"Life is a casino, survival is gambling, and your only bargaining chip is your own life."
people sometimes do some very pathological things for money. According to multiple foreign media reports, an alternative gambling trend is emerging in Taichung: Taiwanese people will place bets based on how long can patients with terminal illness in hospitals live.
This is not an individual case where morally corrupt gamblers use any means to make money. Behind it is a fully developed underground industrial chain worth US$30 million. What is even more uncomfortable is that doctors, nurses, even cancer patients themselves and their families can get a share of it. Once you win the bet, the bonus of the bet may even be as much as three times the investment.
The rules are very simple: patients with advanced cancer are selected, and the gambler bets for "Can the patient survive a month", with a bet of at least $40, and the highest bet record exposed by the media is as high as $350,000.
If the patient dies within one month, the dealer will get empty prize pool; if the survival time exceeds one month, the rewards received by the participants will increase with the number of days the patient dies, with a maximum time limit of 6 months. It is clearly shown on the
entry form that the bettor must first pay an annual fee of NT$2,000, and then pay the "investment" based on the death period judged by itself.
On Shijia East Road in East District, Taichung City, you can see a charity and public welfare mutual aid association for the elderly in just a few steps. There are nearly 60 companies in one kilometer.
These companies only have signs but no storefronts. All billboards support the guise of "hospice care" and "mutual assistance and insurance", but it is still difficult to hide the horrific title of "Death Gambling Street" in the area. The death casino hidden under the empty shell of "The Elderly House" has become a local feature of Taichung.
"Qiantai Company" is the largest mutual aid association in Gambling Street. It is responsible for searching for cancer patients and absorbing members. It has attracted more than 30,000 participants.
Any mutual aid association has a membership of 500 to 1,000 people. Because there are too many people joining the association, traffic police are often stationed to maintain the parking order of vehicles.
Mr. Zheng, the owner of a mutual aid association, pointed out that his managers have about 200 to 300 people, and there are more or less short-sighted people. In the bets held by some people, they can participate even if they are not relatives. As long as they know the patient's name, they can buy heads.
These bookmakers who organize gambling are respected by the industry as "hospice managers". They are like psychic black cats who can smell cancerous cells emit ketones and death breath, specializing in weak families with critically ill families, using dividends as bait, and some people will even lobby their families to sign an agreement to give up treatment.
Taking advantage of the loopholes in Taiwan's Insurance Law, participants can "invest" under the name of "investment". The Taichung police finally decided to carry out a major search on Gambling Street, but in the end, the High Court ruled that such "investment behavior" was a mutual aid between members and failed.
"No one has the right to prevent customers from investing in our company's mutual aid. Is the essence of life insurance more elegant than all this?"
death betting game has no obvious gambling plates and taps. Whether it constitutes gambling remains to be discussed, which gives Qiantai company managers full confidence to refute the media.
anonymous "hospice manager" revealed to Dongsen News reporters that he alone has developed 50 to 60 offline members, and he is not surprised to lose NT$1.2 million in a month.
A semi-open insurance company is even covered with bonus and dividend systems for each group leader on the wall. There are at least 5 to 6 groups next to the counter, and most of the elderly are in and out. If a reporter comes to ask sensitive questions, they will immediately take a defensive posture, claiming that the Mutual Aid Association clearly stipulates that only elderly people aged 60 to 90 can join the club. The health of members is top secret information, and all internal personnel do not mention this.
Before the patient's survival period is about the severity of the bet, the dealer will seek the consent of his family in advance. No matter whether the patient dies or lives in one month, he can get a 10% gambling dividend in the name of "rebirth comforting assistance". This rule is an irresistible temptation for every participant in the life game.
For families who are so poor that they are worried about raising burial expenses, this may be the last bet that families must win in their life insurance policy. The curtain call for a man to die with the world has set off another carnival.
Some people say that life is a casino, survival is gambling, and your only bargaining chip is your own life. You must know that sending death for nothing and burning the embers of life for your family are purely different things.
When other people's lives need to move forward, they just need to lie down.
The behavior of bettors to observe the condition is commonly known as "seeing goods" in the industry. As long as new members join the market, the dealer can take them to the hospital to evaluate "investment" in the name of visiting patients.
Imagine a dying patient's eyes are full of suspicion when he opens his eyes. There are not only relatives next to the pillow who care about the concern, but perhaps there are gamblers who always keep a close eye on electronic instruments and observe the patient's signs curve and life indicators.
They are like retail investors in the securities trading hall with their necks stretched out and stared at the K-line. Their emotions fluctuate with futures prices and stock trends, and sometimes express their emotions and whines.
The dealer will travel around the hospital regularly, and the prompts of "betting quickly" and "closing the case and paying the bill" are quietly spread in the whispers outside the hospitalization department and the ICU ward.
"What do you think about this game? Is it okay for two months?"
"No hurry, wait and see the food for two days first."
There were four patients in Mrs. Xu, who lives in Xitun District, bet on her. She said that when she was dragged by the mutual aid association to pay NT$2,000 a month, she just wanted to help poor families to relieve the pressure of buying funerals and spend some spare money.
After more and more high-value bets were opened, Mrs. Xu's strong expectations for the death time of the case made her feel uneasy and decided to never follow her again after the "goal draw".
"This is making money from death."
It is not difficult to imagine that such a bet will inevitably be manipulated by human factors - some doctors may be treated passively for the sake of benefit, or the patient may choose to commit suicide in a dilemma.
For those who are obsessed with profit, this may be just a "subtle" trading action that can be ignored in the process of seeking high returns.
Death is a fair thing. No matter whether you are powerful or as humble as an ant, the God of Death who harvests your soul will meet you as expected when the deadline is approaching.
Add the weight of the bet to the bet, and the balance of fate begins to tilt, and every breath of the patient will be sluggished by the expectation of interests, or be freed as soon as possible, or die with half a life hanging.
The vicious circle of using people's life span has actually been omens in the legal gambling industry, even earlier than the birth of the Internet.
Death Pool (also known as the Celebrity Death Bet) is the famous Western version of the death bet. This kind of bet has been popular in the business circle of Wall Street for decades, but the Internet has opened up new prospects for such games.
Mrs. Thatcher, Stephen Hawking, David Bowie and Castro are all frequent visitors who are bet on the insurance policies of Celebrity Death Bet. For those who successfully bet on abnormal death celebrities, the organizer will give extremely high odds bonus returns.
On Stiffs.com, a celebrity death betting website founded in 1996, someone once bet on Princess Diana's death.
Printing someone's name on the top of the death betting list may not speed up his death, but the moral doubts of this gambling are reflected in the bettor's contempt and delusion of expecting someone's death.
An elderly man living alone in the UK with a late-stage cancer named Matthews once found a bookmaker to "bet his life" because he was not convinced of the doctor's judgment that "only live for one year". He bet 100 pounds at 50 times odds to bet that he could survive June 1, 2008, and went back and forth twice. Until June 1, 2010, he successfully won a total of 10,000 pounds. Before the third deadline came, he passed away due to illness.
Fighting cancer itself is like a gamble.The tumor spreads irrepressibly, eroding every cell in the body. As the Walking Dead says, "We are taking risks every day. Maybe you are taking risks when drinking water, eating, and even breathing every breath of air, but we have to know why to take risks."
For those poor patients, once they participate in the death game, it means trying their best to make the embers of life warm. In the past month, every day afterwards is a accumulation of wealth that will be given back to their families.
Their lives may have never been so valuable, nor have they ever received so many attention. Every second in someone's life has never been as important as this moment when the deadline is approaching.
After all, the cost of cemeteries has always been closely following the housing prices. When a person’s funeral expenses need to be won in this way, survival or destruction is no longer a question worthy of investigation. The sadness that is absent makes people silently endure the tyranny of fate. Living towards death is a reality that they must accept because of their suffering.
Funerals in Taiwan will cost about 300,000 yuan. This includes funeral expenses and the cost of the spiritual bone tower. Of course, simplicity and solemnity will have a big difference in cost.
All of this makes joining the bet the last move.
From the day of cancer diagnosis, some people have lost control of dignity and autonomy in life, just like they are making the ultimate rehearsal for their funeral in advance.
Just like you can cut hair on a lamb many times, but you can only peel it once.
Regarding the topic of death, we may really need to make up lessons. The essence of living towards death is to be respectful of life. On the contrary, being forced to live is what we need to discuss. These behaviors point to the question of how a person has dignity to die. Sometimes the extension of individual meaning is given infinite possibilities, and no one has the right to unplug your ventilator.
Ba Jin spent the last six years in the hospital. He first cut the trachea, but later he could only rely on feeding tubes and ventilators to maintain his life. People around him told him that everyone who loves him hopes that he will live, and Ba Jin had to force himself to show that no matter how painful he was, he had to cooperate with treatment. But the torment of illness made Ba Jin expect euthanasia many times. He proposed more than once: "I live for you, and longevity is a torture for me."
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