Re:saddling their family with huge expenses, this is a fairly unique problem in 1st world healthcare situations, in that it mainly applies to people in the US. In most other developed nations healthcare and bankruptcy do not go hand in hand.
But the money is just as wasted no matter who pays it.
It's not nearly as much money in other countries. 5 figures on bad odds vs 6 or 7 figures on bad odds. If it's cheap maybe it's worth a shot?
Maybe think of this as one of the burdens that civilization handles for you : One never has to mix the emotional trauma of losing a loved one with the cold facts of how much money they'd save you by dying before tea-time.
That's true of the actual cost of the service. For the 1000% markup that U.S. hospitals take, it's more arguable.
This statement is both true, and irrelevant, because who bears the burden is very important for the individual making the decision. What's being weighed is not "are the resources used to keep me alive being efficiently allocated," but rather, "will my spouse and children be irrevocably bankrupted."
What a strange thing to say. It is irrelevant from the myopic point of view of a patient receiving care, at the moment they are receiving the care. It is far from irrelevant as a matter of social policy, because society has to pay the cost even if a particular individual gets off free. Cf. negative externality [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative].