"Maybe you are better off not having the surgery, but taking the pain killer."This sort of thinking has long been incorporated into the medical ethos. When treatment becomes ineffective or hopeless, the operative standard becomes, "Comfort Measures Only", as I recall the term.
It's all very reasonable, and the big lie here is that we need to move away from a standard of "support life at all cost" that was in fact abandoned years ago.
If you look at the exchange in context, a woman was pointing out that her very elderly mother had in fact responded like a champ to surgery...Obama's response made it look like there would be a
diktat in advance to refuse surgery for all elderly patients (i.e. not just the "hopeless" or "risky" cases) which would result in many unnecessary deaths. It made him look quite callous and calculating.
Cheers!