Ever hear of the Obamacare death panels? The ones where doctors would decide if your loved one was too old and shouldn’t get treatment?
Yeah. That’s this.
What it really was that Medicare would pay for consultation with doctors (?) to discuss end of life care and setup living wills and DNRs and such if the person wanted.
That way if something happened and they were taken to the hospital they could be treated the way they wanted to be and not stuck in a coma on a vent for the rest of their life if that was against their wishes.
But the Republicans branded then “death panels” (which for political purposes was brilliant). So the choice of having help making those decisions was removed.
If our society really cared for the elderly, they would be integrated and respected, not segregated and shunned. We do the latter because we fear age, sickness, and death. Fear isn't caring.
In the US. It's perhaps the most striking difference that hit me during my stay overseas. In the Old World we occasionally get people completely panicking about their own death. In the US, seemingly _everyone_ is like that.
That is certainly not true. Traditional societies and non-western societies have far different ways of relating to elders than we do, and even among western societies there are variations.