There are people who everyone agree are alive (ie. no brain death, can communicate without problems etc) but who are suffering from a terminal illness and therefore have no hope of recovery. Should their medical care not be paid for by insurance? Would you characterize insurance money used for their care as "stolen"?
There are obvious questions raised in the above line of questioning about grey areas. For example, people who are terminally ill and mute and bed-ridden. Or indeed the girl from the article who was 'brain dead' and yet seemed to have some way of expressing herself.
My point is that there is a basis for distinguishing between terminally ill and brain dead people. Though that raises hard questions regarding the gray area.
Assuming that’s what he meant, your example of a terminally ill but otherwise conscious patient isn’t comparable. I’d also agree that it’s mostly pointless and wasteful to keep a braindead patient alive at the hospital’s expense.
A terminally ill patient cannot recover, but is functionally alive. A brain dead patient cannot recovery, and is not even functionally alive. I realize this comes across as harsh, but if you’re intubating a brain dead patient, you’re just circulating air through a warm corpse. One demonstrates obvious interiority, the other doesn’t exhibit anything except basic reactions that will permanently cease within minutes, if unaided.
If you want to reduce it to ethics, based on the definition of braindeath, one case involves the legitimate moral quandary of whether or not (and when) to allow a thing to die. The other case has no such moral quandary, because the thing is already (definitionally) dead.
Whether or not we like doing it, our medical system depends upon us making valuations about human life, even if only implicitly. If we allocate resources to keep a functionally dead object breathing the way a human being does, we’re taking away resources from a human being that is alive. It’s not rational if you accept the axiom that a braindead human is dead.
This article and this case are getting attention precisely because people are disagreeing on the definition of death. If everyone accepted the definition of death axiomatically, there would be no controversy and nothing to argue about.
But people do disagree about it, so if you want to convince people you can't just appeal to axioms that there's disagreement about. You have to make a case.
What is your suggestion on how to reconcile that with any definition of death?
Taken to the extreme, this would mean that cryonics would have to be both refunded by state and by insurance companies since it can technically put off actual death (information theoretic) somewhat forever, much cheaper than critical care. Though most families of people in PVS wouldn't want that.
That sounds callous, but it’s the humane thing to do. Money spent keeping someone alive who has no chance of recovery is money that’s stolen from the treatment of people who could benefit the most from it.