Unfortunately there are plenty of people out there who would look to take advantage of the compassion / kindness of airlines which offer this sort of policy. That means that the airlines have to verify the actual circumstances of each individual request, require documentation, make calls to check the valididity, etc... which costs staff time and money, and in turn translates into higher fares during the 99.9% of the time that I'm not traveling under these kind of unfortunate circumstances. In today's economic climate, I'm not going to get angry with the airlines for seeing this as an area which they need to cut. As I said before, this happens so rarely that it's not going to even enter my calculations when I am deciding which airline I want to give my business.