Do you give all your disposable income to poor kids? Why not - they could be your child!
If parent sounds unfeeling, frankly your post sounds hypocritical. Everyone implicitly makes a decision on how much to give away vis-à-vis spending on less noble things. Parent's not a worse person for acknowledging it.
Do you give all your disposable income to poor kids?
So, I mostly do this. And the cost of saving a child's life in the developing world is around $3k, 1/300th of what AOL's insurance paid for those two babies. Looking at it one way it's sad that we're willing to prioritize one child so highly above another.
But while I'd like to see our society become much more altruistic I don't see how we're going to get away from people considering their child to be far more important than a stranger's child. So if you hear from your company that they think some amount of money was too much to pay to keep your child alive, or to keep a coworker's child alive, you hear it as "you're not family to us, you're not special to us, your family doesn't matter".
(Running through all of this is that people, and especially Americans, are really unwilling to think of healthcare as a system of trading large-but-finite amounts of money for better health. Any sort of statement like "we should not be willing to spend $X to keep one person alive" makes people very upset for even considering the tradeoff, even though there must be some sufficiently high level of $X at which it doesn't make sense.)
It doesn't matter how much you give. If it's not all - and I have to admit I checked from your post history - you're still putting a limit on how much other people's children matter to you. I'm not accusing you of being a bad person or anything like that, I'm saying that is unfair to disparage RexRollman for voicing something we all effectively do.
I respectfully disagree. The reason I thought it was unfeeling was because he said that "I have to wonder why, in a world with billions of people, we would spend a million dollars to keep just one human alive?"
It was the "we" part that got to me. We don't spend millions of dollars on every human, we (as a society) don't need to. But we do spend that on the few humans that it does cost millions to keep alive. There are a lot of research projects that costs millions of dollars to keep going, and often they find breakthroughs that influence other areas.
And I wasn't really disparaging him. He said himself that he thought it might sound unfeeling. To me, it did.
