The grocery store near my old house has a set of jars out collecting change for a young girl with cancer.
GoFundMe has a huge numbers of campaigns for people who need help paying for care.
A Tweep and an occassional beer drinking buddy pointed the limitations of community charity based fundraising for care:
1. GoFundMe generated 100 million out of $3 trillion healthcare spending.
2. This is used by Left to say “Obamacare failed, fuck it.” https://t.co/6nyD08qVMk— (((r subramanian)))☪ (@randomsubu) January 8, 2017
More importantly, let’s think about what a successful fundraising drive for $20,000 or more needs?
For a successful campaign a few things are needed. First the beneficiary has to be sympathetic to the public. An eight year boy who needs a lung transplant to play baseball is sympathetic. A forty seven year old with Hep-C because of a bad series of decisions made in her twenties is not sympathetic. We’ll also need to throw in considerations of broader sympathy for race, age, and disease type. We quickly devolve into a discussion of the deserving versus non deserving poor.
After we have a sympathetic beneficiary, the fundraising drive needs a core nucleas of powerful, forceful advocates who can make the fundraising their primary activity and focus for months if not years on end. This excludes people who are new to areas, it excludes people who have lost significant elements of their family (if my family had a need, my older sister is the natural point person to organize anything needed), it excludes general assholes and curmudgeons.
And once a sympathetic beneficiary is identified with a forceful advocate, they have to access a broad network of both tight and loose ties in order to actually raise money. There are quite a few kickstarters and GoFundMes that fail misterably because the people who are pushing great ideas or truly needy projects either have no ability to connect to a wide network or can connect to a wide network that has minimal ability to give.
The Balloon Juice community has demonstrated the power of loose ties to raise significant sums of money for a sympathetic beneficiary (MARC animal shelter) with a strong advocate (John).
So the GoFundMe and bake sale method of health care financing is fraught with privilege and let’s remember that when we hear calls to rely on the charity of neighbors instead of systemic funding for a humane baseline of care via collective social action.
rikyrah
Keep on telling the truth Mayhew.
Mike E
Just saw this on fb from my BCBS
eric
Yes, but now with the death of the ACA, we will get the public option! maybe even Medicare for all. praise be to jeebus
amk
this is the party that had advocates saying people should pay the docs with chickens and eggs. you know, the old fashioned way?
Patricia Kayden
The suggestion that anyone should rely on charity for healthcare needs is naive. One of the Pastors in my church successfully raised over $80,000 for a heart surgery within a few days on Go Fund Me. That wasn’t surprising since he is pretty popular. What happens when the beneficiary isn’t quite that popular and lacks the wherewithal to publicize his/her Go Fund Me account? Why shouldn’t a developed country like the U.S. provide affordable healthcare insurance to all of its citizens just like other developed countries?
satby
The inherent cruelty of a system where some people win a lottery of support but an equally desperate and ill person doesn’t is probably one of the things that is most attractive to the vile fucks who consistently stand in the way of universal access to healthcare. Privileged and evil.
J R in WV
I’m a retired guy, retired wife, close friends we have known for decades. We don’t really have any way to make new friends. We live in a rural area, acquainted with neighbors, close to next door neighbors.
My wife spent 59 days in the local teaching hospital, the first 23 in MICU on a vent in an induced coma with septic shock from community acquired pneumonia, perhaps from Baltimore Harbor, or at the beach in Delaware. Near the end of her stay she had a necrotic portion of her left lung removed. (Never knew there’s no way to detect necrotic tissues in the body, not happy to know that!)
Early on I feared personal bankruptcy and asked for advice. A social worker showed up, and we talked. M was on Medicare already, on total permanent disability, and our costs were actually minimal. She made a full recovery and we’re back to living in the country and traveling as we can.
Without health insurance that works properly your life is not secure. The Rs have had 6 years to write a real health care plan, and would rather take 50 futile votes to repeal a health care plan that works pretty well already. Fuq them hard with a powered up tool.
Jeffro
Charity is never enough, and the rich are the stingiest with their donations out of all groups. Heck, even the middle class is stingy – I’ve heard family members complain that church/charity should be taking care of people (not the government), then later complain when charities call them asking for support.
This is why we need to push for higher taxes on the wealthy, not just on the income tax but on the estate tax and SS cap too.
Baud
We lost the battle as soon as it became commonly accepted that Obamacare had to be perfect or it was a failure.
Elizabelle
The word is “evil.” Charity, my ass.
PST
@J R in WV:
That is usually true even if you are in the top quarter, or ten percent, or even five percent of income. Only the truly wealthy can withstand the financial shock of what nature may randomly throw at you. And if you are a decent person, you are hostage not just to your own health fortunes, but to those of family and friends. You may have the whole insurance game under control, but what about your cousin/son-in-law/stepdaughter/best friend’s kid/etc. How far are you willing to go and for whom? I would much rather forgo an unneeded tax reduction and sleep easy knowing that we have a safety net that protects not only me, but my near and dear, and likewise hundreds of millions of strangers whose lives are just as important.
Rusty
A corollary to the go fund me model is the strong potential for coercion. The irony is the argument that government funded social care (health, education, nutrition, etc.) is somehow coercive, when it’s actually the opposite. You can go down and scream about how awful the government is, and still get your social security check the next Monday. Meet the basic and neutral requirements and the support shows up no matter your religion, political leanings or more (ignoring for the moment that government aid has often had a racial bias). With private charity, you often need to belong to the right group, or at least profess to belong. Want that bag of groceries from the food pantry? “Let me hear you profess your faith in Jesus.” Like some help with those medical bills? “Ooh, I don’t like evangelicals. Or gays. Or anyone that drives a Chevy. Now if you decide to change, maybe I can help you.” What looks like charity is often more some form of exchange.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Every time I see one of these “let’s collect money for some poor slob’s >insert malady of choice here<", I get upset. Passing around the proverbial hat for some invasive, advanced and costly medical procedure is no way to run a railroad.
And yet here in red, rurl Misery, it's exactly what people think should be done knowing full well that most of the time, the funds raised don't come close to covering an uninsured person's medical bills. Or that such an approach is a travesty in the first place. And around here at least, you can count on every last one of them voting for Cheetoh Donnie.
They don't connect the dots that if we had a better health care system, even the warty one we have now, families wouldn't have to go thru that crap in order to obtain life saving health care. Of course to them the biggest problem with Obamacare is the Unforgivable Blackness associated with it.
The morans who control the House and Senate surely must realize that all they hafta do to gain acceptance of Obamacare among their racist base is to simply rename the ACA "Trump's Most Awesome Health Care Plan for Real 'Murkins".
Barbara
@Patricia Kayden: $80K might pay for basic surgery, but if he has complications it won’t even begin to cover it, never mind the drugs that he will probably need to take. But the main point is that “relying on charity” is a euphemism for protecting privilege in the same way that an employer relying solely on current employees, friends and relatives to find new employees is. There is a reason that employers that do this risk running afoul of equal employment laws. Basically, it ensures that those who already have won’t lose it to chance and misfortune while doing nothing for those who do not have the necessary social networks to avoid even greater financial peril.
amk
Barbara
@Mike E: You know that someone in Congress is clueless about insurance when they start spouting interstate insurance sales as the answer. I mean, you have to be a blithering idiot not to understand that the key expense associated with insurance is how much it costs to pay for health care, which will always be a local component of costs. Georgia actually enacted legislation to permit sales from out of state, and I remember reading an interview with the guy who sponsored the legislation professing shock that not a single insurer entered Georgia under that statute. A blithering idiot.
O. Felix Culpa
I recall, x number of mass shootings ago, that friends of one of the surviving victims were holding a car wash to raise funds for her medical care. This was before the ACA was passed. She was a recent college grad and didn’t have a job with benefits and of course couldn’t be on her parents’ plan. I was appalled that in this allegedly advanced country victims of our benighted guns policy (thank you NRA and cowardly legislators) had to pay for health care via bake sales and car washes. Or anyone who gets sick, for that matter.
So yes, let’s go back to the freedom of pre-ACA times.
ETA: This of course begs the question of how bake sale profits can even begin to pay for the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of likely costs. Sheesh.
John PM
My wife just had ACL replacement surgery. The cost just for the hospital before insurance was $25,000. Insurance brought the approved amount down to $7,000. Out portion of that was $700. I am still waiting for the surgeon and anesthesiologist bills.
Charity is nice in theory, but just like libertarianism, it doesn’t work well in practice for the reason Richard sets forth. This is a great post. Thank you Richard.
O. Felix Culpa
@J R in WV: That must have been a scary time for you. So glad that your wife is ok and your medical costs were covered! Mazel tov!
PST
@Barbara:
And of course, the cost can vary wildly for the same services. With insurance, you have the benefit of collective purchasing power — the Sam’s Club advantage of health coverage. My coinsurance is 30 percent, which sometimes makes me feel hard done by until I take into account that the insurance company has negotiated 60 percent or so off my costs, so I’m only paying 12 percent. With the GoFundMe model you may get stuck paying the rack rate. Or not, depending on what providers are willing to do.
Barbara
@Baud: Yeah, this is probably the right way to look at it. My brother has epilepsy and could not get insurance under any conditions as a mostly self-employed worker, until the ACA. For 20 years, he had to try to cope with health needs and costs. At times he tried hard to get SSDI because he felt so overwhelmed. The ACA means that he can continue to work without the terrible insecurity that he will lose everything if he gets sick again. Paul Ryan deserves to burn in hell for pretending that people like my brother are invisible and don’t matter.
Ruviana
I’ve been thinking about this a lot with regard to SEK. He died almost 2 months ago. His Gofundme is still live. I bet he’d agree with everything you say. I don’t know if he had health insurance through Salon (his employer) or was still on ACA. He was very much someone that even some improvement in insurance access helped and I fear for those who are as sick as Scott was and won’t even get what he got.
Jinchi
Who on the Left is saying “Screw Obamacare, let’s just start a GoFundMe site”?
Eric U.
@eric:
this is true. I will be 90 (30 years), but we’ll get the public option.
MomSense
This is a nightmare.
O. Felix Culpa
@Barbara: It would be great if you or your brother could communicate his story to your legislators. There are folks and organizations gathering stories like this – and there have to be MANY – as part of resistance to ACA repeal. It’s valuable to put a human face to the benefits of Obamacare and the disastrous consequences of repeal.
O. Felix Culpa
@Ruviana:
Yes. SEK and so many others still with us who have chronic conditions, including BJ commenter ArchTeryx.
I go back and read SEK’s Oldman Cats posts from time to time. His talent, insight, and humor are greatly missed.
satby
Beau Biden first was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2010, pre-ACA. When the Vice-President of the United States has to consider selling his home to pay expenses for his son and the President of the United States has to loan him money, we have a spectacular failure of a system.
Edited to add: not because of who they are, but because they may not be Koch-level wealthy, but they are more wealthy than most people.
O. Felix Culpa
@satby:
Yup.
ProudGradofCatLadyAcademy
What is really gross is that at UHC, we have these charity flyers at work all the time. No one can see the stomach churning irony that health insurance employees can’t even afford the bills their health insurance leave them with even after utilizing it.
ThresherK
@Jinchi: If my FB feed is any indication, I’d guess that’s the FurneeFroze (sic).
I see a number of em are still piffing and moaning that the most important thing about the ACA right this very minute isn’t that it’s in danger of getting repealed w/o real replacement, or getting cored out from the inside, but that the ACA isn’t single payer.
oldster
Like Jinchi @23, I am very surprised to hear that anyone on the left is saying that GoFundMe obviates the need for Obamacare (or some other adequate national health care legislation).
On the other hand, there are some decidedly moronic parts of the left, if that includes e.g. Jill Stein supporters and some of the more manic Bernie-bros.
So I don’t doubt that there are people like this, but unless it’s more broadly represented on “the left”, it feels kind of like nut-picking to ascribe this view to “the Left”.
Major Major Major Major
@ThresherK: Because people who are beneficiaries of single-payer plans never buy into right-wing frames.
Jinchi
Let’s be clear. It’s the Republican party, particularly elected Republicans, who claim that “Obamacare failed, fuck it” and who think that we should replace it with church bake sales and GoFundMe sites.
I don’t understand the need to find some random liberal to kick, when the entirety of the Right wing is the source of the problem.
ThresherK
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t know that I’ve seen that one with the actual hammer and sickle before.
Major Major Major Major
@Jinchi: Yeah, for the most part we should save the hippie-punching for when we’re debating movement forwards, I welcome all help on rearguard actions. That said, I do know people who think that destroying Obamacare will somehow lead to single-payer.
Damned at Random
When we first moved to town, the charity jars were for a lady who contracted with the post office for rural mail delivery and needed cancer surgery. She won a competitive contract by failing to factor in health insurance. At which point I realized what our future as independent contractors, “entrepreneurs”, really looked like.
RSA
Giving USA puts total charitable donations in 2015 at $373.25 billion, of which $29.81 billion was in the category of health.
In 2015, total Medicaid spending was $545.1 billion. No serious, informed person should think that private charity can replace a public health system.
Major Major Major Major
@RSA:
Well there’s your problem, we’re dealing with Republicans.
amk
@Major Major Major Major: Ignorance isn’t the sole domain of rethugs. Plenty on the left have a share in that.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
From TPM , which has the video
also
Major Major Major Major
@amk: The left isn’t claiming that private charity can/should replace a national insurance plan.
Barbara
@O. Felix Culpa: I am going to do it. He will never do it. My brother is his own worst enemy with these sorts of things (a non-voter, not a Trump voter).
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The lady whose family received hundreds of thousands of dollars in agricultural payments can’t imagine why anybody needs government subsidies.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Amen. I’ve tried Go Fund Me myself to help raise money for my non profit. Poor school children in Honduras would be an easy sell, one would think, but, as you say, my reach just isn’t big enough to do much with it. I get so sick of people saying, “Jesus told us to help the poor ourselves, not steal from somebody else to do it. If we got rid of all these wasteful, fraud-riddled welfare handout programs, and got the government out of the way, private charity would step in and do all that needs doing so much better, faster and less wastefully.”
Shit. Why, oh, why didn’t we pointy-headed, bleeding heart liberals think of that? As if that isn’t what “welfare” was for most of the time people could walk upright and speak. That’s what welfare was up until 100-150 years ago. But, well, I guess they have a point, after all. That must be why there was no poverty until 100-150 years ago, right? Right? I say again, shit…
Roger Moore
@Rusty:
Feature, not bug. This is exactly why the Right prefers charity to government aid; they want to use “charity” to coerce people.
sharl
@Jinchi: Eh, people are still mad about the Dem losses.
I think it would be more precise – though still counterproductive and pointlessly broad-brushing – to refer to the “young Left”. Older people like me who were/are sympathetic with those lefties have been around long enough to immediately recognize the dangers of a Trump Presidency, and for most of us, voting for Secretary Clinton was a no-brainer.
Younger folk just haven’t been around long enough to personally witness or experience the consequences of bad public policy in a way that really brings the badness home. They needed more positive motivation – as opposed to negative campaigning encouraging a vote against a much worse person, and rather than getting yelled at constantly for not voting correctly in large enough numbers (and for their critics, would any number have been “large enough”?).
For this specific topic, acknowledging the flaws in the ACA – flaws that Obama himself acknowledged – and promising to fix them might have helped. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hillary even noted this on the stump, but it went uncovered by the media; e-mails, y’know…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Yup
delk
According to BCBS I had $207,131.14 worth of medical bills in 2016, a little over $190,000.00 in 2015, and probably at least $10,000.00 for January of 2017.
I don’t see George Bailey in the mirror when I brush my teeth. I can’t imagine even thinking that Go-Fund-Me or bake sales would have made a dent.
Major Major Major Major
@Barbara:
Ruckus
@oldster:
Also, a lot of the lefties who are complaining about the ACA are complaining that it didn’t go far enough, that it isn’t perfect enough, not that we should not have any health insurance law. They seem to want a law that will make health care free for everyone. Not a bad idea. Except. Nothing good is ever free and very rarely easy. Something as critical as health care certainly isn’t. But simple people want simple answers, probably because they can’t fathom complex.
Gin & Tonic
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: There is no cure for that degree of stupid.
ArchTeryx
@O. Felix Culpa: And this old dinobird is honored that someone remembered.
I had my own experience with “private charity care”, though on a much smaller scale then these pathetic “bake sale surgery” campaigns. For a little while, I was controlling my disease with acupuncture, but my grad student junk insurance (of course) didn’t cover it and at $80 a week, my grad student stipend sure as hell didn’t either. So I started a campaign within my family and friends to raise money to keep my acupuncture up.
It worked – at first. But cracks started to appear almost immediately. I lost one Norwegian friend when it turned out his gift was a *one time thing* and basically was told I deserved to die because I was born in a country too barbaric to have universal health insurance. (This was years before the ACA). My uncles, Republicans all, gradually stopped sending the checks as well. My friends were loyal to the end, but they couldn’t fund the treatment by themselves.
And then it quit working, like all other treatments had before it, and I was left with two choices: Get surgery, or die.
When I went to the Cleveland Clinic to try and set up the bowel resection surgery, one of the first things they did was conduct a wallet biopsy: Could I afford the co-insurance on the surgery? A single very well-to-do friend, God bless him, put up that money so my surgery could proceed, and even paid for my mother to be there at the hospital so I had an advocate. That’s privilege – but it was only possible because a) the co-insurance was a few thousand out of a $100,000 surgery, and b) it was a one-time expense.
If I tried to run a GoFundMe for my current life-sustaining medicine, it may buy me a few months at most, but charity does no good whatsoever for maintenance care. I don’t have a rich networking of people willing to go balls to the wall for me, and even if I did, it would only buy limited time.
Fuck Paul Ryan and his willingness to kill hundreds of thousands so he could smirk in front of the cameras.
Belafon
I have to disagree with the tweet. The point the SPLC is making is that we need Obamacare even more because GoFundMe is a sucky way to help people. And I’ve donated to help some people.
Jinchi
@sharl:
Younger folk voted 2-1 for Clinton.
Older folk like ourselves voted 55%-45% for Trump.
sharl
@Jinchi:
Yup, but you wouldn’t know that if you went solely by some online discussions.
Mike R
@Ruckus: Want to thank you for your advice to keep a notebook during my recent medical adventure. It helped, you were right didn’t give me any power but sure gave me something to keep the unreasonable worry to a minimum.
schrodingers_cat
@sharl: There were quite a few older BS supporters too, male and female. I happen to know a few IRL.
sam
Even WITH health insurance, getting some sort of major health treatment can cost a lot of money (and I’m not even talking about copays and deductibles).
I have a friend (former colleague) who has suffered from Crohn’s disease for pretty much her entire life – she’s probably close to 60 now, and when she was diagnosed as a young woman, they didn’t have anywhere near the types of treatments that they have now. She’s had a multitude of surgeries on her intestines over the years that left her pretty much, well, without much intestine left.
Finally, last she was told that her only hope at this point was to get an extremely rare intestinal transplant. The transplant itself would be covered by insurance, but here’s the thing. There are only a few places in the country that even do this surgery and, well, her hospital in Boston was not one of them. She and her husband had to physically relocate to Indiana so that she could even be put on a transplant list. So they had to rent an apartment, move, and then plan on living there for however long it took (a) to get the transplant and then (b) recover sufficiently to move home to new england. And they had to do all of this while she was being fed through a tube.
Insurance paid for the surgery. Insurance didn’t pay for them to relocate halfway across the country and to rent a second home. “Luckily”, about three seconds after they arrived in Indiana, she got matched with a donor and had the surgery (yes, she was in that bad shape). She didn’t even see the apartment her husband had rented until about two months after they arrived, because they literally landed and she got taken straight to the hospital. They’re still there while she goes through the extensive recovery process.
And yes, she had a fundraiser for the incidental expenses of all of this – the National Foundation for Transplants actually has their own website for people to fundraise through instead of gofundme. That’s how common it is.
THis is all to say – this is how expensive it is WITH good insurance.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
By the way, who is, or was, SEK?
O. Felix Culpa
@Barbara:
Great! Sometimes we have to speak up for those who can’t or won’t (for whatever reason) speak up for themselves.
Goblue72
I don’t see any organizations on “the Left” saying “screw it”. I do see them saying this is going to be bad news for a lot of people, but it’s going to happen so better learn from this & prepare a better plan.
Keep tilting at the windmills. Your technocrat BS won’t save you. Your Rube Goldberg device proved far too weak to survive politically because it was a Rube Goldberg device. But please, tell us how we just need to twist some dials & knobs on Rube Goldberg 2.0 and it will all work better next time, you promises! And next time, it’s failure won’t put Medicaid at risk too!
You lost. Deal with why it happpened or keep losing.
sharl
@sharl: Forgot to add that no-shows on Election Day among otherwise likely Dem voters – a number which doesn’t show up in just a tally of votes – was probably a critical factor in those close-but-lost states (e.g., Milwaukee, Detroit).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Goblue72: Shut the fuck up, Dwight.
sharl
@schrodingers_cat: Is that in New England? Sadly, Electoral College dynamics continue to matter in this whole shit parade.
MomSense
@sharl:
I don’t think they were no shows. I think they had their votes stolen from them either by the Crosscheck purging or the new voter ID laws. It’s estimated that 300,000 people couldn’t vote in WI.
Then you have the fact that half the voting machines for Detroit weren’t working on election day. There are 500,000 voters in Detroit.
ArchTeryx
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): He was a front-page columnist for the Lawyers, Guns, and Money political blog (www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com), well known for his dry wit and Oldman Cat columns. He had what appeared to be a minor illness turn septic, due to it interacting with his multiple chronic health issues. That lead to total organ failure and death. Naturally, his family and friends had to set up a Gofundme to help defray his expenses.
germy
@Patricia Kayden:
For example, what if Goblue72 needs a procedure?
Jeffro
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: If this lady thinks that Randians like Ryan and racists like McConnell are going to let Trump have single-payer, then she needs to check into the nearest rehab center for treatment immediately because she is hiiiiiiiiigh.
Assuming Trump ever puts a plan forward, it’ll be one of two things: Obamacare with a different name and higher premiums for everyone to offset the tax cuts for the wealthy that were previously funding O-care, or, being asked to ‘get the most insurance you can afford’ on your own. I’m serious about the latter – Trump is that full of crap. “No more Obamacare taxes…now go use the ‘savings’ to buy your own insurance.” Never mind that for most there are no ‘Obamacare taxes’
O. Felix Culpa
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
SEK was a bright, talented, relatively young man who died from multiple chronic health issues a few months ago. I believe he was a contributor to Salon. I began reading him at LGM: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/author/sek
ETA: What ArchTeryx said in #67. His account of SEK’s sad demise is more accurate. I was hazy on the details.
Major Major Major Major
@Jinchi:
The ones who could be bothered to vote.
schrodingers_cat
@sharl: Yes, indeed.
ArchTeryx
@Patricia Kayden: The answer is simple: They’re judged the undeserving poor, and they die. Not that GoFundMe is going to raise a million dollars for cancer treatment even for the “deserving” poor. They get to die too. Isn’t expediency a wonderful thing?
germy
Miss Bianca
@eric:
I have to presume you are joking. As a joke it’s in poor taste, but as a serious contention it would be beyond the pale of offensively stupid.
O. Felix Culpa
@ArchTeryx:
Hey man, we care. And I’m confident we’ll do what we can to help. Although my fervent hope is that the important ACA provisions remain. I’m doing my darndest to organize resistance to the GOP’s murderous agenda.
sharl
@MomSense: That’s a good point. Various forms of voter suppression likely had a major impact in those places, especially given the closeness of the popular votes. Unfortunately – and I hope I’m wrong about this – that topic will be under-reported in the near future at least. Possible antics by Jeff Sessions and his crew may bring it to the fore in a most unfortunate way, but for now such systemic problems are largely going ignored.
Major Major Major Major
@germy: that’s asinine, since for starters putting that in the ACA was a Republican idea and second because, well, we already know that they’re just opposed to helping poor people.
germy
@Major Major Major Major: You’re right; it was a repub idea, and I think the reason was to make it as unpopular with “decision makers” as possible.
RSR
also, too: see public education. Always with the ‘Waiting for Superman’ bullshit with some corporate or civic do-gooder funneling funding though some third party skimming off the top for administration costs.
Even GoFundMe campaigns cost about 8% off the top:
Major Major Major Major
@RSR: there’s a difference between “charter schools can serve a useful purpose” and “vouchers for places that teach snake-handling in third grade.”
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Major Major Major Major: The Dems calling that particular bluff was one of the funnier parts of the ACA battle.
hovercraft
@Patricia Kayden:
It’s the same bullshit mentality that says that the state should not be involved in any social welfare, to these people Hunger Games is not an apocalyptic allegory, it is a depiction of the way the world should work. The rich are better than everyone else, and they should be allowed to keep those riches for themselves, and if they deem a person or a cause worthy they will deign to donate money to it. It; the same arrogance that says health savings accounts are a viable alternative to Obamacare. If the medium household income is les than 52 K, then how much can you put into an HSA account? How does one cover a single hospitalization, when my Dad had a heart attack 25 years ago, the hospital bill was 150 K, how would one pay that? Most people are not sympathetic, and even those who are, are not guaranteed that their circle of acquaintances will be willing or able to pony up enough money to cover their bills. I thought the other side of these assholes philosophy was that we are supposed to be self sufficient, but here they are advocating that people become beggars, dependent on the whims of people to decide whether they live or die. This is all madness, healthcare is not Survivor, we should not get to vote for who lives or dies.
O. Felix Culpa
@Major Major Major Major: Now that would have made third grade REALLY interesting. /
Major Major Major Major
@Thoroughly Pizzled: I thought so too!
O. Felix Culpa
@hovercraft:
Well put. With your permission, I’m stealing that.
germy
@hovercraft:
The impression I get from republicans is that if they somehow enacted their “tort reform” medical bills would shrink to a hundred dollars or so for a similar procedure. I’ve had conservatives tell me the reason bills are so high is because docs are “afraid of being sued” or some such bullshit.
bemused
@Barbara:
There are the clueless and there are those who have convinced themselves they can’t trust facts which have a well-known liberal bias and are willfully blind to the thousands of their constituents without insurance before ACA who suffered and died or those know full well they are lying through their teeth and don’t give a rat’s ass how many Americans die to feed their “free” market greed and Randian ideology, looking at you, Paul Ryan.
RSR
@Major Major Major Major: It’s a critique of public education funding in general, more than charter vs voucher vs traditional schools. Every school I know is begging for donations for the bare necessities. Principals running marathons for pens and paper, Teachers with GoFundMe campaigns. Ed effing Rendell with a giant $700,000 check from the DNC…for *books*! A private, unaccountable foundation soliciting funds for books in public schools. Students of color painting their own schools to ‘honor’ MLK day.
Fundraising like this used to be for things like sending the band to the Rose Bowl Parade, or class trips to museums or historical sites. Now it’s for the effing basic building blocks of education.
Tenar Arha (same Tenar, more Nameless Ones)
So, needing to share my pain- I had a full on headdesk moment test yesterday. Friend of my Dad’s who’s probably on Medicare by this point saying “but everything I’m reading says Obamacare is a disaster!” And this is a guy who didn’t vote for the dumpster. I never know what to say to someone like that. If everything he’s reading is this wrong they’re not going to believe me if I point them to here for information, and in the moment I can never come up with one of the few resources that they might accept. I suppose this is my new chore- learn a few “acceptable” resources so that I’m not caught flat footed. Ugh.
hovercraft
@O. Felix Culpa:
Help yourself :-)
@germy:
I’m pretty sure that health care costs are still rising in states that have actually done tort reform. It’s like the magical tax cuts will create new jobs, just wait and see, what do you mean they didn’t, oh well the problem is just that we didn’t cut them down enough, just one more tax cut and you’ll see. Malpractice costs are a very small factor in overall health costs, it’s one of those things that the GOP has ingrained in their supporters, like “foreign aid”, the number sounds big when they recite it, but in the bigger scheme of things, it is negligible.
ArchTeryx
@hovercraft: Au contraire. This entire election was a vote on who lives and who dies, and enough people in enough key states voted for ‘death’ that that’s exactly what we’re going to get. By the hundreds of thousands.
satby
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Oh my god yes!
Our little spay/neuter assistance group constantly struggles for fundraising, and one of the things people say is “if someone can’t afford to care for their pet they shouldn’t have one”. But they can afford to pay for regular vet care, most of them, just not the inflated rates that regular vets charge for a spay or neuter. Our biggest assistance is offered to the working poor and senior citizens, but in the Randian world, those people shouldn’t have the comfort of a companion animal because they can’t afford a one time expensive procedure (not to mention the benefits to society of reducing the unwanted pet population). And they all still pay, we only subsidize the cost for them.
matryoshka
I’d be wary of donating to anyone via GoFundMe because I know of a person in my community who is using photos of her child having an EEG test with an entirely fictional story about her child’s brain cancer to supplement her income, and last I saw, she had several thousand dollars donated. Her physician alterted GoFundMe about the fraud several months ago, but the page is still up and she is still collecting money from kind but misled people.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
I’m not a wonk, but am instead just a lawyer with middling skills and a real practical bent here in flyover country. I see this about the basic mechanics of the ACA:
1. As is always the case, this was the inevitable response to industry practices not so much in regard to the poor and the working poor, but instead to industry practices related to preexisting conditions and lifetime caps. Had those health care town halls not been disrupted by the Teahadis (with the connivance of the Hamsherite/Naderite/Steiniac left who were all in for destruction of the retirement system and economy in order to get single payer), we’d have heard many, many stories of people paying for insurance many years before suffering recission, nonrenewals, and market pullouts that killed existing policies as people age or suffered chronic conditions. The stories would include the statement that no policies were available at any price.
2. To deal with preexisting conditions, you have to have a mandate. The “can be on parental coverage until 26” thing cushions younger workers on expense.
3. Medicaid expansion isn’t “pay as you go”, but is in fact an investment in better health outcomes and savings down the road.
Charity never actually worked, which is why insurance was developed – and failures within the insurance market related to the aged and chronically ill led to Medicare and Medicaid.
My current motto is “thotsnprars aren’t a substitute for a health care system”.
Major Major Major Major
@matryoshka: I wonder if that’s legal. Are the donations from people she knows??
gene108
@germy:
Wasn’t that language included because some Republican Congresscritters had a fit and demanded that if average Americans have to suffer under the terrible PPACA, than members of Congress should also be made to suffer?
Their hypocrisy is astounding.
ThresherK
@RSR: I’ve joked for many years that contestants in the Jeopardy! Teachers’ Tournament should be playing for filler paper, composition books, and ball-point pens.
Now I don’t know if I’m kidding anymore.
MomSense
@Tenar Arha (same Tenar, more Nameless Ones):
You could always point your Dad’s friend to the CMS explanation of benefits because ObamaCare added a lot of services to basic Medicare. They now get physicals, screenings like mammography, bone density, PSAs, etc. Also, too closing the prescription donut hole is a good thing.
There are also some patient protections that give hospitals incentives and penalties if Medicare patients have to be readmitted. It makes sure hospitals adequately treat before trying to kick them out their door.
hovercraft
@ArchTeryx:
The irony of course is that most of the people most affected will be those who voted thumbs down. Unfortunately people like you are being affected too, but they voted for this. I’m still holding out hope that when push comes to shove the NY legislature will be shamed into doing the right thing. Those people in those states who voted for this deserve what they get, they were warned, but they thought they could punish “those” people, well guess what assholes, it’s going to boomerang on you.
matryoshka
@Major Major Major Major: Not that I can tell. Many of them live in other states and have different names, but I do not know this person socially, only from a peri-professional role. I doubt it’s legal (I’m not a lawyer), but it’s also apparently not a kind of fraud that anyone really bothers going after at this point.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@ArchTeryx:
But you get the benefit of their thotsnprars. Isn’t that an adequate substitute?
Why do you hate sweet baby Jesus and the Troops?
schrodingers_cat
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: The problem is that the real world is complicated and people are looking for easy answers that can be distilled in sound bites. This is a problem not just with the right but also the leftie purists that veered towards BS in this election and RN in the 2000 one.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Richard, if you’re watching this, would you have an interest in longish pieces about the following practices pre-ACA:
1. Recission
2. Nonrenewals
3. Market or product exits
4. How pre-existing conditions or age rating combined with that created unchecked misery
Mike J
When I was a kid my little brother had medullo and glioblastoma, Insurance ran out after a solid month in the hospital. The next eight years of his life we had no insurance,
Instead we got to donkey basketball games and thank everyone for being so generous. Also, you better make the right sounds about jeebus.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@schrodingers_cat:
My RWNJ mom always benefitted from my dad’s gold-plated insurance as a schoolteacher, and both now really enjoy Medicare. She’s never understood how I feel to pay several thousand dollars each year for incredibly high deductible insurance that pays for nothing.
bupalos
I don’t think a single thread goes by without the notion that (x-group) deserves special positive or negative status because the majority of the members of (x-group) voted for (y-politician or policy). The groups range from “people from x-state” to “people of x-gender” to “people of x-ethnicity” to “people of x-age.” I come on bended knee begging people to stop and think every time we feel this impulse.
I get how pissed we all are. I get how screwed up this whole deal is. I get that we feel like lashing out and need to create targets for that emotional outlet. But these targets are fake. They don’t exist in any way that is meaningful in terms of real humanity. And this drive is pretty much literally the root of all evil, and it’s playing into the hands of the forces that came together to make this happen.
If I can go macro for a second, there are two newish forces (not unique to the U.S.) that are driving these changes. The first is globalization and automation, and the increasingly uneven division of wealth and power from what are already shockingly unequal and unfair social and economic systems. The second is a great cultural sorting that is enabled by the internet and the explosion of choices in media, the division of society into (literally and figuratively) armed camps with decreasing contact and increasing distrust. It’s a powder keg that’s been growing for decades that is now in the process of exploding. The Trump phenomena is a cataclysm, and it will be a catalyst. Our duty is to make sure it is ultimately a catalyst for good. That is a very heavy lift.
Hate is too heavy a burden to bear. It’s always been true and always been deep and always been so much more practical and pragmatic than it sounds. Dr. King knew it for what it was: a crushing load that disables, a luxury of the wrong side of the human heart that saps the energy needed for action.
Trump operates by deliberately provoking hate. He thrives in the resulting chaos and acrimony regardless of of how deeply democratically unpopular the side he’s espousing may be. It’s emotional terrorism, it’s evil, and it’s incredibly transparent. It’s also shockingly effective because we are hard-wired to respond in kind. If every time this cataclysm prompts us to respond, we stop and think about our response in these terms, the force of this explosion can be not only contained, but in tiny, pinpoint vectors turned towards good.
JimV
Good post. Worth saying and well-said.
ArchTeryx
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: My thotsnprars are that they go down with the Titanic right alongside me. I think alot about that story these days – because, in the middle of the Gilded Age, the rich drowned and froze to death right alongside the poor. Diseases don’t care about gated enclaves or check the weight of your wallet, either, before infecting you.
ArchTeryx
@hovercraft: I’m not counting on that nest of vipers to do ANYTHING but cut us loose in the dead of night, after the cameras are turned off and the reporters gone home. $4 billion isn’t just going to magically appear out of nowhere, and given a choice between condemning a bunch of poor people to death and angering the Titans of Wall Street with an actual tax increase, I know exactly what the Republican-run State Senate is going to choose.
Remember, states can’t run deficits. They can’t just kick the can down the road. It’s destroy the state exchange or raise taxes. There is no third option.
Another Scott
@Barbara:
Indeed.
These fundraisers for medical care are horrible. We who are willing and able to kick in some money rarely are able to do more than just make a small dent in the bill and end up feeling guilty that we can’t do more. And, as we know, the bill too often is just a made-up “list price” number for people who don’t have insurance anyway. The people suffering suffer more, the people who can give suffer, and overall society suffers because it give politicians an out rather than actually addressing the fundamental problems.
Similar, “great acts of charity” by the 0.0001% who can give $100M to their favorite college or hospital or art museum aren’t society’s friends, either. Our government and our polity would be much, much better off if the people (through their elected representatives) could decide major investments like that rather than some guy who managed to finagle the system and create gigantic rents through a fortunate monopoly or fall out of the “right” mother.
Grrr.
Cheers,
Scott.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@bupalos:
Chinese President Xi Jinping gave an interesting keynote at Davos several hours ago, one I happen to agree with. The economic problem is not globalization, but an excess of profit seeking without financial regulation. If you look closely at the atomistic international chaos favored by Trump, Putin and other white nationalists, this returns us to the instability of the sort of short term alliances which both facilitated and worsened the Great War, and rips the guts out of any meaningful international financial, environmental, trade or labor related oversight.
That is the true danger – a world of conflict and more widespread poverty.
trollhattan
O/T Once again we ask, “Why do people live in Florida?”
Peale
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Its great that he can have so many banks sitting on so many bad loans. What are all those billionaires the state creating seeking if not profit? Just wealth? Is that different?
Timurid
Schumer, bringin’ the wood…
stinger
@Damned at Random: I feel sorry for her and all, but that’s a failure of whoever evaluated the bids and awarded the contract. The RFB should have specified what needed to be covered in the bid. Health insurance is an obvious requirement, and if other bids covered it but hers didn’t, that’s a red flag.
Another Scott
@Goblue72: Purity kills.
Cheers,
Scott.
bupalos
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Yes, I don’t mean to blame “globalization” itself, but globalization means that many of the structures we had that help in dividing wealth more equitably, or at least give credibility to the way it is divided, are breaking down. It puts the rentier class on steroids and strikes at the real physical value of labor.
The Moar You Know
@trollhattan: Seen one that big, in Floriduh. Way back in the 1970s when I was a kid, at the Snakeatorium in Panama City. They can get somewhat bigger.
Here’s the three scariest/most dangerous Florida critters:
1. Adult Florida “citizens”
2. Mosquitoes
3. Fire ants
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Peale:
When the financial world was imploding over “worthless” mortgage backed securities, and collateralized swaps, my recollection is that the underlying loans were performing adequately in the C tranches in over 80% of the individual notes. That didn’t include the value in foreclosures and recoupment. What that ultimately means is that the investments would be recovered, just over a longer period – that is a far cry from “worthless”.
I’m guessing that Xi and his bankers are taking that longer view. They seem to be investing moreso than just profiting.
Major Major Major Major
@Peale: Xi, like most marxists, is long on criticism and short on solutions. That doesn’t make him wrong in this case.
Ruviana
@matryoshka: It’s a big problem. There’s a group that that tries to take down the hoaxers here. At AV Club’s remembrance site for SEK someone trolled extensively saying it was a fraud. If you look at the link your endless faith in humankind will be reinforced.//
Thoroughly Pizzled
@ArchTeryx: I usually think about the Civil War. The Southern aristocracy truly believed that they were better than the Northern rabble. But bullets don’t discriminate by wealth or status.
Cacti
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I wonder if it noticed that blue Colorado rejected a single payer ballot initiative by an 80-20 margin?
catclub
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
It is really only 4 out of 5 out there! :)
Thanks Richard for pointing this out. I wish I had the nerve to put a sign that says “This is bullshit, use taxes for healthcare” in front of all those jars by the grocery checkout.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Cacti:
Rigged polling places paid for by millyunayuhs and billyunayuhs.
bupalos
@Miss Bianca: i think it’s meant as a joke, but I actually don’t know why we can’t think this big.
catclub
@hovercraft:
I read a book called Help, by Garrett Keizer, that is excellent. The point I got was that if you wait to give until you find some deserving, sympathetic, person, you will wait a long time, so don’t wait.
NR
@Cacti: Well when you have the presidential nominee of the supposedly “liberal” party attacking single-payer with right-wing talking points, of course it’s going to be difficult to build much support for it.
Chris
This is, of course, the entire point of having a safety net privatized. They want the power to sort humanity according to that.
Chris
@Rusty:
Yep, basically this. That’s why the anti-UHC crowd wants it.
The complaints that welfare is like slavery then become revealing; no, it isn’t, but if you let them implement their version of it, it will be.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@bupalos: Eh. For me, it’s just a statement that I don’t have the spoons to care about people who are getting what they’ve asked for. I have a long-time R friend who has been working through the disability process for years. She just had her hearing, and she won’t get an answer for a couple more months. I’m gonna have a really hard time being sympathetic when Paul Ryan destroys SSDI just as she has it within her grasp. Because she’s been voting for this.
Rusty
@bupalos: Amen. Peace be with you.
ruckus
@Mike R:
There is enough reasonable worry when you have a major medical issue. Little things like having to wait up to a year to know if all the hassle and side effects of some treatment has had a positive outcome, or if all the time and money and “issues” was just passing time.
Michael Bersin
An interview I did in 2012 at Show Me Progress with Randy Huggins, from Leeton, Missouri, about what the ACA means and what repeal would do to his family (Vicky Hartzler-r is the representative for Missouri’s 4th Congressional District):
Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r): the Affordable Care Act and what repeal really means to one family (July 14, 2012)
==============================
[….]
Show Me Progress: What does repeal of the Affordable Care Act and Representative Vicky Hartzler’s vote to repeal it mean to you and your family?
Randy Huggins: Uh, it means financial insecurity for all of us. Uh, without having health insurance you know you’re going to have something come up. So, basically we would have to set everything aside and save for any health issues that would, would come up in the future.
Show Me Progress: Uh, but at the same time, uh, would saving cover everything?
Randy Huggins: I seriously doubt that we’d be able to save that much.
Show Me Progress: Uh, and, and how would that affect your, uh, grandson’s future?
Randy Huggins: Well. He would never be able to get any health insurance, um, because of the preexisting condition with his heart even if, when he is eighteen, to buy his own policy, he wouldn’t be able to get a policy. Uh, he would never have any kind of financial security.
Show Me Progress: And so the, uh, the Affordable Care Act, um, means that your grandson has a possibility of a future.
Randy Huggins: He, he has a possibility of, of a piece of the American dream, yeah.
[….]
Spinoza is my Co-pilot
@bupalos: Ah, it would be pretty to think so, wouldn’t it? Love conquering hate and all that, a decision to go with the “better angels of our nature” in the face of triumphant American-style fascism ultimately leading to some eventual “good” outcome (notwithstanding that being a “very heavy lift” as you perceptively noted).
Here’s the thing, though: Lincoln’s desperate “better angels” appeal to avoid the Civil War not only didn’t work (obviously) it never even had the remotest chance of working. It was only a response of hatred and violence on a massive scale that could and did defeat hateful and violent American slavepower (an earlier version of today’s American fascism).
Similarly, it was only hatred and violence on an exponentially-greater massive scale that could and did defeat hateful and violent European fascism.
Setting aside hate and turning the other cheek and extending an olive branch to our fucked-up rightwing fellow citizens of whatever demographic doesn’t fucking work and will not fucking work — they eagerly snatch the olive branch and stab you in the goddamn cheek with it, every time (Obama’s presidency is exhibit A here). They hated me and all I stand for first and so I fucking hate the vile pieces of shit in return.
I don’t even have much hope that my or any anti-fascist’s hatred will have any real efficacy — I’m one of those defeatists that Elizabelle and some others here rail against. I think we’re well and truly fucked and our only real hope is the very, very slim one that “heightening the contradictions’ actually works.
I highly doubt it will and instead believe the fascists will (successfully enough, anyway) blame the misery they cause on the liberal/left/Democrats. Watch them, for instance, gut Medicare for those below some age (my bet is 50) by blaming said gutting (i.e., replacement with useless fucking vouchers) on Obamacare. They’re already laying the groundwork for that, and though it’s complete bizzaro-world bullshit (Obamacare’s actually helped Medicare) we’re so deep now in an Orwellian post-fact world with a mostly-useless (or worse) media that this particular Big Lie will prevail.
They won’t succeed in every such attempt at scapegoating, of course. Enough to maintain power for the foreseeable, though (the SCOTUS and fed judiciary are already set to be rightwing for the next generation; Democrats are gonna lose Senate seats in 2018 and have little chance at the House for years; Trump/Pence/horrorshow Cabinet are in for the next 4, at least). Which will allow the fascists to achieve their ultimate goal of shredding the New Deal and all the progressive institutions built since then. Good luck putting that back together as global warming starts hitting hard and irrevocably.
So yeah, all I have for them is hate.
J R in WV
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Scott Eric Kaufman was a PhD (UC Irvine, 2008) scholar and writer who posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money. (The link is to SEK’s posts, not LGM’s front page…) He was philosophical and humorous, often at the same time. One of his favorite subjects was his many rescue cats, some of whom became characters in OLDMAN CAT, somewhat deranged imaginary conversations Scott had with one or the other of his formerly feral housemates.
He died recently after a long siege of various serious illnesses which eventually led to organ failure; eventually after a long hard fight he asked to have the equipment shut off.
I was quite fond of him, we chatted in LGM comment threads some.