News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Maybe if our healthcare industry wasn't designed to profit capitalists off death and suffering, there would be no such shortage.
I say this as someone who used to donate regularly until I learned how my donated blood was then being ransomed for private profit against sick people that need it.
I won't knowingly support such a system, where genuine charity (not that shit corporations do for tax breaks and marketing, that's called a transaction) is bastardized and betrayed into serving the profit motive.
Ransomed? I hadn't heard about this so I checked and found that places like Red Cross sell the blood for roughly $250 per unit to hospitals in the US, which seems...perfectly reasonable within the parameters of our healthcare system. There are operational costs to collecting blood that have to be funded somehow.
The cost to patients charged by healthcare providers is unrelated, and this does not apply to for-profit plasma centers, which...yeah, don't do that.
The next link in the donation delivery chain is unrelated? Agree to disagree.
Capitalist Trojan horse Charter schools might be "non-profit" but they hire publically traded, for profit charter management companies. It's all a capitalist profit grift by design. Pretty but fake front-end hiding a greed driven backend.
Forgive me, but this is misguidedly reductive. No healthcare is provided in the US, by providers, without being subjected to capitalist exploitation. If I understand your thought process, a collective of the best pharmaceutical scientists in the world could create a completely non-profit pharmaceutical NGO, design and manufacture life-saving drugs, and give them away to hospitals (or sell them at-cost). But so long as hospitals then charge profit rates for those drugs, it would be ethically indefensible to financially support the NGO?
Is that not holding patients hostage in an impotent effort to force change in the broader healthcare industry? I donate to my local non-profit blood center, who (assuming they're similar to ARC) sells my blood to local hospitals at-cost, and then my blood is used to save a patient in need. The patient will then be responsible for paying the hospital exorbitant sums for my blood (from which the blood center doesn't benefit) and all the other services it provides, but what's the alternative?
Edit: would it make a difference if the blood center didn't charge hospitals for the blood, even though the hospital will still charge patients?
It would be different if my DONATION to a NON-PROFIT was distributed for the cost of retrieval, packaging, and delivery into the patient's IV at cost, as it is a DONATION. No one forces for profit hospitals to jack up the price of the donated blood for private profit, they choose to out of greed. They should be FORCED not to by law.
Agreed, and I'm forced to participate in capitalist exploitation to subsist in this greedy fucking place at every turn, but I won't be a willing part of their schemes and scams if I am not forced to to survive.
Capitalists see charity and good will as just another vector for their grift. Thats why I donate directly to their victims on street corners now. If they do use it on drugs as so many warn, good, I hope that provides momentary solace for what we their fellow citizens have done to them in the name of "fuck you I got mine."
Seriously, I get it. It's fucking infuriating, but again...what's the alternative? Is there some way in which this moral rigidity is not holding patients hostage in an impotent effort to force change in a broader healthcare industry?
There are alternative and more effective methods of effecting change that don't involve sacrificing life or well-being. I implore anyone who's rightfully disgusted by this reality to grit your teeth and help people however you can, and direct your ire where it's best deserved.
You do realize that gritting our teeth and helping others through the intentional hostage situation of "but you gotta pay the shareholders first to be allowed to do it" is just further prolonging and further entrenching this sick system?
At some point, if the people don't say enough, let it all come crashing down, and rebuild a more equitable system, then our children and our children's children will be even more exploited, more commodified, and more dehumanized.
I'm being the change I want to see in the world by saying e-fucking-nough, you want to squeeze those sick people for their last nickel, do it yourself. My blood won't be your leverage.
This greed disease can cause pain in perpetuity, generationally, or we can let it collapse and endure the pain of reconstruction. There's gonna be a lot of pain, suffering, and unnecessary death either way. But only one has genuine hope in the long term. Nothing will make our current economy more equitable over time. It's going the other way by design. It is working as intended.
Who's organizing this? Your withdrawal isn't part of some collective movement, it is solitary and impotent. It is harmful. There's no board room hosting the league of evil medical barons, no agenda item about how Allonzee stopped donating blood so they'd better start taking things seriously. You're not changing anything, and squeezing sick people isn't a necessary step in effecting change anyway.
There's no "we" and there's no collapsing. These systems persist despite your personal rebellion, because they're really good at persisting until faced with overwhelming collective action. Until then, fucking help people.
Sorry friend, it's not really about you. But a lot of good people who care about inequity have let their pride convince them that systems will implode if they personally choose to stop participating in them. That's not how it works. The only people feeling any hurt are the innocents in your own communities.
"You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs. They have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting. They know what's good for them."
-George Carlin, from an episode of Politically Incorrect
I'm more than aware we are doomed and we will only continue to live further in service to them until they succeed in destroying the very air we all breath. I can only control myself, not the millions of people that continue to serve them against their own interests. I do what I consider right without hope or expectation of reward in a fully compromised and unethical society.
Based on this conversation, what you consider right has a lot more in common with pride and laziness than it does with moral integrity. You say a lot of revolutionary words about dismantling power structures before finally admitting you're just shrugging your shoulders in your own little corner.
I can't dismantle them by myself. I can't fight the storm by myself.
That doesn't mean im going to get a sledgehammer and start helping the storm knock over houses.
Have a good one.
You too, thanks for the interesting conversation.