Why don't they just eat cake?
This is the good end of the spectrum. The other end is that the patient lives alone, soils his clothes and doesn't change them for months/ gets lost and becomes homeless, gets infected and dies an animals death. Most of the patients live closer to the bad end.
First of all, a lot of the grandiose claims here about how "if I was demented I would just get myself put down" are coming from tech people who could afford this end of the spectrum.
Second, 24 hour home care - or 'family care plus a certain amount of professional relief' is, while expensive, not much more expensive than medicalized fulltime care in a lot of facilities. You're not paying the overheads of a bunch of salaries and potentially the profit margin.
At the lowest end of the spectrum, things are indeed terrible. Aside from fairly extreme small government people, I think most people would want the state to step in. A lot of the places that are over-medicating their patients are collecting vast amounts of subsidies and pocketing the improved profits that come from getting to run staffing levels as low as they can get away with.
I can illustrate it as follows: You can go on a wonderful free holiday for two weeks, but the deal is you will not be able to remember it. Do you want to go?
Some people will say no. After all, if they cannot remember it then it is just loosing two weeks. These people prioritise the remembering self.
But some people will say yes, because woohoo it’s a holiday! It’ll be fun in the moment. These people prioritise the experiencing self.
I think this is a really interesting concept by itself.
In the case of tech people, I suspect they are mostly in the first category. So they are more in the ‘if I cannot remember anything then put me out of my misery. I essentially don’t have a self anymore.’
But I wonder if people in the second category will be of the mindset, ‘well, I’ll still have good days, which I guess I’ll enjoy at the time’