TOS Blog: Daily Commentary from an Objectivist Perspective

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Help Joshua Lipana Fight Cancer—Update 2

Posted by Craig Biddle at 6:46 pm ET

(If you are new to Joshua’s situation, please see my earlier announcements here and here.)Joshua Lipana

I’m delighted to report that Joshua’s prognosis continues to improve. According to his doctors, chemotherapy is working, Joshua’s bone marrow is now cancer-free, and the tumor in his left lung has been reduced to a fraction of its original size.

Joshua writes, “I’m getting stronger and have started physical therapy. (Brushing my teeth used to be exhausting.) . . . I’m excited to get back to champion freedom and kick statist ass.”

I think I speak for everyone who knows Joshua or has read his articles when I say: We look forward to that, too!

Although Joshua’s health appears to be improving, his bills continue to mount and currently exceed $30,000. To date we have raised $18,267 (that’s $2,000 more than GoFundMe shows because one couple generously made a direct donation of $2,000 to Joshua’s PayPal account); so we still have $6,733 to go to reach our goal of $25,000.

If you haven’t yet donated, please make a donation today. If you have donated, please consider making an additional donation.

Let’s help Joshua return home, not to a pile of unmanageable bills, but to a clean slate so he can resume “championing freedom and kicking statist ass.”

Thank you,
Craig Biddle

P.S. If you’d like to donate directly to Joshua’s PayPal account, you can do so by sending money to joshualipana (atsign) yahoo (dot) com. If you’d prefer to mail a check, please make it out to “The Objective Standard,” write “Donation for Joshua” on the memo line, and mail the check to: The Objective Standard, P.O. Box 5274, Glen Allen, VA 23058.

Posted in: Announcements

Comments are welcome so long as they are civil.
  • Devil’s advocate

    Have you inadvertently made the case for socialized medicine by stating that he cannot afford the cost of the treatment?

  • Jorge

    How does that make any sense? Under socialized medicine there is the chance that he wouldn’t have ever gotten the treatment to begin with, and plus cost are high because of government.
    That was a pretty lousy question to use as a devil’s advocate question.

    Hope he gets better.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Keith-Sketchley/732092025 Keith Sketchley

    As for the greatness of socialized medicine, ask why some breast cancer patients from Victoria are having surgery in Seattle this month. (The regional government health authority cannot fully utilize even its modest supply of operating rooms because it did not manage staff vacations properly. Fortunately the regional authority in the Vancouver BC area and private facilities in the Seattle area can pick up some of the load.Oh, and there are private surgery facilities in BC, heavily used by the worker’s injury compensation board because avoiding the public waiting line gets people back to work much sooner thus ends compensation payments. Saving the one scarce resource – individual human time alive – is ignored in the Canadian system where waiting lists are long. I know a nurse who was off work for over a month because a gall bladder problem prevented her from working but was not acute enough to justify emergency surgery. And ask how much an unfree society does for health – Africa being the perennial poster place for that. Even the grand experiment in socialism could not in over 7 decades achieve the end it used to justify its oppressive means (feed people, an essential for heath that is part of the problem in Africa as well-nourished people resist disease – despite having some of the earths’ best farmland). The notion of free medical care is useless without the wherewithal to produce it, but heavily socialist societies do not produce much. Socialized medicine is definitely not a panacea.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Keith-Sketchley/732092025 Keith Sketchley

    One great thing about modern medicine is improved treatments against cancer.For example, David Koch is surviving prostate cancer with a new drug, removal and drugs used earlier did not work well enough to eliminate all of the cancer in his body.(Koch is the industrialist whose brother Charles funded startup of the libertarian Cato Institute. He donates huge sums of money to medical research.)There are many other examples, including an unsung effort that made penicillin more than just a laboratory discover: http://www.keithsketchley.com/gritty.htm. A major proportion of our population would not be alive today if penicillin and later antibiotics had not been invented, as infections including pneumonia are often fatal without such treatment.