For example, my one of my grandparents' kidneys stopped working when they were mid 90s. In the US, they were entitled to taxpayer funded healthcare benefits which allowed them to receive dialysis. So US taxpayers paid for a van to come pick them up in a wheelchair 3x a week, perform the dialysis at the center for a few hours, bring them back. And they had to have a translator available since they did not speak English.
This went on for 4 years until they died at 99. Even though it was my grandparent, I still think that was a ludicrous waste of society's resources. They should be given an option for assisted suicide.
I hope that I can figure out a way to take myself out if I ever come into that kind of situation. I see no purpose for me to burden others with providing me with chronic care.
If you want to see real "medical waste", by the way, you should see how much is spent on a 2 year old that gets diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Or, up until 10 years ago, a kid born with HIV. Now THAT is wasting money. In their case, the kid has never worked, will need MUCH more (essentially constant) medical attention for 30 years, expensive medicines for all that time, the treatment will fail, it's just a matter of when, and they still won't ever be able to contribute to society. By the time they're of working age they'll be so disabled they can't work (ok maybe the HIV baby could work for 10 years, tops). It's not reasonable to even have them type on a keyboard after maybe 14 years of age.
Let's kill em all! (especially now with mRNA vaccines we're pretty close to a cure) ...
Do you think societies have unlimited resources to spend on everyone? Should they be directed only to people with healthcare problems? What about people that suffer non healthcare tragedies?
Not spending $2M of resources to keep a baby alive that has a 99% chance of not having any quality of life is not “killing people”.
Why rightly so?
Up until now, the number young people has been increasing in pretty much all societies such that society continuously had a greater supply of labor to continue meeting the bed pan changing demands of increasing number of old people.
You introduce women’s independence and easy to use, cheap birth control (IUD), and that very well can change the parameters under which society operates, which necessitate changed to how it can operate.
We are nowhere near technology where 50+ year olds are regularly able to contribute to the workforce in manual labor jobs, especially turning people over, bathing them, and otherwise laborious work it takes to take care of extremely old populations.
We are already seeing this tussle in the US, where there are vast nursing and nursing aide “shortages”, or another way to look at it is society trying to figure out how many of its resources (pay for that kind of labor) to allocate to caring for sick/old people.
It very well may be that society could be better off investing more in its young rather than old.