Comment & Debate
Los Angeles Times. “Planning for Worse Than Taxes”. March 22, 2005 – “We’ll all die. But in an age of increased longevity and medical advances, death can be suspended, sometimes indefinitely, and no longer slips in according to its own immutable timetable.
So, for both patients and their loved ones, real decisions are demanded: When do we stop doing all that we can do? When do we withhold which therapies and allow nature to take its course? When are we, through our own indecision and fears of mortality, allowing wondrous medical methods to perversely prolong the dying rather than the living?
These intensely personal and socially expensive decisions should not be left to governments, judges or legislators better attuned to highway funding.”[1]