It's not done for a profit motive in general here, but more that nobody loses their medical license, and no NHS trusts get smeared in the gutter press, for trying to "save" a life against all hope (see the controversy surrounding the Liverpool Care Pathway).
The lack of any legal route to assisted dying is also a problem. Even if that was introduced here, it would probably only cover people with a specific terminal diagnosis, not the more common scenario in the elderly of repeat curable problems.
Euthenasia is a contentious topic, rightly so in my opinion, and is a seperate issue to regaining a balanced view of how and if we should treat the seriously ill when the treatment may harm them as much as the illness.
I'd personally rather live so long as I know better. Death might be inevitable now, but that isn't necessarily a set thing. Folks are working on having different sorts of existence and working on extending life and things like that. Sure, some of it seems like a pipe dream now, but who knows when some weird breakthrough will happen. I'll take my few years, and resent anyone trying to take them away - but your few years aren't mine to decide what to do with.
Besides, not everyone in their 80's is necessarily frail. Some are frail sooner, some later.
2. Most people at the bitter end are past the ability to make decisions.
Depends who is paying for them. Voters certainly can take Medicare away, or implement a triaging criteria.
I'm generally against doing procedures that won't really add life to folks - especially weeks. Years, though? That's years. Folks can be frail yet able-minded and so on. It doesn't really matter to me if someone needs to have some assistance to live, regardless of age.
Triaging criteria already exist. It is really a shame that insurance companies and businessmen have their hands in it instead of doctors. But I don't mind these criteria: They are, in general, for emergency situations instead of, say, routine gall bladder surgery.
And the people triaging at insurance companies are doctors and pharmacists themselves. A doctor not employed by insurance companies is also a "businessman", considering they get paid more the more they treat. No one is exempt from conflicts of interest, but since US voters didn't want "death panels", they get to deal with prior authorizations.
It's the same function done by the NHS or government in any other country.
You're wrong. There are many factors in play (family, friends, isolation, stress, money, pain, etc) around the individual's choice, but studies often find that the majority of older people would prefer a palliative approach to end of life. For example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4821585/ Sadly there aren't many studies around this topic. It's important, especially when so many people assume that older people just want to 'not die' rather than listen to what they actually want.
That is not what the assisted suicide debate is about. The debate is about the right to kill someone who cannot do so themselves.
«On February 13, 2014, Belgium legalized euthanasia by lethal injection for children,» from [1].
«Even the controversial head of Belgium’s euthanasia commission is concerned that a well-known Belgian psychiatrist is allowing too many of her psychiatric patients to be euthananised,» from [2].
1: http://www.patientsrightscouncil.org/site/belgium/
2: https://www.bioedge.org/mobile/view/belgium-euthanasia-docto...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26181615
Perhaps the law is not being applied this way, but I think the idea here is "this poor child is in agony with no hope of improvement and keeping them alive is torture in a sense" - not "let's take terminally ill children lightly"
https://www.cancerresearch.org/join-the-cause/cancer-immunot...
He’s still alive 4 years later.
And no, just because something works to "save (or extend) one life" does not mean it should be tried for everybody, because "hope". If you read the article - which says nothing surprising anyway - you balance your very few successes with lots and lots of bad cases. For some few to live longer a lot of people have to suffer more.
Completely orthogonal, but since the path this thread took shows people care a lot (too much) about individual examples, I saw this more than once in my own family. My 94 year old grandmother broke here hip, surgery was ruled too dangerous, so she was driven back to her retirement home - where she only spent her last year, when care became too difficult at home - and spent the rest of her days just lying in her bad waiting to die. There was no good option left. That's just how it is near the end. I'm just saying this to show that I'm not talking about something that I only know from discussions such as this one.
Also, both my grandmothers (who both made it into their nineties) had surgery in their 80s and both suffered significantly. Their brains were not the same afterwards. Anesthesia is not easy on the brain, even on top of any stress of the surgery itself on the body. There was a significant difference in mental abilities in both my grandmothers when comparing how they were before and after their surgeries (both had them for broken bones that occurred due to age related osteoporosis). And they both had pretty good starting points, others are much more frail at those ages.
That's one thing I ave noticed in a lot of US hospitals and doctor offices. Everything is very shiny and new and costs a lot of money.
The economics change with insurance coverage. Once I hit my deductible, why do I care how expensive it is? At that point, might as well get my money’s worth out of my insurance company.
The last time I need non-routine care, the only thing I cared about was:
1. Is this doctor good?
2. Is this doctor/hospital in-network?
The money doesn't come from nowhere. If everybody thinks like this, your insurance costs more money.
If you don't pay for your insurance personally, how about just straight up being paid more by your company?
I do pay for my insurance personally. Health insurance law is somewhat different than most other forms of insurance in that the premium cannot be increased no matter my frequency or magnitude of previous claims. [0]
My marginal use is a merely a rounding error in the context of my health insurer's outlays. Nothing I could do would personally affect my rate. The aggregate of many thousands of people's use determines my rate, and for that, the tragedy of the commons is fully in charge.
[0]: https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/
And I doubt hospitals are debuting rediscovered Van Gogh works. Buying affordable works from local artists can fill a massive hospital for well under a million.
For those lacking understanding of the value of art in this context here is a good recent piece of research with many useful references: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5328392/