We refer to social programs as safety nets, but wealth is like being followed around by a crew holding one of those gigantic inflatable cushions. It doesn't stop you from falling, but every fall-- every mishap, affliction, rejection, malady, failure-- every fall lands you in that cushion.
And I think people with enormous cushions (this is starting to feel like a suggestive analogy) do genuinely forget, or never fully realize, that other people don't have them. Or even, really, a safety net.
And that when you have no cushion or safety net, you live differently, you think differently, your expectations of life and other people and social institutions are different. Because of course, your lack of cushion is held against you. Assumed to be your fault. Your destiny.
That's called just world bias-- the belief that everybody with a cushion earned it, and that everybody without one didn't.
That's what makes it possible for people with cushions to not care about people without them. To turn off their empathy, and turn their faces away from people falling to their deaths (literally) around them.
And I don't know how to fix that.
To reiterate: Prejudice against poor people for being poor (AKA classism, a form of bigotry) not only exacerbates their suffering in every possible way, but encourages everybody else to compound that suffering via their own prejudice.