What this story is really about is limits. And it brings up an interesting point -- whose job is it to set limits?

Calaber24p, you make the point that it should only be up to the parents. As you say,

They pay their taxes and will pay part of the bill for keeping Charlie on life support so this shouldn’t even be an issue.

But that is a very individualistic standpoint, in the sense that you believe it is up to the individual to decide how money is spent.

But -- that is not how a community works. If the point your are making is that the community should take care of its own, then it is up to the community to make those decisions. They have limited resources, and it is their job to allocate those resources in the best way they know how. Choosing to keep Charlie on life support indefinitely, even though he is not getting any more conscious life out of it, and even though there is no reasonable hope for recovery, means that money can't be spent on someone else. That means no cancer treatment for someone else. No heart transplant for someone. Resources are not bottomless, as much as we like to pretend they are when government allocates them, but remember that government has no resources of its own. So the resources that Charlie will be spending will be resources taken from other members of society.

In a true individualistic society, societal funding wouldn't even be part of the picture and we wouldn't be having this discussion. The family would keep Charlie alive until the cost to do so would not make sense given the quality of life they are buying in return. And they would voluntarily choose to pull the plug themselves. And they would grieve his loss and would correctly see that the culprit was his illness that no one caused, rather than getting stuck in the mind fuck of believing that it is everyone else's duty to pour the resources of society out for them without measure until they are sated.

So you see -- society needs to make a choice. Either we are an individualistic society that assigns such great value to the individual that we allow individuals to be free but temper this by pairing it with individual responsibility, or we choose to be a village and temper the overwhelming strain on the shared resources by giving the village the right to allocate resources as they see best.

What we are trying to do right now, which is to argue that the individual is so sacred that society must redirect resources towards any and all individuals without limitations, is a recipe for collapse in a hell of a hurry, because it represents a system whose feedback loops have been severed, which means that the system will experience positive feedback until the demands on it become impossible.

Either the individual is in charge, in which case the individual pays for it, or society is in charge, in which case society pays for it. What we are trying to do now is the worst of both worlds, where the individual is in charge and society pays for it. That's not stable.