Things That Happen

You don't really see stories about it in the news, but middle class kids who get cancer have it tough. Treatment is very expensive, even for a family with insurance, with both parents in professional jobs. Often — very often — the costs exceed what insurance will pay; and often one parent will quit working in order to become a caretaker. So what happens? It's quite common these days for a kid with cancer to organize a fundraiser — a race or walkathon, a quilt sale, whatever. But think about this: a middle class kid, suffering from cancer and from treatments, has to beg in an extremely demeaning and dehumanizing way, offering up some salable sob-story, just to pay for health care. They have to put themselves and their illness on the market. And then, of course, there are the poor minority kids with cancer or other difficult diseases (less salable diseases), and they often can't pay, period. It's not the kid's fault that they get cancer. Stuff like that is just part of life.