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"
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.