This comment is not directed at you or your F-I-L personally, don't take it that way. It's not you or your F-I-L being improvident (or wealthy), it's "the system".
If your F-I-L was like most people, "his call" and "his choice" were funded with other people's money, statistically speaking, almost all of it the taxpayer's money.
So, the question for all is, "at what point, if any, do the taxpayers get to weigh in on F-I-L's choices?"
So far, we have chosen $20 trillion in debt to avoid this question.
Sooner or later, we will have to make a decision.
I agree. 100 years ago, we did not have to make these kind of cost decisions. Death came at a more appropriate time.
We are moving, fast, to the place of families having to decide whether 6 months, a year, 6 weeks, a very small gamble on remission are worth bankrupting your family.
Most boomers will say yes because they grew up in a world where anything else was unfathomable. Going forward, most families will be forced to say no.
Simply because our frame of reference is different. Very different. We never had that experience. Millennials and Zoomers--you may as well be speaking in an other language.