I agree with you. I used to be too extreme and did not believe in any kind of government assistance.
One day my Mother told me a true story. Back in the early 1900s my Uncle happened to notice a woman out in her yard cooking turnips in a large pot. She had six children.
It turned out her husband had died and left them penniless. That is all they had to eat, not even any bread. Back then there was very little welfare but there was a tiny bit. My Uncle drove them to the county seat and they applied for some kind of relief. The county paid them $20 a month, not a lot but it was enough for them to live on.
I also had a distant cousin who died of appendicitis. Her Father was crippled in a logging accident. Their relatives were not wealthy either but helped them enough that they got by OK. The problem was they had no money.
When she got sick, the local hospital would not take her because they were broke. Finally Baptist Hospital in Pensacola agreed to take her. Unfortunately she died on the way. She basically died from poverty.
If you think about the cousin that died of appendicitis. The government would probably have come out better if they had paid for the operation and she had gone back to work and paid taxes.
Not that they should do that every time, because it would create Moral hazard, but on a case by case basis. And really the government wouldn’t have had to gift the operation. They could have made the operation cost into a loan to her and got it back plus taxes.