Dude, you're not getting it. People make decisions on money versus lives *all the time*.

Auto manufacturers do it.

Cities budgeting for their police force expenditures do it.

Airplane manufacturers do it.

Civil engineers do it.

Doctors do it.

The drama here is not socialist or communist, it is pragmatist. Simply put, people put value on human lives ALL THE TIME.. You might have traded off money for your own life when you bought that fuel-efficient-but-not-crash-worthy car. The engineers building the bridge you drove across this AM didn't build it to never fail, they built it to have an acceptable risk of not failing.

And the reason you want intelligent cost/benefit decisions made at the end of life, be it a premature baby or a convalescent senior, is because the money has to come from somewhere.. Unless you're independently wealthy and are spending your own savings, that somewhere is a pool (insurance, medicare, etc) shared by us all. Just like your mass casualty example, there isn't enough resource (in your case first responders, in mine money) to give everyone everything we could possibly imagine giving them.

Nobody here wants to deny ordinary care (e.g. CPR) to everyone. What we are talking about is EXTRAORDINARY care (e.g. 6 months of ICU care for what is medically an unviable fetus)...