The NY Times had an article on a troubling trend in medical care. More Americans are finding it necessary to get money to pay medical bills by asking for donations on crowd-funding sites. [There's also an older Times article about someone injured at the Boston Marathon bombing needing to ask for crowd-funding for medical bills.] What this says about American politics and economics is profound and disturbing.
First, the article notes that American senior citizens who are covered by Medicare are having more trouble paying for their health care than seniors in other affluent nations. The crowd-funding trend is not just a matter of who has employer-based health insurance, who can afford private insurance premiums, etc. It's not just a question of business claiming that working-age Americans should be able to take care of their health care. It's a question of every sector of the 99%. It's about whether we take care of the people who worked for 40 or 50 years to keep our economy running and to raise the next generations.
Regardless of the above comments, what the Times describes is not primarily a Medicare or senior citizen problem. It adds to what we already know about the short-comings of the Affordable Care Act (which clearly isn't named as well as it might be). Other nations do a better job of providing health care without impoverishing the patients and their families. If you want "affordable" or to help working people, we'd have something more like the Canadian system. According to scientific studies discussed in Scientific American Canada provides comparable levels of medical care at a far lower per-capita cost. But in 2009, Obama and Congressional leaders wouldn't even propose a Canadian-style health care system as their first bargaining chip in negotiations in order to compromise down to a somewhat less profit-oriented Affordable Care Act.
The Times article even tells us something about charity. As income inequality grows, it becomes a greater sacrifice for working people to give to charity, but the wealthy could afford to give even more. Yet, desperate patients and their families find themselves getting help from sources where working people give to the needy. Traditional charitable organizations aren't keeping up with the needs of working Americans, so the desperate go to crowd-funding. The rich are getting richer, paying special low tax rates on capital gains and other non-work income - and being stingy to people who need help paying doctor bills. (Studies of charitable giving show that the stingiest income group is around $1 million to $10 million per year. The super-rich give more as a percentage of income [but not as percentage of wealth] to non-profits - but only a small part goes to direct services for the needy.)
And speaking of the rich getting richer, at least some of those crowd-funding web sites take a slice of the donations for their owners.
Charitable giving is a kind thing, but it's not something people should have to depend on for medical care.
The spokespeople for the rich have been telling us we can't afford Social Security, Medicare and other social benefits. There's one simple answer to that. If we can't afford to provide health care and retirement to people who have worked for decades doing necessary work, then we can't afford to have idle rich people living in luxury and sitting on mountains of money. We can't afford to have special tax rates for income that doesn't involve working (such as capital gains) which are lower than the tax rates for an equal number of dollars in wage / salary income. We can't afford not to have a Canadian-style health care system which costs so much less. We can't afford to let the wealthy spend unlimited amounts of money on elections in order to make our society less affordable for everyone else. We can't afford to let the rich pay less than their fair share in both taxes and charity.