I know a lot of families taking on massive debt to help pay for their parent's old age. Five-Six figures here and there to extend their parent's lives by a decade or two, saddling themselves with debt and leaving the next generation with no assets... Likely after moving the entire family to a decaying suburban city. All so the previous generation can stick around with a much poorer quality of life.
Health care has a far larger impact than the number on the bill. We need to openly talk about life and accept the inevitableness of death.
It's so incredibly easy to say when you're simply throwing others lives away, rarely do people do it with their own.
Again, this is just my personal position regarding my life's value vs my descendants. I'm advocating the questions, not my answer.
This is a hard problem, which means the questions are hard to ask and the answers are difficult to accept... Death has never been easy. However it's a conversation that families and society at large need to have.
Culturally, we are lagging behind what science can do... We can do so much but never stepped back to ask if we should. Society needs to make conscious decisions instead of blindly following our biological instincts.
My skepticism is mostly around not the economics but the sheer accumulation of desperation in these small communities creating high corruption and theft rates ruining the efficacy of the concept.
When you take into account the amount of energy required to grow food, refrigerate it, ship it halfway around the world, and distribute it to stores, surely the amount of energy required to grow food locally is inconsequential.
You're still going to have to refrigerate and ship the stuff locally; Train and ship shipping are relatively cheap compared to the last mile shipping.