Will you be this cold when you are dying? What about when your wife and kids are dying?

Maybe I am just a hopeless optimist, but personally, if my wife/kid is dying, I am probably not going to say "BAI!1!", rip the cord out of the electrical outlet, and grin as I watch his/her eyes close for the last time. Ever. Instead, I am going to spend a lot of money to hopefully avoid ever seeing that. Because while you can always make more money, we can't clone people yet.

Some people are different. If I was that dude, I would have hoped my wife would have just pulled the plug and saved everyone the money.

Living in a hospital bed is not living.

Painkillers, sleeping, and a laptop doesn't sound too different from my normal life. Except I don't get the painkillers.

He fought cancer over the course of 7 years, and it sounds like his quality of life was reasonable for most of that time.

I think pretty much everyone would rather die than linger on in a hospital bed without hope. At a certain point, utility of future life becomes negative and returning to a positive state is not possible. The problem is that it's not so clear cut and obvious at the time that this is the case. A big part of this is that doctors often want to save the patient at all costs, and often deceive themselves as to the patient's prospects. So often even the patient has no idea how bad the situation is.

Of course. By reading a blog post, I have no idea what the situation was truly like. I should have probably qualified my response with that.

but you're talking about spending your own money, not mine! euthanize you, and donate the money to a charity helping starving 3rd world kids get a chance at a whole life.

My own death doesn't scare or disturb me. It might happen suddenly tomorrow, or in 50 years, or in a million (if anti-aging succeeds). I'm sufficiently curious about what happens next not to be upset about the concept. (Although death is weird; I've never done it before.)

On the other hand, I'd fight for a child or a (healthy, not doomed to die soon) relative with everything I've got. Which is why it surprises the hell out of me that health insurance companies aren't getting the Joseph Stack treatment all over the place over rescissions and life caps.

You're genetically programmed to protect children. Doctors and hospitals know this and exploit it. Unfortunately children with cancer or birth defects are money sinkholes.

Spartan parents would kill children with defects. In contrast we keep physically and genetically damaged children alive (or on life-support in the case of cancer) at much cost to ourselves and at peril to our offspring. Would you want your daughter to marry a man who carried a life-threatening gene? Did she? That's what we're doing. Maybe someday we'll be able to fix these problems, but today we cannot.

From the article it seems he was teaching for a lot of the time after the initial diagnosis... Also, he took the chance to complete some of his lifelong dreams (visiting Pompeii). And the bill was actually 250k after negotiations.

i'm all for giving a dying man his dreams, but we spend comparatively zero on dying kids in 3rd world countries. that much dough could allow a bunch of children a chance at a whole life.

The difference here is that had he not spent that money on living, the money saved could have gone to saving dying kids in third-world countries, but probably would not have done so. It would have just been more profit in the bottom-line of some insurance company and less revenue for some doctors/hospitals, that's it.

The 17 months he lived could have taken him 17 months closer to a breakthrough cure - holding on to hope is often times what people attribute this insane struggle to, and I dont blame them.

What if a new technology had come online in 2006 that would have given him 20 or 30 years?

horrible gamble. but obviously correct when you don't have to pay.