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.)
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.)