That "burden" also includes spending his grandchildren's college money.
Individual freedom is, however, not absolute. It can be limited when an individual's actions harm the self, the family or the human family.
To ignore the inherent trade-off here that puts us in a position where we MUST make unpleasant choices is equally immoral. I'm going to glom two pieces I've been dabbling with to make this clearer:
We all know what is going to happen with Social Security and MediCare. They will go bankrupt on the back end of the baby boom. There is a simple reason for this beyond demographic numbers:
So the working public, having a conscience, pays for such services without recognizing the corollary to the above fact:
2. One can always dream up more ways of spending more of other people's money in order to make life more pleasant, especially those providing services to the recipients.
The longer we live, the more expensive dealing with aging becomes. That means working people, who are asked to pay the taxes then have less to invest in future productive children. Less productive children will then have a harder time bearing the cost of supporting more of the elderly, each living longer and each demanding ever more expensive services…
It's a downward spiral. We all know it. At root, it's a moral problem. We all fear a lingering death alone without loved ones. What we've done is to subsidize it and the businesses that live off the system.
Social Security helps older folks stay in their homes instead of forcing them to impose upon their kids, which at first sounds humane to both. Consider however, the economic use of the housing stock when an aging couple or an elderly woman stays in a home large enough to accommodate a full family. That means those homes are not available to young families who need the space. The resulting increased demand for housing forces young families to pay higher prices and thus stay in debt for decades longer. Most often they then have to purchase housing they can afford far from work in remote suburbs. That means they spend less time with their children. It raises daycare costs at a time when they can least afford it. It also inhibits early savings for college…
Social security ends up alienating the aged from their families, too often to live alone and friendless and, as a result, dying at an earlier age. Isolating the elderly from young people removes the opportunity for the elderly to teach their history or culture to succeeding generations. The elderly end up feeling less valued, while the State and media are free to revise history and culture at will. We all know where that goes.
What's this to do with social liberalism? The people who brought us Social Security and the welfare state were communists. Their answer?
They work to make the process of dying more attractive, whether it's abortion, "assisted suicide," gay lifestyles (gay males live an average of 57 years), getting public school children used to death with games of "lifeboat," loose sex, extreme sports...
In a free society, health care choices are necessarily individual, but given the uneven chance that an individual will incur catastrophic healthcare expenses, individuals must pool resources to fund health coverage, usually by means of insurance.
When healthcare was funded by a single family, funds were necessarily limited; a family would not starve its children to treat the sick or aged. The amount of effort to save a single life that could be spent has changed for two reasons:
2. Pooling healthcare resources has vastly increased the money available to be spent on any one case.
In effect, the “family” now paying for the service is the entire insurance pool. That pool, or its agent, the insurer, then has a say in what they will fund, just as the family once did. So now, instead of a family refusing to starve, we have an insurer refusing to go broke. It's a tradeoff. We have more funds available for any one individual, but less control over how they are spent. As long as technology is increasing the upper bounds of what might be spent, we, as a pool, face hard choices about what we can afford. When a moral imperative to make an infinite commitment to save any one life meets a technical ability to bankrupt the pool, somebody MUST lose in the pursuit of saving that one life.
As the pool enlarges to a global perspective, the moral problem takes on a new dimension, and "the least of mine," takes on a whole new meaning. The money being spent on Terri Shiavo could feed, clothe, medicate, and educate ten thousand children who will otherwise die.
We have to find ways to make hard moral choices in order to contain costs. It's inescapable.
Seventy percent of your medical dollar (or nearly eight percent of the national economy)is spent upon people who die within six months. Meanwhile, pregnant mothers still don't get decent prenatal care that would prevent life-long medical expenses and aliens enter the country carrying hepatitis, parasites, and antibiotic-resistant strains of infectious diseases that go untreated. Hospitals are on the verge of bankruptcy caring for the indigent. Private insurance rates bear much of that cost as a hidden tax in hospital charges.
We have no other choice than to limit the size of the money pool, else the system WILL fail and the society with it. That is why we must gradually shift from a system based upon taxes to one based upon family savings.
Home hospice is inherently low-tech and high-touch. It comes into play when you realize there is no real option to go on with drugs, chemo, surgery, dialysis, ventilators, pointless diagnostics, or any other kind of intervention, because the patient is truly dying of the underlying disease or injury.
At that point, you opt out of futile treatments, and legitimately concentrate on comfort care and, if I can call it this way, the "social and spiritual surround."
The dying person (no longer really a "patient") can be nourished and hydrated, pain-free and comfortable. Even with a feeding tube this is not expensive: at the time my mother was dying it was about $7 a day for the nutritional formula; and with my father, who never had a tube, he was happy to eat ice-cream three times a day (though I did keep up the nutritional shakes and smoothies as well.)
Family members arrive from across the country, visitors come: neighbors who are fellow-parishioners came and gave him Holy Communion every Sunday, and our assistant pastor actually gave him the Last Rites twice: once a months before his death, and then he rallied unexpctedly for a couple of weeks; and then again the day before he died.
By the way, he had sold the house and given away all his money years before he died, in increments of I think $10,000 per gift to his children, so there was no income tax and, after his burial, no estate at all.
This was the way to go. No hospital wires and buzzers, no unnecessary prolongation of the final dying process, no damnable lethal doses: just loving care, and peace.