Originally Posted by GUWonder

A series of purchases/payments necessary for rural medical care in some parts of the world doesn't take place in a timely manner -- if at all -- with personal checks, money orders or retail bank transfers when the poor family needs to procure and/or pay for all the medicines and supply it to the hospital/clinic doctors/nurses for treatment themselves. In such situations, ending up with trickled money isn't generally ideal and adds stress to an already stressful situation. Having all the funds sent as a lump-sum makes sense since travel expenses and other transactional costs rise substantially if the poor family have to repeatedly run around more because the money was trickled to them rather than sent in lump sum.


Lots of rural hospitals/clinics/physicians/nurses and pharmacies in Asia and Africa don't take ATM or other bank cards or don't take them from
everybody; nor do the individuals who a poor family may need to pay to get the potentially life-saving transfers (for example bone marrow transfers) arranged and covered to have the potentially life-saving medical care for the child. And when a poor person is an ethnic or religious minority in an area where communal conflicts are long-standing, things tend to get harder for such poor families desperate to legally save a life and fortunate enough to have a foreign sponsor barely willing and able to transfer the necessary money -- which had exceeded $10,000 -- for the medical treatment. This isn't imagination. This is the real world.