Families of children with significant, life-limiting conditions face exponentially spiralling costs of care as the years go by.
People will have to forego any transfer of wealth to help the next generations of family members, as they use their entire resources to meet the uncapped, and unquantifiable, later-life care expenses.
When you add into the mix that plans to support much-needed National Health Service hospital projects have also been ditched because there's no money for it, while local authorities are having to close or curb care homes due to lack of funding, then the prospect of what this all means for the elderly and vulnerable in society becomes horribly clear.
Make no mistake: we are going to see our loved ones suffer.
Mental ill health among the elderly and physically vulnerable is going to be exacerbated by the inevitable financial stress this will cause.
I predict we are going to see hand-wringing headlines in the newspapers about how old people were left to die or, worse, forced to consider assisted dying (proposals to bring in Euthanasia for older people are still on the cards for this government), not because the old people were that ill, but because they could not afford to live.
If that sounds far-fetched, please bookmark this and come back to it in a few years' time.
The treatment of older people in this country is a national disgrace, and we must speak out about it before it is too late.
We have turned from a society that proudly supported people from cradle to grave - from the conception to the resurrection, even - into a society that just "cannot afford" it.
Former US vice-president Hubert Humphrey told a convention in 1976: “The ultimate moral test of any government is the way it treats three groups of its citizens. First, those in the dawn of life - our children. Second, those in the shadows of life - our needy, our sick, our disabled people. Third, those in the twilight of life - our elderly.”
What sort of society have we become when we'd rather pass laws to help people die than support them to live?
