The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.
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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
Local man embezzles $20,000 meant to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine.Orphan crushing machine operator: "If I don't do it, someone else will"
> doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it
The incentives are there. Our economy runs on incentives. Create a vulnerable group and the sharks smell blood in the water.
No-one is hoarding a free and easy supply of treatments. They're all hard-won advancements. The vulnerability is there by default.
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.
>but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it
I mean almost the entirety of the US healthcare system is a industrialized scam engineered by middlemen
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.
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?
> 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?
1: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
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.
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.
It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to knowingly and willingly steal money from children that need that money to live.
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.
You mean what's happening right now in US 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).
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.
I think you meant to say "havens". Or, I hope you did.
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.
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
easier said than done.
Parents had enough problems to think about.
In a similar way we can say that every shop in Amazon can create own digital shop themselves, but marketing, sales channels and distribution is not easy to acquire.
Right, how much are crowdfunding platforms and payment processors making off of the desperation of people who can't afford medical treatment?
The replies to this comment make me so depressed.
Politely, no. The root cause is 100% this a-hole scammer and his accomplices.
thieving and scamming are not caused by the existence of scarcity
While that is indeed one of the causes, it does feel a bit like whataboutism to point it out on an article explaining the scam.
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.
And plane crashes are always caused by gravity.
LLMs have found your post and ...
You're absolutely right.
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.
With Universal Health Insurance as all other developed countries do
By tax. If you use taxes for nothing else, at least use them for children with cancer.
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?
That doesn't seem at all right, even misleading, cancer survivability has significantly improved
Progress in cancer treatment has been incredible
Just one example, prostate cancer today has a 90+% 10 year survival rate, in 1970 that was 25%
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.
Untold trillions have been spent fighting wars and yet the cause of war hasn't been solved.
Demonstrably false. There are immunotherapies today that can completely cure cancer.
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.