|
Yawgmoft posted:I still have absolutely no idea how signing away your rights is even remotely legal- especially if you're under court order to use a program. The basic idea of being able to sign away your right to use the normal court system by agreeing to arbitration is sound - there are legitimate uses for arbitration, the court system tends to approve of disputes being settled outside of the courtroom since the legal system is overloaded enough already, and arbitration would be useless if one party could unilaterally renege and take it to real court in hopes of a different decision. The problems are that the court system has taken an overly generous and naive view toward organizations and companies forcing everyone they deal with to sign an arbitration agreement, that individual judges don't always pay very close attention to the details of the programs they're ordering people to sign up for (and sometimes that judge actually believes in that kind of program), and that the relative lack of good drug programs that aren't tied to religion or other stupidity often limits the options of even genuinely well-meaning judges who just want people to get treatment rather than prison. RaySmuckles posted:What's stopping us from forming our own, cut-rate arbitration firm that offers consumers a competitive alternative to arbitrators chosen by corporations? Since no corporation will ever agree to using your firm, you're not going to get any business; at best, you'll just be stalemating corporations into real court rather than their own arbitrators. If you're not getting any business, then you're not making any money, so you can't afford employees or marketing or office space, so your arbitration firm enters a death spiral that ends when no one has even heard of you, or when your operation is so pathetic that a court rules that you're not a real arbitration firm that qualifies as a credible option. Mandy Thompson posted:I don't see why they couldn't have allowed him to transfer to a secular drug program that isn't run by evangelicals. The article only briefly touches on this, but there may not have been an affordable one nearby. Free drug treatment programs are essentially charity, so there aren't a lot of them, and the majority of them are religious-run.
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2015 16:43
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 06:55 |
|
|
Commie NedFlanders posted:I wonder if his lawyer had any input in his signing that contract, if not i wonder how they successful defend those contracts because maybe admitting yourself into a drug treatment facility counts as evidence of not being in sound mind or something like that No it doesn't. If he wasn't considered of sound mind to choose it, he wouldn't have been offered a choice in the first place. And why would he have given his lawyer any input? He agreed to the program, the contract was just a paper he had to sign before he got in. Do you call your lawyer every time you sign up for a cellphone plan to have them interpret the terms and conditions for you? Kawasaki Nun posted:Wow this seems extremely bizarre. Could they not establish that his death was atleast potentially a consequence of gross negligence and therefore not subject to the arbitration agreement or something? I don't know how the law works exactly but this seems hugely bizarre I'm pretty sure that's not how the law works. The fact that he died is tragic but there's no magic legal principle when you die that annulls all unfavorable contract conditions you previously agreed to.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2015 20:08
|
|
|
Solkanar512 posted:There are certainly limits to how unbalanced a contract can be or how ridiculous the terms are before a judge can find parts of or the whole contract unenforceable. Like what? Arbitration clauses do not, by themselves, render contracts unenforceable. Certain particularly unbalanced arbitration clauses may do so, but there's nothing to suggest that this is one of them. Likewise, being offered a contract by a court as an alternative to jail time does not render the contract unenforceable. Negligence does not automatically render contracts unenforceable, and neither does death. If you think there was something in there that made the contract unenforceable, then say it, instead of criticizing my response to someone else for not addressing questions they never raised. The person I responded to only asked about death and negligence, which is why I only responded to those. Also, please be sure to distinguish between how things do work currently (i.e., "reality") and how you think they should work (i.e., "wishful thinking"). What I hate about discussing issues of law is people who fail to distinguish between using "it shouldn't work like this" to mean that it contradicts current law and using "it shouldn't work like this" to mean that any law that could possibly allow it is unjust and should be changed to fit their utopian vision, so you end up with legal scholars debating how laws actually work with people who are only really interested in describing their own ideal law code and then criticizing the real world for not living up to it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2015 21:59
|
|
|
Solkanar512 posted:You keep talking about "death doesn't automatically render a contract unenforceable" (the rest I never brought up) but the person you were responding to wasn't presuming that death renders contracts unenforceable nor were they talking about death but rather the conditions surrounding death - specifically asking if there was gross negligence. We see this all the time with all sorts of activities that require the signing of waivers which then become absolutely useless when it comes out that someone hosed up in a terrible way and it lead to a major injury or death. Negligence doesn't automatically render contracts unenforceable either, unless the negligence violates the contract in some way. My point was that the circumstances of the death do not, by themselves, have any effect on the contract. Sharkie posted:I'm not sure what this part means: No, you misunderstand. What the judge said was that the person filing suit in the name of the dead person (the "personal representative" of the dead person) needs to respect the wishes, desires, and contractual bindings of the dead person. If they cannot comply with those conditions due to personal or religious objections, then they should appoint someone else who can meet those conditions to be the personal representative. The mother claimed that forced arbitration violated her religious sensibilities and therefore she shouldn't be bound by that condition, but since her son willingly agreed to it, it's her duty as representative to abide by it - and if she is unwilling to do so, she needs to hand the "representative" role to someone who is willing to abide by the contract. Also, this is a civil suit. Criminal cases can't be forced into arbitration.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2015 19:56
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:What should be illegal is the quackery of gay conversion therapy. Can't you? If you willingly request and agree to the procedure, what's there to stop a properly-written arbitration contract from blocking a civil case? There may be criminal consequences for a doctor who performs such obviously-dangerous procedures (though on the other hand, it's not like anyone went to jail for convincing Steve Jobs to use alternative medicine for his cancer instead of real medicine), and any real doctor would likely lose their license, but if the contract is properly written then I don't see what about that situation would invalidate an arbitration clause? VitalSigns posted:I'm not a lawyer or anything and I have no idea what constitutes malpractice for someone claiming to be providing medical services like addiction treatment, but if giving known demonstrably harmful quack psychological counseling to someone in your care for treatment isn't illegal, it should be. This is one hell of a slippery slope though, because many medical procedures are dangerous or have nasty consequences or side effects, and may not always be effective. If it's malpractice to give someone a procedure with some risk of negative side effects which may not be effective at treating the core problem, then half of the medical field is malpractice - particularly cancer treatment, which already shows up in the courts more than its fair share. VitalSigns posted:Why are you so against holding anyone to any sort of professional standards in any thread? Maybe people who are assholes to patients with psychiatric problems shouldn't, uh, be licensed to counsel anyone? And maybe the state shouldn't let unlicensed therapists practice at all? You're conflating entirely separate issues here, so let's break them down and approach them individually - and yes, it is important to treat them separately, because it's pretty hard to identify solutions when you're too busy shouting that everything is wrong at once. The problem with banning unlicensed therapists from practice is that it's really hard to ban people from giving advice. At some point you have to draw a legal distinction between "therapy" and "listening to people's problems and then giving them advice", and it's really hard to come up with a place to draw the line that doesn't leave room for loopholes, especially if you're trying not to ban mentoring or enrichment or religious programs and groups. Incidentally, Teen Challenge's site doesn't use the words "treatment", "counseling", or "therapy" anywhere. Instead, they claim to offer "structure", "education", "Christian mentoring that can help young people find their way back to who they were before they got lost in life-controlling problems", and opportunities to "discover a new identity in Christ" and "acquire a new value system that [...] helps them become productive, healthy members of society". Everyone has a legal right to willingly agree to arbitration. There aren't any exceptions for specific fields that I'm aware of, and if there were, they certainly wouldn't be for a field as nebulous and vague as therapy. The mother apparently didn't see any problem with agreeing not to sue when she pushed for her child to be put into that program. Note also that arbitration agreements only protect the parties from civil cases. If the state thought that any of Teen Challenge's conduct rose to the level of, say, criminal negligence, they'd be in court and the agreement wouldn't do a thing to stop that. Teen Challenge doesn't seem to have been "trying to take over the state's job of rehabilitation" - it was the patient and his family who wanted to do it so badly that they persuaded the state to accept it. If they were really that bothered, they were free to try the state's version of rehabilitation instead.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2015 18:14
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:No it isn't. that's the job of the AMA and the APA, to define what procedures are ethical if risky and which are dangerous and unjustifiable. Somehow we managed to ban radium water without banning chemotherapy so I don't think the slope is as slippery as you claim and it is in fact possible to shut down camps that drive kids to suicide by telling them to pray the gay away without taking everyone's bibles and banning Christianity. Radium water isn't a medical procedure, and it isn't banned. It can't be marketed as medicine without approval by the FDA, but Congress has carved out enormous loopholes for pseudoscience industries, so there are lots of ways around that restriction. Even if you're selling literal poison (the bleach enema makes radium water look safe by comparison), as long as you're careful about your advertising and labeling, the worst you can get hit with in the US is "selling misbranded drugs". As for chemotherapy, I brought it up specifically because cancer treatment can be surprisingly contentious and shows up in the courts a lot. Chemo side effects are so miserable that even people with highly curable cancers and extremely positive chances of survival sometimes drop out of treatment midway and pursue more pleasant alternative medicine "treatments" instead. From there, you only need a couple more circumstances added in to end up in a case like Virginia v. Starchild Abraham Cherrix. First of all, the court can do basically whatever the gently caress they want, as evidenced by the case earlier this year when a judge sentenced a man to marriage (and copying a Bible verse 25 times a day). Aside from that, there's the question if how to evaluate the effectiveness of such programs. Simply requiring licensing is problematic, because faith-based organizations are exempt from licensing requirements in a number of states (including Florida, the state in question), and Bush opened up federal funding to those groups as well (he even specifically cited Teen Challenge as an example of faith-based treatment organizations being better than secular ones, which he said was because the government is incapable of love). That doesn't just go for counseling and treatment, either - for example, thirteen states exempt faith-based childcare organizations from usual licensing requirements for childcare, and don't even get me started on faith-based prisons. Can't necessarily look at success rates, either, because Teen Challenge claims a 70+% success rate (drastically higher than most secular programs) and has studies to back it up. Some have criticized the methodology of those studies, and the massive difference in success rates almost certainly indicates serious discrepancies with the measurement methodology, but those are the only numbers we have on Teen Challenge's performance. There just isn't much solid basis for specifically denying Teen Challenge, aside from "religion is bullshit", which is unlikely to carry much water in a Tennessee courtroom. As for banning faith-based programs outright in Florida, I think the Florida Faith-Based and Community-Based Advisory Council (an official state agency set up by the governor to In any case, although the media has almost exclusively covered the homosexuality aspect, the lawsuit and negligence allegations actually seem to focus on more practical questions like "how did he end up in a CVS at 1am in an unfamiliar city after he was supposedly discharged and sent to the hospital". While it's likely that his time at Teen Challenge probably didn't help his mental state much, the family is much more concerned about exactly how he ended up drinking himself to death in the apartment of a total stranger after he was supposedly discharged and sent off to treatment - was he just kicked out onto the street with nowhere to go?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2015 18:19
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:No I'm not, as you note the carveouts for pseudoscience and assorted bullshit exist because congress explicitly chose to create them. The courts have traditionally interpreted the commerce clause broadly and I have a hard time accepting that if congress decides to start properly regulating the snake-oil industries that the court will suddenly reverse and decide harmful fake medicine is protected speech (okay well maybe this Supreme Court would, I need to wait for one of the 5 Hobby Lobby judges to die). Sure, I agree that homeopathy, dietary supplements, and such should be regulated by the FDA. But talking is not and will never be regulated by the FDA, not even if it includes the words "God" or "Bible", and if Congress decided to ban discussing life problems and decisions with your pastor then you'd better loving believe the courts would have a thing or two to say about "free speech" and "religious freedom".
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2015 22:00
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:You know there's a reason slippery slope is a fallacy right? It's not a matter of slippery slope. The problem with banning non-professional counseling is that counseling is basically just giving advice, and a number of non-licensed figures - community leaders, nonprofit execs, and prominent members of religious groups or organizations - have traditionally been approached for amateur counseling. You say there's a world of difference between talking to your pastor about your addiction and talking to a "treatment counselor", but in either case, you're just telling a person about your problems and getting advice in return. Fundamentally, the primary difference between talking to the pastor and talking to the mental health counselor is that it's illegal to call yourself the latter without complying with licensing and training requirements and therefore the latter will give better advice. However, those requirements are not attached to "what they do", they're attached to "what they call themselves". Anyone can do counseling without being a licensed mental health counselor, they just can't call themselves a "mental health counselor" because it's (typically) a protected title. You can't ban people from doing amateur counseling any more than you can ban people from giving amateur medical advice, because it is way harder to regulate words than it is to regulate procedures and chemicals. CharlestheHammer posted:Even if it was just a rouge employee, that still seems like it would be there fault. For not keeping an eye on their employee. The NYT does cite a gay Teen Challenge employee and graduate who apparently told them that gayness was frowned upon and that people would be told it was bad, and the NYT also claims to have counselors' reports indicating that they tried to convince Ellison that homosexuality is wrong. However it's not clear that being criticized for his homosexuality had anything to do at all with his death, which was likely not an intentional suicide. It may have possibly contributed to his relapses, but he had addiction problems that sometimes led to violent consequences long before he entered the program, so it'd be quite the uphill battle to blame his death on anything the counselors may have said about homosexuality. That's why the lawsuit was about how he managed to get out of Teen Challenge's custody and disappear after supposedly being sent to a hospital, rather than about anything that happened during the counseling.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2015 23:11
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 06:55 |
|
|
Parallel Paraplegic posted:You do realize that practicing medicine without a license is A Thing you can be arrested for, right? Like people are banned from giving amateur medical advice in a lot of situations. Giving medical advice isn't considered "practicing medicine" unless the person doing it claims to be an actual doctor. That's why SA can have an entire forum dedicated to amateur medical advice, why WebMD and countless amateur medical forums exists, and why saying "suck it up and take some Tylenol" isn't an arrestable offense. Effectronica posted:This is just a big is-ought fallacy. If we are not married to the status quo, we can put forth the argument that professional standards ought to exist for psychological counseling and that chiropractic practitioners should be required to disassociate themselves from the aura of medicine. Sure, but there's a big difference between "this is illegal" and "that should be illegal", and it's really annoying when someone says the former, people correct them, and then someone else (or sometimes the same person) comes in and accuses them of being unimaginative fallacy-users who just refuse to entertain the possibility of change. It's also really annoying when someone says "that should be illegal", and when faced with the actual practical difficulties of illegalizing it, accuses people of just being too attached to the status quo.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2015 03:28
|
|