Your Prof. Halper should stick to Plato. His pontificating on how feeding tubes placed in people with dementia lasting only a few months is downright asinine. Some elderly live for over a decade lying in bed, unable to move, with no idea where they are or what is going on. It is the living forcing a dying person to linger on that is unnatural and twisted.
Obamacare may indeed end up killing old people due to rationing, but trying to equate that with unnaturally prolonging suffering is a fallacious argument to begin with.
I’m all for people making their own decisions on medical care but a hip replacement for an elderly woman with terminal cancer sounds more like torture to me than waterboarding or sitting in a room with a bug. Hip replacements are extremely painful and require weeks of rehab. If you have advanced terminal cancer you can’t exactly walk around after surgery with a foot-long wound that’s stuck together with staples and see any point in doing it. Why would you want to?
Amen to Cynthia’s comments above. I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things about hospice and palliative care.
