It is my experience that they are isolated in their own little bubbles & don’t realize the possibility exists that some of their friends may disagree with them.
That’s probably it. Just like being religious is the “default state” in the US, being against Gay marriage and opposing every tax increase seem to be the default state as well. Atheists know that they have a minority position, but some religious people just assume that every normal person believes in God.
I had the pressman (from Oklahoma) at the printshop I managed a couple years ago ask me, “Where do you go to church.” I told him, “I don’t go, I’m not religious.” and he looked at me like I had just told him I sneak into maternity wards and slit infant throats on Thursdays. He got very cold and muttered something about, “Maybe when you’re older.” I was in my mid-thirties at the time.
I’m sure that he had never in his life met anyone who’d admitted they were an atheist in polite company. I blew his fucking mind.
Maybe in your circle of friends, but at least in my community, which admittedly is rather small, popularity has very little to do with attendance. Word gets out to the school, churches, etc, and people come to help.
I actually recently organized several of these this past spring for my neighbors daughter, who had brain surgery to remove a tumor. It was pretty heart warming to see people I didn’t know show up, introduce themselves to the family, who they also didn’t know. A lot of those people were from local churches. Another big chunk were Seniors who used the opportunity to not only help, but also to socialize over a cup of coffee.
As someone else noted, we didn’t raise enough money to cover all the medical bills, but it was enough to make things manageable. Tough, but manageable.
Wouldn’t it have been better if it saving that kid’s life didn’t have to be so tough? It’s bad enough when family has to come to grips with an illness like cancer. It’s even worse when that same family has to resort to hustling on the street corner in order to save a loved one’s life.
My neighbor was in tears afterward. Not from the hardship though, but from gratitude at the show of support from the community.
The hardship will be there regardless of who helps out. I think you are dreaming if you think financial hardship will ever be separated from medical hardships. But for my neighbor, the personal support from the community meant much more than a statement mailed at the end of the month would.
Er… what exactly are you saying here? Because if you’re saying that medical hardship automatically = financial hardship, there are plenty of countries around the world where people couldn’t imagine paying one cent for medical care. I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to hope that someday the US will join them.
Care to name one?
Pretty sure Athena meant “one cent out-of-pocket”, but then, you knew that.
Yes, of course that’s what I meant. They do pay taxes. They don’t hold spaghetti dinners to raise money for 5-year-olds with cancer.
I had a recent stay in the hospital. ONE DAY. Tests, but found nothing wrong:
$12,000
And that’s not including the doctor bills.
Please…stop with the spaghetti dinner daydream. You’re out of touch with reality.
(agreeing with Duke, in case that wasn’t apparent.)
Here’s an interesting documentary.
Oh stop whining, that’s only 8,000 spaghetti dinners! 
I think that is the Republican health plan BTW. But Bachman from Minnesota wants to open it to competition with hotdish.
How far is that, exactly? How many treatments will it cover? Have any numbers, or just vague handwaving that smells of the rectum when it just came?
-Joe
And if everyone donates a big pot to cook the pasta in, think of the money you’ll save!!
The money might cover one parent’s salary while they’re home with a child that’s too sick to get out of bed, but there’s no way in hell it’s going to cover cancer treatments or complications, infections, relapses, surgeries, etc. It’s ridiculous to think of it as anything more than a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
And anyway, people who have friends and family that are both willing and able to throw fundraising dinners are lucky. Not everyone has that. I would prefer for our health care system not to be primarily based on luck.
Whatsit Jr. was hospitalized in the NICU for three weeks when he was a small infant, due to complications from RSV and pneumonia. The grand total was somewhere around $80,000. It is tragically hilarious to me to think of the number of spaghetti dinners you’d have to throw to cover even a tiny little fraction of that cost. There’s no way you could even get to the “tough but affordable” range. And Whatsit Jr. only had pneumonia, not a sympathy-inspiring disease like cancer, so nobody threw any spaghetti dinners for us anyway.
But the parents will be grateful, and the warm fuzzy that lasts until they actually do the math is worth more than all the insurance in the world!
It’s like at the end of A Christmas Carol when Mary Lou Retton does her tumbling down the street.
-Joe
Why are you assuming that the fundraisers are for cancer treatments? I see nothing in th OP that says they have no insurance. Of course, the out-of-pocket expenses are bound to be crazy-expensive, but why do we assume they are for the whole thing?
In my experience (and I’ve participated in many of these, and, frankly, too many in my immediate family), they are to help pick up costs in addition to the medical treatment, things like replacing a paycheck that may be stopped while the parents take off work, costs for lodging near the hospital, transportation, meals eaten out of the house, things like that. And those kind of fundraisers can make a huge dent in those expenses.
And, I applaud the family for at least trying to so something. Many people would just throw up their hands - I would have spaghetti dinners for the rest of my life in order to pay my expenses, if need be.
Yeah, you’d pretty much have to have spaghetti dinners for the rest of your life, if that’s how you intended to pay your expenses.