One’s heart goes out to the families of the seven men missing from the fishing boat tragedy on July 3 in the Sea of Cortez.

Their need for closure is understandable.

That said the sharp comments of a family member of one Bay Area victim should give us all pause.

He criticized the United States government for not spending $300,000 to have the Department of Defense conduct a dive to the sunken boat some 200 feet below the surface in a bid to retrieve bodies.

The government had already extended its search efforts five days beyond established protocol.

At this point it is clear there are no additional survivors.

There should be an expectation that a reasonable commitment of government resources should be made while there is a chance of finding a victim of such a tragedy alive.

All of us sometimes have too high of expectations of what we want government to do while failing to draw a connection to the cost of what we demand.

It is why more often than not the most expensive week of a person’s life in terms of health care is the week before they die.

Extraordinary measures are often demanded by loved ones even if the patient has vital signs in serious decline and is way past the average life expectancy. That triggers extremely expensive care with virtually no reasonable chance of avoiding the inevitable.

It is often driven by a “what if” such and such had been done, would the patient had lived longer? It is a form of closure.

We can never bring ballooning costs of the two-headed monster that threatens to permanently cripple our economy – government expansion and health care costs – under control unless we start adopting reasonable expectations.

How reasonable – and expensive in terms of tax dollars – and effectiveness is it for us to rely on government 100 percent to educate our children?

And how much of our health and money do we squander by failing to take responsibility for our own well-being by being wise with what we eat and staying active instead of relying on pills and doctors to save us?

We place ourselves at risk – whether it is ignoring our health, cross-country skiing in a blizzard, or going wild using what should be basic shelter as an ATM – and then we want the government to bail us out when things go wrong.

Every day life has risks.

Modern technology, health care, and even things such as sanitation have greatly reduced those risks.

In many cases this has provided us longer lives and more time for leisure.

As a result, we often engage in even more riskier behavior.

Leisure activities that involve things such as bicycling downhill at 62 mph, sky diving, hunting wild boar, or fishing on a small vessel in the open ocean puts us in jeopardy way beyond what would be considered the normal risks of living.

We should not – and cannot – expect government to have an open checkbook. That applies to bringing individuals closure after a risky venture turns tragic or prolonging life on the outside chance a miracle may happen.

Everything has two prices – the actual cost in dollars and the opportunity cost in terms of what could have been done with those dollars.

As hard as it may be for us as an individual to accept the fact the government won’t spend $300,000 to bankroll what is essentially a body search there is a question of the common good.

It is a litmus test that those who govern must make when spending limited resources taken from the people they were elected to govern.