I fail to see how this is, as one specialist puts it, a “profound ethical dilemma," and not simply a temporary and embarrassing misalignment of resources. If you can prevent people from dying—and enable them to live meaningful, sentient lives despite being tethered to a device—then the solution is clear: scale up production while making the devices smaller and cheaper, and in the meantime seek out alternative long-term facilities for palliative care to avoid occupying hospital beds.

The fact that the article frames the problem as "we have this fear of letting people die"—instead of a difficult but solvable problem of research, economy, logistics—seems to me emblematic of a certain dead-end, anti-growth mindset that pervades much of supposedly humanistic writing from the NYer.

So what if this is "a bridge to nowhere?" So is life! And in the end, we are all, in our own ways, waiting for time to run out, tethered to something immovable.