Earlier this week there was a post on this site about the definition of death vs brain death. That article pointed out that many doctors oppose any questioning of the idea of brain death = death for at least partly economic reasons: taking care of braindead patients uses up greatly needed resources. (in fact, the article mentioned that the proposal of such a definition was based on medical care facilities growing full of braindead people)
I wonder, if the idea were more mainstream, if life extension funding on a large scale would be opposed by similar arguments: 'we as a society can't afford to have everyone live a lot longer, so we should put our resources towards other medical pursuits.'