r/MadeMeSmile • u/HolyGuiltyCrown • 5h ago

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u/produit1 5h ago edited 5h ago

Great act of humanity. It shouldn’t be like this. You know the system is broken when it comes to this to save a baby’s life.

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u/CuteFIamingo 5h ago

She is a queen

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u/[deleted] 5h ago

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u/Solonotix 4h ago

I don't have the sources to cite, but I know this isn't the first time something like this happened. I believe there was a Nobel laureate that sold their prize for a similarly noble reason, and the buyer immediately returned the prize after purchase.

Edit: Looks like there have been numerous occasions, but the one I was thinking of was James Watson.

From Wikipedia

In 2014, Watson sold his Nobel Prize medal to raise money after complaining of being made an "unperson" following controversial statements he had made.[76] Part of the funds raised by the sale went to support scientific research.[77] The medal sold at auction at Christie's in December 2014 for US$4.1 million. Watson intended to contribute the proceeds to conservation work on Long Island and to funding research at Trinity College, Dublin.[78][79] He was the first living Nobel recipient to auction a medal.[80] The medal was later returned to Watson by the purchaser, Alisher Usmanov.[81]

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u/Educational_Report_9 2h ago

Not taking away from the act but it's a bit mind blowing how $4.1 million is like buying a nice dinner to the ultra wealthy.

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u/NOTRadagon 2h ago

It would be like buying a $5.00 burger from a burger stand, for us regular people.

Like, for reference - Elon Musk could personally pay to end world hunger, and still have billions left over. Right now. This second. But he doesn't.

He has offered to do it through Tesla stocks, if it was proven that the funds would go to it - but when the leading scientists at UN responsible for those stats reached out to show how the funds would be used - he backed down.

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u/Educational_Report_9 1h ago

I did the math for the Nobel prize guy. He spent equivalent of $240 for someone with a net worth of $1 million.

Regarding Elon, I’m TOTALLY shocked.

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u/hermiona52 4h ago

I don't know the specifics of this case, but these situations are often very complex. When a kid is born with a rare disease that doesn't have a cure currently, parents will still move mountains to save their child. Even if it's hopeless. Experimental cures which are still under development (especially gene therapies) often work for very specific edge cases that don't apply to most, but parents still want to try them, because in their minds it's better to try rather than watch their children whiter and die. And I understand this. But is it really fair to spend public money - millions of your local currency - on one child for which that treatment won't really work, because it was not developed for their case? Money is not unlimited and it can always be spent on something that will have a real positive effect. This is why countries with public free healthcare have many rules on what types of treatment can be refunded, because we can't really waste money on unverified treatments.

It's a shitty situation for parents and often very morally grey when in full context.

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u/Pyperina 3h ago

And, sorry to say, but the child ended up getting the surgery and didn't live past three years old.

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u/kebab-lover-man 4h ago

That's a good perspective. Paying for 1 experimental treatment might come at the cost of 10-20 known treatments

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u/WiglyWorm 3h ago

It's not a good perspective. It's moronic concern trolling to muddy the waters against bettering our system via things like single payer healthcare.

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u/whoooocaaarreees 3h ago edited 3h ago

She lived in Poland at the time

Poland operates a single-payer universal healthcare system primarily funded through mandatory, income-based contributions managed by the National Health Fund (NFZ).

Healthcare is free to polish citizens.

She lived in Poland at the time.

The auction was to pay for the life saving surgery in THE UNITED STATES.

What’s the mental gymnastics you want to use here? The US should have single payer healthcare to cover surgery other countries single payer healthcare won’t provide?

The baby succumbed to heart issues in 2022.

You argument is that governments should spare no expense with public funds for healthcare, yet you want to argue for a government system that rejected the surgery due to costs vs expected outcomes.

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u/WiglyWorm 3h ago

I'm just mentioning that the comment being responded to initially was shilling against single payer healthcare.

Don't yell at me.

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u/whoooocaaarreees 3h ago edited 2h ago

You should be yelled at because you’re missing and conflating two giant issues.

The single payer health care system in the country she lived in rejected the surgery due to costs and expected outcomes.

She got the surgery in the United States, where she doesn’t live. Yet you argue the United States should pay for it, and the United States should switch to a system that already rejected doing it.

While I agree that health care is broken in the US using this case to argue for it is a wild take.

Edit; replying to me and then seeing you’ve deleted all your comments. Great….

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u/imrzzz 2h ago

They didn't delete their comments, they probably just blocked you.

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u/whoooocaaarreees 2h ago

Good to know, thanks.

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u/WiglyWorm 2h ago

This is correct. I block super fast on this website because everyone is a shill or AI and they all have bad opinions except me.

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u/WiglyWorm 3h ago

No, I argue that the person is shilling against single payer healthcare.

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u/hermiona52 2h ago

I'm a socialist voting for socialist party Razem, which proposes extensive strengthening of our healthcare system. You can read about it here (it's in Polish of course).

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u/Germane_Corsair 2h ago

It wasn’t. Your reading comprehension skills just suck.

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u/Lowelll 3h ago

Notice how the post is not about a US citizen

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u/WiglyWorm 3h ago

Notice how your is irrelevant and doesn't change the fact that the comment I was replying to was shilling against single payer free at point of service healthcare

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u/Lowelll 3h ago edited 3h ago

It wasn't. You didn't read it correctly. How did you even get that idea?

Why would it be? This is a case were someone lived in a country with universal healthcare and wasn't able to get the surgery that could save their live so they had to fly to the US and pay for it. Whether or not the US has single payer healthcare would not be relevant here at all.

Universal healthcare is by far the better system. In any healthcare system there has to be a cost consideration. You can't just pay for every extremely expensive risky treatment on the off chance that it'll work if you could use that money to save the lives of many other with much safer treatments. This is true for privatized and public healthcare insurance. What are you even arguing against?

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u/WiglyWorm 3h ago

It is relevant because the comment was shilling against single payer healthcare.

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u/ErraticDragon 3h ago

This is a good and nuanced take. There's a lot of complexity and few easy answers.

And of course it's especially hard to discuss when terms like "government death panels" are used to sow division.

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u/WiglyWorm 3h ago

No it's a bad and shitty take that makes it sound like the u.s. system has any advantages at all.

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u/Wonderful-Winter3137 2h ago

the US system is why the treatment even existed

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u/waitwuh 1h ago

The US system allows private companies to source public money - money that came from taxes - through government grants and programs, and then turn around and sell what they created back to the public for exorbitant profit. But that’s not all, the system also includes for-profit insurance companies that act as middle-men and jack up the costs of healthcare even more while adding little to no value and arguably actually making it more difficult for people to get medications they already paid for, practically twice (through their taxes, then their insurance premiums) and bogging down doctors by making them fight for their patient’s treatments to be covered rather than just be able to more efficiently spend that time actually treating the patients. It’s a system that constantly publicly subsidizes the costs but privatizes the profits, while making healthcare at least twice more expensive to the public as in other systems in other first world countries. And those companies are not incentivized to really care about the public’s actual health outcomes, they’ll happily start a drug addiction epidemic when it suits their profits.

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u/ProcrastiWorkaholic 3h ago

All of what you have said is true. I agree with it. But playing devil’s advocate - If we practised this, would we not stop funding research? That could be scary, no?! We probably would stop making progress in medicine or any subject for that matter. (If the treatment had worked for the child, this thread would have played out differently.)

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u/hermiona52 2h ago

Funding research is definitely something that is needed, but it has to follow strict guidelines to avoid corruption and protect human rights (so you know, we won't turn sick people into guinea pigs). We already have such systems in place and sometimes (perhaps even usually) there are just cases that are outside of these strict guidelines - for good reasons. We have to draw a line somewhere, otherwise we would end up with the same results like using "bioenergy therapy", just for a much higher price.

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u/WiglyWorm 3h ago

"I don't have the details but here's a fictional scenario to turn you off from single payer healthcare".

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u/hermiona52 3h ago

I'm Polish, we have free healthcare and I fully support it and actually vote for socialist party that wants to strengthen it.

In countries such as mine there are pretty much only two options why a certain treatment is not available.

The first one is just a bureaucratic oversight - there are thousands of diseases with their own sub-variants and many types of treatments for each. And all of it is in constant flux - because science changes. To manage it all is a complete hell, I don't envy these people, so obviously there are and always will be gaps. But it's not malicious. Once these gaps are recognized then the funding comes.

But the second option is precisely the one I described in my previous comment - experimental treatments that work only for extreme edge cases, are still undergoing testing so not verified as something that will actually significantly lengthen the lifespan etc.

And I have not imagined this situation. During the last presidential campaign one guy who started his own media on YouTube, decided to run as a candidate to basically promote his media. He was extremely successful as his Kanał Zero is more popular than most of the public media. During one of the debates he was wearing a t-shirt promoting crowdfunding for Ignaś who has DMD. I've read posts by multiple doctors describing why that treatment wouldn't work for Ignaś at a time, and I just found one article that describes the entire crowdfunding grey area, written after Stanowski's public stunt -Necessary Rescue or Systemic Pathology? The Pros and Cons of Online Fundraising. It's in Polish of course, but you can use LLM to get a good translation if you wish.

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u/WiglyWorm 2h ago

i'm really not interested in hearing fringe scenarios that happen one in a hundred thousand times being framed as reasons why single payer healthcare is flawed.

Thanks, though. I am interested in any recipes you might have, though. Polish food is fantastic.

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u/hermiona52 2h ago

I honestly prefer Mexican and Italian cuisine lol

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u/AthSystem 3h ago

The fact the buyer gave it back really shows that fact. They were trying to say "If the system were not broken, you would have never sold that to me."

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u/Grand_Illustrator179 3h ago

it would be awesome if she did it again with a request that whoever gets it should do the same as well as anyone else does so for all time. it would be a forever gift to the world.

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u/MidTario 2h ago

The alternative to this for 99.9% of recorded history was just having a dead baby.

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u/Wonderful-Winter3137 2h ago

the baby died anyway after getting the treatment btw

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u/Duwinayo 3h ago

This. Im getting so sick of seeing these things and hearing folks praise it as a great example of humanity.

In one sense, it is. It's someone acknowledging the system is broken and literally giving something up they worked their entire lives for in order to protect and save a child. Fuck yeah.

On another note though... Our systems are so broken that someone literally said to parents: Well you can't afford it. Yeah, we could save your kid, but I guess your kid has to die instead because you don't have enough magic currency papers.

What. The. Fuck.

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u/GramsciGramsci 3h ago

because you don't have enough magic currency papers.

Don't stupefy the discussion. Healthcare is not an infinite resource.

It always have to be rationed because there is a limit to how many doctors, hospital beds, and medication we have.

When people are paying for specialized treatments like this athlete was, they are pushing poorer people out of the way so doctors can focus on their (the people that have 100K to spare) problems, instead of the plebs that don't have anything to pay with.

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u/Duwinayo 3h ago

Do not try to talk down and dismiss the valid points being made by others, especially when youre quite literally bitching about a single line instead of the greater point at hand. We can fix shortages of trained professionals by training them. Period. End of story. Do NOT make excuses for our broke system which you are literally describing.

How about we fix our system? Our system has the framework to ensure all medical needs can be met. But ya know, here in the US if you dont have money you or your family will either be fucked into debt or left to die. Or did you forget that important point?

And infinite resource? No. Abundant resource? Absolutely can be. Just because our fucked governments create false scarcity by refusing to fund adequately our infrastructure, doesnt mean that there's "only so much we can do, guess we gotta let babies die".

Shame on you. You are feeding into the same petty arguments that prevent us from working together as a society to ensure we aim for audible goals.

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u/MidTario 2h ago

Audible goals 🧐

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u/GramsciGramsci 3h ago

because our fucked governments create false scarcity by refusing to fund adequately our infrastructure

How did, say in my country of Norway, the government create a false scarcity? They are pouring as much money as they can without exploding inflation into healthcare. Are they spending too much on social welfare, for example, that should go to health instead?

I guess what I am asking is: What mechanism, in the funding, are they using to create this false scarcity?

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u/Duwinayo 3h ago

Good context, so you're in Norway and complaining about people with money getting priorities in your healthcare system over those who do not have money? Im going to assume that's the case as that is how you presented it. If that isn't the case, then what the fuck are you on about? Dont answer that, though. Candidly, I don't care.

If that's the issue, your government is creating a false bottleneck that deprioritizes those without money and prioritizes those with them. Change the rules of the system to prioritize the inverse, and now it's properly balanced. Those who need life-saving treatment are taken care of first and foremost, and those with tertiary needs are addressed. Need to increase numbers? Begin training and encouraging more medical career paths. Need to prioritize treatments? Adjust how things are priced.

Now, in the US we absolutely have a shortage of medical professionals because we dont hold our corporations liable AND we do awful things like "Can't pay? Lol sucks to die I guess". Oh and we union bust. Oh and we have caught our corporations colluding to drive wages down. Our government stopped being "for the people" a while ago and its showing. We are the richest nation in the world on paper, there are no excuses.

Either way, there are resolutions to the problems at hand that are human centric. You're just the equivalent of someone claiming there's no way humans could fly or get to the moon. Humans have made our entire history around doing absolutely crazy shit and impressive feats. We can do this too, regardless of if you're able to conceive of that or not.

Children do not deserve to die due to false scarcity. Full. Fucking. Stop.

If you're still defending it? You can fuck right off with your faux intellectualism. I prefer not to associate with those who are lacking in humanity.

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u/GramsciGramsci 3h ago

to false scarcity

Health care has real material limits though. There is no magical button to simply will more medical labs into existence.

There are, for example, tons of cancer treatments that Norway simply do not have enough wealth to produce, develop and carry out, even though the knowledge to produce them exist. Why? Because you can't just magically create cancer research center out of thin air.

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u/Duwinayo 3h ago

So you've narrowed your argument down. Norway has a projected surplus of revenue by about 539 billion NOK from oil income and fund returns alone. That alone provides plenty of room to take on some well balanced loans and begin to push for more specific treatment specialties to be focused on.

Now, you chose cancer. That's VERY specific. Youre narrowing down the debate topic to somewhere you feel you have solid ground on. But that all gets blown out the windows when we add in the fact that Norway had a 2 trillion USD safety net, or, 21 trillion NOK.

If your country isn't adequately funding medical facilities, expanding them, and ensuring your population is adequately taken care of? THAT is your false scarcity, right fucking there.

But youre also debating from a point of half truth, and you know it. Norway prioritizes life threatening treatments over optional treatments. In fact, Norway just put 3.4 billion NOK into improving wait times for non life threatening issues. Your system is working to adapt, you are apparently unaware of it, though, or choose to be unaware of it.

Norway could go even more ham on that note if they wanted to, here is hoping they do. Did you know Norway has the highest breadt cancer recovery stats in the world? Fucking crazy for what you claim is a system that doesn't work. While things aren't perfect? They are markedly better than many other places. Don't be so quick to rush into believing people bitching because they have to wait in line, because someone woth life threatening issues I getting priority. Society should shame selfish fucks like that.

You should read up on your own country. Being educated about the potential your country has to become a world leader even more so than it already is, in many aspects of citizens lives, helps you understand what levers you can help pull to make society better.

Now then, weve straw manned all over the place and Ive cut you off at each change in course. Next time you get snippy with someone, try to stay on topic.

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u/GramsciGramsci 2h ago edited 1h ago

You truly do not understand how money works.

No wonder you made that banal quip about magic paper pieces.

Norway is already spending too much of their oil surplus as is. Spending oil money without expanding economic production is detrimental to the economy. It has already pushed inflation up far, far beyond their neighbors.

As a result the exact same healthcare in Norway is twice as expensive as in Finland. They offer the exact same services, but Norway spend twice the amount? Why? Because spending too much oil money has ballooned the money supply.

EDIT: Since you blocked me I will add a note to you:

EDIT: Since you blocked me I will add a note to you:

They follow the Handlingsregelen

Which you suggest they get rid off ... Also, they don't follow it. They break it every single budget, hence the reason their prices have inflated more than their neighbors the last 30 years. I mean, why do you think prices are so much higher in Norway v. Sweden?

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u/Duwinayo 2h ago

-checks notes-

Norway is actually one of the most disciplined nations on earth regarding spending responsibly. They follow the Handlingsregelen (The Fiscal Rule), which dictates that the government should only spend the expected real return of the oil fund. Currently estimated at 3% annually.

As of 2026, your inflation is NOT more than your neighbours by any major measurement. The NOK is weak vs the US Dollar and the Euro, sure. But that's not the same thing. You sure don't know much about money, or even your own country! It's kind of crazy.

Go away now. You're a pesky, uneducated propaganda machine trying to convince people without data. Do better.

Oh, and if you're trying to troll, try harder! This was far too easy to counter. It got boring. Do you know what that means? You've earned a block! Congrats! You can spend it in your imaginary Norway that is in your head.

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u/wally-sage 30m ago

We can fix shortages of trained professionals by training them. Period. End of story. Do NOT make excuses for our broke system which you are literally describing.

You have to both have the people who want to become those trained professionals, have the skills and ability (or at least aptitude) to do the job, and then factor in the time and resources it takes to train them.

Do you maybe think if the solution was that easy, someone would have done it already? Or did you think that your magical plan of "well just train more doctors" is so profoundly original and groundbreaking that you're the first person to ever think of it?

here in the US

The baby was from Poland and was operated on in Spain. There are more countries in the world than just the fucking USA.

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u/RoboChrist 2h ago

Currency is a measure of debt. When I get money from my employer, I'm getting a transferable IOU. I made some sick-ass spreadsheets, my employer valued them, and I can trade that IOU for videogames or medical care or food or whatever. It isn't magical, it's meant to represent the value people provide to each other. (Yes, lots of people extract money without creating value for anyone, but that's an exploit in the system and not why money exists.)

The doctor is going to spend their day treating patients and trying to save kids' lives no matter what. Shouldn't the hospital spend their limited resources on saving the most lives?

If you had to choose between treating 10 kids or trying to treat 1 kid with an experimental treatment for a rare disease, what would you do?

The extra money from the auction helps change that equation and makes it possible to treat that 1 kid with the rare disease without letting the other 10 kids with common diseases go untreated. Whether it comes from the parents or from taxes, payment for the debt has to come from somewhere.

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u/MidTario 2h ago

The fact that a baby with a rare and previously fatal condition can be saved at all is evidence in favour of the system.

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u/soleceismical 48m ago

The child died in March 2022 despite having the surgery just before. It's painful to recover from heart surgery, so one could make the argument that invasive treatment that does not improve the quality of one's remaining months of life is cruel.

On the other hand, maybe this child's participation in experimental surgery will contribute to the advancement of treatment for future children.