No. Public/private keys can be under the control of the individual. You only need the public key to be signed by a trusted 3rd party. That only gives them the power to revoke it, but even the revoking can't cancel what you already signed while the key was valid.
Sorry, but public-private key pair sais nothing about birth or death of individual. Which is an occurrence as common as you would guess. Being living person in some country is the relevant information, holding some cryptographic keys is not.
There's value to considering possible points of failure up front.
Think of the inertia that mag stripe only payment cards have in the USA, and think about how long it's taken to get chip cards rolled out. And then consider that we don't have the more secure chip and pin variant that Europe has, and (to the best of my knowledge) don't have any plans to go that route in the future.
A bad solution with broad penetration and huge network effects is one that can't easily be changed in the future. Let's do imagine some worst case scenarios and think about what it would involve to harden a system against them before rolling it out to everyone.
