It doesn't make economic sense to spend, as an extreme example, $500M of public money to save one life. If we did whatever medical treatments we could, at whatever cost, we'd go broke as a society very quickly.
Utilitarian optimization places some upper bound on the amount of money we should be willing to spend to save a life. Making people pay for their own care approximates this bound but with more variance.
We spend billions per American life saved on terrorism.
We regularly spend $50M / life on infrastructure; hundreds of millions on an overpass over a dangerous intersection to save a handful of lives.
We regularly force companies to spend well over $10M / life on health & safety regs.
Medicaid costs about $800K / life saved.
Your statement illustrates one of two competing views. The following statements are extremes of the two positions.
1) The government by default owns all your money, and any money you get to keep after taxes is just a tax break.
2) You own your money by default, and the government should not take your money except to provide things that the market is unable to (some examples of which are law enforcement, military).
Those who espouse one of these views, tend to see people who espouse the other as morally wrong and evil.
I may not like it come tax time, but it makes sense to me. I consider the half I don’t keep another sort of contribution to society. And of course look for ways to minimize it–money doesn’t save itself. But I don’t fight over the concept– I rely on services paid directly from taxpayer money each day. The one thing I would hope for is efficiency– but I don’t think starving and cutting systems inherently improves them. It’s just a shell game.
So people on one side of the fence are not happy about the very high medical costs required to keep a child alive. They do not understand the humanity behind the numbers.
On the other side of the fence are parents who are not happy that some people think their child is an excessive burden on the system. They (understandably) do not understand (or at the least, are looking away from) the numbers behind making their child viable.
The author correctly identifies one side's shortcoming wrt balanced discourse, but does not see the blindness of her own implied position -- that no cost is too high to save a life. Nowhere in this piece does she broach the subject of numbers and real cost [1].
Finding balance is very difficult in any area, especially in areas where you only have _one shot_ (an example is your child's education, where many parents feel that no amount of investment is enough, and more is always better). But since the system does not have infinite resources, it's a necessary conversation to have (which the author could have brought up, but failed to do so -- understandably, since this article is a strategic opinion piece meant to further the author's self-interest, which I completely respect).
A billion dollars to save a child's life, we would likely agree, is too much. $1,000, we would likely agree, is entirely justified. Where we draw the line, why, and how we get there (of urgent need is our relationship with end of life care and treatments) is an important conversation that we are failing to have, and those of us on both sides of the fence are equally culpable for this shortcoming.
[1] The large 6 figure bill and post insurance $500 bill is only used qualitatively in the introduction.