Terri Schiavo

It's not my decision, so I don't know why I'm talking, but anyway, here goes:

She's in a persistent vegetative state. Brain scans show that parts of her brain have atrophied and been replaced by spinal fluid. With such severe damage, she can't show the recovery that Sarah Scantlin showed. However, as Fear of Clowns wrote, she didn't write a living will, so all we have is her husband's word that she wouldn't have wanted to live this way. Since her family is willing to support the living vegetable that used to be their daughter, fine. However, since she has no idea what's going on, not to mention the fact that she's not going to be able to recover, they should pay for it out of their own pocket--or like-minded people can spend their hard-earned money to maintain her.

What I don't want to see is the rest of us forced to pay to maintain vegetables. Unfortunately, since her case seems to be a stalking horse for those opposed to abortion, I'm afraid that those who want to maintain vegetables are going to try (and in many cases succeed) to get state funding for it.

Update
On a similar topic, In How to Save Medicare? Die Sooner DANIEL ALTMAN notes that Medicare's future financing problems are likely to be much worse than Social Security's. Further,

For the last few decades, the share of Medicare costs incurred by patients in their last year of life has stayed at about 28 percent…. Thus end-of-life care hasn't contributed unduly of late to Medicare's problems.

Even if it's stayed steady, that's still a huge chunk of cash. Then he cites David O. Meltzer, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago who also teaches economics. Even with the knowledge of "many markers we have of someone who is approaching the end of life",

Dr. Meltzer warned against putting the brakes on care just as a patient takes an inexorable turn for the worse. Studies of doctors who intervened at that point to stave off unproductive care have found little success in cutting costs, he said. Instead, he recommended that doctors try to prepare patients and families for less resource-intensive care at the end of life. "There is no question, as a clinician, and as a patient and the family members of patients, there are things you can do to make sure that expenditures with little chance of being helpful won't be undertaken," he said. "You explain to people that the goal of medical care is not always to make people live longer."..

Explaining that principle early on could make a difference in the cases that appear to pose the biggest problem: those in which the patient's health changes suddenly and severely. Dr. [Gail R. Wilensky, a senior fellow at Project HOPE] cited recent research showing that these cases incurred high costs with scant medical benefit…

Yet teaching doctors and patients to say no could be a losing battle. "It doesn't fit human nature, and it certainly doesn't fit our culture," [Dr. Arnold S. Relman, a professor emeritus of medicine and social medicine at Harvard and former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine] said. "Most Americans - and most people who are educated in advanced societies now - believe that each person is entitled to, technically and scientifically, the best medical care that they can get."

Good luck with changing that.