking scam in the 90s, then fled to Israel because he was Jewish and claimed persecution.
At which point should the pattern be acknowledged?
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/b676/live/3589b...
In this book an old NGO worker explain very well how it work the business: https://books.google.dk/books/about/Blanco_bueno_busca_negro...
They're easy to recognize, because they're very forceful in their begging, relying more on intimidation than compassion.
There really is no level people won't sink to for some money.
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.
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.
The actual homeless people here have access to government support and shelters, those beggars don't as they're not here legally.
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.
However, if you give a homeless person money and they go buy drugs, I think you effectively made them poorer. I would advise giving them food instead.[2]
[1]: Word in quotes because there is no way to verify their identities.
[2]: I've literally seen a person asking for money get offered free fries at McDonald's and denying them. Beggars don't get to be choosers.
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)
lol more like whatever keeps their heroin dealer warm
I'll take "Things That Never Happened" for $200, Alex.
I always tell people to donate as local as possible. Ideally local Shelters, Churches (that take in everyone) etc...
Anyway, yes, direct donation is always better, be it to some random guy down on his luck in the street (unless they have just missed their bus and need ticket money for the next one and so for 3 years in the same bus station) or to some trusted person/group who actually does deliver the stuff to the area. Way too many random NGOs have popped up in Europe promising to do good things, just transfer money to their bank account and they will take care of it all for you.
Do you know how many scammers are from India? Do you know how many scammers are from the US? Jeffery Epstein was from the US, is every US citizen now a pedophile?
How the country origin is related to them being scammers? They're scammers because they're shitty people, it's not related where they're from.
There are many existing punishments - go after all their wealth, family and connected business, trusts etc. Simply ban them from western financial world. Publicly shame them and make their name a curse to spit on. Properly harsh jail and making sure all inmates know who arrived, I wouldn't expect kinder treatment than pedophiles get. And so on.
Since that’s what they did to their victims.
Which could also include a QR code going to a gov website with details why this org was given the certification.
This isn't perfect but would certainly lower such incidents.
Also, the scale seems much larger than $20k.
The incentives are there. Our economy runs on incentives. Create a vulnerable group and the sharks smell blood in the water.
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?
Involuntary, progressive crowdfunding through government threat of violence (taxes) seems to work better than the other methods and most consider it humane. Americans have shown little interest historically in doing the humane thing, unfortunately.
I mean almost the entirety of the US healthcare system is a industrialized scam engineered by middlemen
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
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 expensive. You can’t trust companies selling cures. You can’t trust every doctor when they have financial incentives to offer treatments. Insurance companies are in an adversarial relationship with providing treatments, which doesn’t result in efficient supervision here. Lawsuits offer some protection, but at extreme cost to everyone involved. Etc etc.
The net result of all these poor incentives is single payer systems end up being way more efficient, resulting in people living longer and spending less on 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.
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.
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'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.
I have no problem with bureaucrats. I want a choice. If I come in one day to find the shelves empty, I go somewhere else. If they make it difficult for me to check out, or are too expensive, I change. I just want choice.
You can choose to listen to the same unelected anonymous bureaucrats. Just log on to FDA or whatever, and follow their advice (e.g. follow the food pyramid). Only one of us wants to remove choice from the other, and that's the difference.
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.
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.
> 1000hr incandescent light bulbs remain the standard offering till present day
This proves in fact that all the cartel did was establish a standard, an optimal average between various tradeoffs when building an incandescent lightbulb: brightness, cost, efficiency and life span. Yes, the cartel behaved anti-competitively. The effect on the market? Nil.
> perfect information and infinite time
There is absolutely no requirement for this for markets to work. Markets work just fine with partial information and just-in time. When new information and new market participants appear, markets will self-correct. The only way to prevent markets from working is through government intervention.
In facts, free markets are the only system we have that works with incomplete info and reacts in real-time. Central planning will happily decide on incomplete info then never adapt. We saw that during communism when the Party decided allocate X resources for production of Y and it always resulted in a glut or shortages. Central planning doesn't work.
Pure misanthropic fantasy pretending to be sophisticated economics.
It's the obvious reality around me here in Eastern Europe. We were starving under communism before 1990 but are now enjoying the amazing wealth capitalism brought.
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.
Probably 99% of what I consume comes from private companies and the services generally get better over time, with some exceptions. Compare that to an experience with the TSA.
Or come here in Eastern Europe where we had the "pleasure" of trying both systems and see how free markets pulled us out of utter poverty.
This is simply not true. Healthcare in the US is comparatively much more expensive than countries offering subsidized healthcare with comparable or better outcomes(1).
> it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system
Capitalism can't work in a market that's completely consolidated, and where people can't offer to not buy your service. Healthcare in publicly subsidized countries is much less expensive because it's regulated. Compare the price of simple drugs like insulin or asthma medicine if you need an easy example. Pharma companies still happily sell there, which is to say that the difference is pure profit on the back of sick people who don't have a choice.
My biggest grief against this individual payment system is moral though. I don't see the virtue in a system where kids have to put on a show to receive care. Or anyone for that matter, you'll give to a kid because they're cute and generate empathy, does it make someone ugly with no family less deserving of getting cured from cancer?
1: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
So it is a highly asymmetric bargaining situation where all the incentives are poorly aligned. Of course it is exploitative.
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.
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.”
Agreed. Also, all empirical evidence shows that free-markets work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost than either. Just look around at any less-regulated and thus free-er markets. Or just "reject the evidence" - your choice.
> die
I am middle-aged so I used plenty of health services in my life. I always had choices when in came to price and level of care and treatment. None of them were for the "dying" case. But I do have an insurance specifically for that case. I am a rational being so I plan in advance. No need for a government bureaucrat to decide my health care for me just in case some day I may be incapacitated.
Same with education. I am more than happy to pay taxes for an education system, even if I do not personally have children.
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.
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).
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.
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
Money goes in, and good feelings come out. It certainly serves a purpose, but not the intended one.
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.
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.
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.
* 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
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.
There are plenty of capitalist nations that provide public healthcare on a large spectrum of coverage and quality.
Ahead of Canada, sure (they come worst here in both scenarios) but behind countries like the UK, Germany & the Netherlands that do have universal health care.
"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.
I needed a sleep study. An inpatient sleep study is booked 3 years out here. Good insurance.
Seeing that sleep study doctor in the first place just to get sent a $150 gadget that listens to me sleep? I waited two months. The follow up appointment? 3 months.
Do you know why non-emergency care waits that long? Efficiency. Turns out, hospitals want to not spend extra money on doctors they don't need whether they get paid by the government or this weird industry called "insurance" we have developed.
Go head, tell me about how you can get any treatment or any scan in a week without fail in our wonderful overpriced system.
This quality of service costs me and my wife ~$23,000/year.
Sure, we can walk into urgent care and get seen. I've also never had a problem walking into a walk-in clinic in Canada, either. The clinic's lobby and the doctor's car in the parking lot isn't as nice over there, though.
In capitalism it is easy and transparent: price, with the side effect of aligning society interests with those of the selfish individual.
Of course the strange and heavily regulated US health-care system is obviously far far away from a free market.
In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries, friends and network of connections. The side effect is that the most productive individuals are discouraged and punished, with the whole society lagging in effect.
Case in point: the EU that started lagging the USA so much in growth that ended up having to beg for basic defense when a blood-thirsty neighbor came hungry for land.
But don't worry your free market friends are killing it right now, for tax reductions
https://www.wired.com/story/how-trump-killed-cancer-research...
Both actual capitalism, i.e. the bad thing, and this which can plausible be argued to be well-functioning market economies, are is often stabilized by adding elements of communism to the system-- publicly funded education, healthcare etc. This is one of the reasons why I as a vaguely socialism-influenced whatever I can reasonably be said to be see communism, i.e. a system characterized by the distribution principle "to each according to his need" as less revolutionary than the socialism distribution principle "to each according to his contribution". Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
The market is just reacting to the regulatory environment and all the political patches and shortcuts of same done to appease voters over the last 100 years. Fix that and the market will sort itself out.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm.
I don't think your statement is true absolutely, I think it's very possible to have pure market economies that are quite well-functioning, i.e. not monopolies etc., where many people are very rich but with some people being really poor, even to the point of not being able to afford healthcare or healthcare insurance, so I don't think it's guaranteed to be true, though I think it's mostly true.
You won't have to worry about distributing advanced cancer medications when they don't exist in the Communist version, because they weren't discovered. You can't fulfil a need with a drug you never risked a giant amount of funding and effort to discover.
So I don't understand how your comment really relates to mine. My comment is basically me quibbling about terminology with the terms capitalism and market economy.
This allows decentralised decision making for large grained resource allocation - for example should we build a factory for shoes, or for toothbrushes? - and is a good thing, as central planning has been demonstrated to not work if applied to the whole economy. (the converse, no central planning to any of the economy, has also been demonstrated to not work!)
However that accumulation can be (and nowadays usually is) orchestrated by a corporate entity, which in an ideal world would be almost entirely beneficially owned by retirees on an equitable basis.
What has gone wrong, is that the benefits of productivity enhancements (since 1970?) have flowed to capital more so than to workers - which not least prevents them from forming capital themselves (savings/pensions), hence rising wealth inequality.
But this kind of thing, i.e. capital accumulation by some to the exclusion of others, is, I think, objectively problematic in that it's not really compatible with free markets since capital ownership will be barrier to entry once capital has in fact been accumulated by some to the exclusion of others.
I agree that it is decentralized though, but sort of like how feudalism is decentralized.
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.
You're absolutely right.
Yes, there is quite a bit to improve in the German system. No doubt there. But if I compare it to the abysmal situation in the richest country on this planet, I am left standing awestruck asking myself why. I really, genuinely cannot wrap my head around.
[1]https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor... via https://truthout.org/articles/6-in-10-americans-back-medicar...
Your vote has consequences, and republicans have been voting for people who objectively and loudly tell their voters that they have no intention of doing those things.
It's time for people who vote republican to own that they suck at picking who to vote for.
Tons of them also say they want recreational weed, but it's only republicans working to prevent that in most states, often literally ignoring citizen's initiatives and court cases to accomplish that.
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.
If the US were to shift to that model today, a country already heavily in debt would have to either take on more debt PR increase revenues in a manner that they wouldn't have been willing to in order to fund our already growing debts.
The debate over whether public or private healthcare is better is all well and good, but first we should be debating how the US would pay for it in the first place.
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...
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)
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.
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.
Is it so hard to believe in today's day and age that somebody tries to learn and understand how the world around works using observation, published facts and deduction from as close to first principles as possible?
We can't really know, since only free markets can determine the price of a good or service (it's driven by supply and demand) and health care market is tightly regulated.
> Why is American insulin
Because of the regulatory barriers not allowing other providers to enter and sell insulin on the US market.
As we all know, American insurance companies never deny coverage, nor do you ever have to wait in an American hospital. /s
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.
Just one example, prostate cancer today has a 90+% 10 year survival rate, in 1970 that was 25%
That’s not utterly transformative but I wouldn’t call it negligible either.
https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival
Removing cancer from a body is tremendously simpler than making a new body.
France cancer fraud trial begins (1999) [0] (the head of the charity was found guilty, imprisoned, and fined)
[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/352075.stm
But, of course, you know that, but you would rather dig and (try to) play semantic games than admit you are wrong. Do better.
If we are going to have cancer stories and gun violence stories daily in the news, shouldn't the kids dying be a daily coverage?
Credit to BBC who every few weeks does show the kids dying in the hospital but US news does not mention it anymore since the summer
Still dying. More in 2026. Even more in 2027. Even more in 2028.
Even if USAID is restored in 2029 it will take awhile to rebuild and all those dead kids aren't coming back ever.
Oh and they didn't just quietly die. They suffered for weeks, months and died
Musk did that. But yeah keep using X and buying his cars
These monsters.
And you are less likely to be killed by a mob, as a bonus.
Where are you seeing the hate?
[0] https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=46286734
The author of the question appears to have some information I don't (unless he made it up of course), so I asked him to share it
Another one? How many charity scams are "jews" involved in?
By the way, indiscriminately bombing children seems to be more acceptable than opening fire on them for some reason, so maybe Israel military should stick to its guns.
Huh, maybe people can ask for donations to be cured of that "cancer"...
Your convictions are as extremely deluded as a Palestinian suicide bomber's, to my ears.
When people are unable to engage with an argument this is what they do.
"To be shot" murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale, twisted smile."
"Bravo!" Cried Ivan delighted.