| | Luke:
But in the end, much of this consternation comes down to people trying to legislate away the harsh reality of finite personal worth.
Well said. It's about shedding unavoidable risk. I'm always drawn to the comparison, "How did our grandparents handle this existential boundary condition, and why do we think we are entitled to attempt an impossible solution?"
We all have finite duration here. Our processes, our borrowed star dust and our finite motes of heat and light and animation get 'spent.' It's an amazing, remarkable ride. In the end, we should be prepared to say 'thank-you, it was the most amazing thing' -- even if just to that universe -- and hand back our merely borrowed star dust to the universe from which we borrowed it.
The mission we seem to be on now ... stave off the inevitable end of the ride using every heroic effort known or imaginable to mankind with no questions asked, succeeds only in throwing patched up bodies onto a tidal wave that is still going to crash on the beach no matter what we do.
In our grandparents era, they would take the bad news, "Ride's almost over, order you affairs." They wouldn't say, "I can't afford it, but isn't there some way we can tax all of not only our children into oblivion to try and get me another 12 weeks here via some technological heroics?"
And, there wasn't a politician selling them that message using the lives of others on the way to political power.
My sister and I witnessed in horror what 'Medicare' permitted to be done to our elderly 90 year old mother, dieing of multiple diseases of old age: cancer, kidney failure. We finally had to wrestle her from the system and take her home to simply let her die in peace. For as long as Medicare would pay, her slow, drawn out death was being used as bait to fish for billables, torturing this woman far from the comfort of her home, in some hospital facility, simply so that A could bill B for trying to keep elderly dieing patient C living forever... Meanwhile, no 'cure' for old age was ever within sight. That was not compassion, that was systematic insanity, and that insanity is breaking the nation's back.
More hospice, less heroics. Patients should make their own choices, and it is not 'cruel' when those patients consider their own economic conditions, when considering, 'do I want to exhaust not only my entire estate but the resources of my children just to cling to this bed for another six months? Life is precious, but is the difference between 90.5 and 90 really worth all this, considering that the 'extra' 0.5 is during the most miserable phase of my entire existence on earth, and is largely just extending medical torture, in a futile try to avert the inevitable?
Individuals should have that choice, just like their parents and grandparents did.
We've attempted to make a utopic tribal assertion, that individuals will not make that choice, that the tribe will exert the maximum heroics possible for everyone at the end of their natural lives with no considerations at all to cost, futility, and choice.
It is tribal insanity, not compassion.
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