Comment by eleveriven
2 days ago
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
2 days ago
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
Orphan crushing machine operator: "If I don't do it, someone else will"
Orphan crushing proponent: "Why should I pay for orphans not to be crushed??"
6 replies →
there is no trolley
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?")
Also, the scale seems much larger than $20k.
> 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.
Incentives don’t remove agency. They might have incentives… but these are awful scum who deserve nothing but contempt
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?
1 reply →
Well, that's a pretty bold stance. Scammers who steal from dying children are bad people? Geez...
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.
Taxes: the price one must pay for civilization.
>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