70 is not old to me.

I'm sick of people pushing crude stone implements on me.

What was wrong with the days when we survived with the odd pointed stick to get us through a hunt? Life expectancy is getting too high.

Soylent green is people. Just saying.

I worked in a hospital for 10 years.

The data shows the average person in the USA will spend 55% of their total lifetime money spent on healthcare in the last 6 months of our lives.

You want to decrease the cost of healthcare without dealing with that number? Good luck. No one is going to vote to just make Grandma comfortable and let her go.

You may start thinking about getting old by then.

I think baby boomers will become a danger to society as they age. Do you seriously think they will give up driving? hell no. They will drive as old as they possibly can. We will have 80 year old baby boomers driving around, tons of them.

Think about that.

Teens not so great behind the wheel either, FWIW.




---edit---

meh, I'll leave it to better informed posters on the driving thing. Those numbers above don't seem normalized for population. Maybe these better reflect reality w.r.t dangerous drivers.



crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/810853

Revealing indeed.

Link?

That came up first in a google search for "car accidents by age".

www.carinsurancelist.com/teenage-drivers.htm/car-accidents-by-age-pie-chart

Sick younger people going to cost a lot more than sick old people. We should let sick young people die if we want to save money.

Nazism itt.

So, hypothetically I can spend like 5 years doing an around the world trip staying in nice hotels and eating wonderful food and meeting all kinds of exotic women... or I can have a series of painful surgeries in my 80's and prolong my life 2 bed-ridden years... not a hard choice, for me.

We really need an open debate on this in society.

Meh. My first two patients last night were an 81 year old guy accompanied by his 80 year old wife who came in with a sprained ankle - problem because they're leaving in two weeks for a hiking tour in Tuscany. Next patient was a 46 y/o 350 pound woman with diabetes and renal failure who looked like she was 65 and uses one of those scooters to get around. Age is to some degree a number, not a status.

MM MD

Yeah. Obviously not to an unlimited degree, but it's pretty damn easy to be completely effed up at 45 because of lifestyle and it's not that uncommon for an 80 year old to be both mentally sharp physically capable of at least getting around well.

I'm trying to formulate a catchy expression that is something along the lines of: "The hardest thing you do is hard, no matter how easy it is." People don't always get what I mean though. If the hardest thing you do every day is get out of bed (physically) or watch tv (mentally), before long that's going to be all you're capable of.

Use it or lose it!

You like that? I just came up with it.

Good one. I'm going to take some credit for priming the pump and getting you thinking about it.

As a society we have held life itself to the utmost importance. Murder is the worst offense that one can commit. People who don't bat an eye at a sentence of life in prison will vehemently oppose the death penalty.

I think most people on the surface would think it is better to make 10 people's lives significantly harder, in order to save one life.

We don't kill people and we don't let people die. We could improve society significantly on certain levels if we rounded up all babies born to poor, uneducated, drug users and threw them out to sea. We don't, cause there is something not human in that.

There comes a point when the math, or data, or statistics don't matter. We could send every high school student to college for free if we stopped trying to save the life of anyone over 80 and put them in hospice(this isn't a fact, just a made up example). Do we let them die to improve society? Does this improvement come at some other less tangible loss that as a human species moving forward we cant afford to lose?

I dunno.

Was this on purpose?

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timei...erriam-webster

If I'm old and I don't want to strap my family with medical costs, what options do I have with wills or DNRs or otherwise to essentially instruct medical professionals to let me just die? If what situations do these instructions apply?

Yes, and I assume Max was referring to that in the first place. We're posting at a very high level here.

Jesus. Maybe we could just get rid of people like you instead.

Ahhhh....caught up. Bravo to all involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanc...care_directive

In all seriousness this may be partially true depending on what the case is. Many folks over 70 who contract cancer are not treated because in all likelihood the treatment will kill them faster than the cancer will. Also many forms of cancer which are highly treatable at 30-40-50 are more or less untreatable or unlikely to get beat at older ages. Hodgkin's has about a 88% cure rate under age 40 but by age 50 that drops to around 65% and its under 50% by age 60. The thing is many people who are 60-70-80 are being kept alive with chronic conditions at a high cost that younger folks are not.