Every time I see shit about cutting edge prosthetics with near-full motion capability, controllable via muscles and nerves or whatever they even use nowadays, I'm reminded of my friend from work who couldn't even afford something beyond a simple plastic harness arm that essentially is just to make it look like he has an arm, with no utility value.

He would take it off during work because it just got in the way, but wore it out to avoid all the questions about it with randos.

Every time I see things about cancer treatments I'm reminded of a few people I knew from my parents social events that have died in the last 10 years simply because they couldn't afford the treatments. A few even got divorced to keep their debt from ruining their spouse after they're gone.

The future can be here all it wants, but until everyone has access to it, we may as well be considered a medieval society.

5e isn't that bad. Even poor people make two silver a day, and if hiring someone to cast a second level spell to cure a family member of blindness was more than they could afford, you could get so rich casting for money. But those rules are just a suggestion, and I'd probably make it so at least some cases of blindness are a little harder to cure. And you could also make it so economic disparity is much worse.

I just found John Green‘s account.

On a serious note, it is really sickening to hear stuff like this. It’s not even that those drugs are crazy expensive or extremely difficult to distribute. It’s just greed and very bad distributed wealth

We have the ability to make Tuberculosis not exist and have for half a century.

Please tell me more. My knowledge about this must be very outdated.

There are a lot of things that are really only failing for a lack of distributing ressources. But Tubercolosis (where our once widely used vaccine was mostly ineffective in eradicating it and the treatment is complicated and long requiring monitoring of each patient because of the possibility of secondary infection from the antibiotics or organ damage) is not what comes to my mind first, second or for quite a while.

In fact in both cases research is ongoing in search for more effective vaccines and easier treatments (primarily for shorter treatment periods as well as against the multiple antibiotic resistences), because our tools today are not actually up to the task.

I could swear he was a cleric who somehow had the familiar spell. Yeah, cleric: https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/Shak%C3%A4ste

Shakäste and his familiar the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna! Very awesome character.

Those are great explanations and if that was the case I would try to help them because it's ridiculous being blind in that world. But the vibe op gives off suggests to me that they weren't planning on someone helping them, they were just there for diversity.