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I am not sure that is true, it was not discussed or proposed in any of my own family members who have taken ill, been hospitalized and died, but then again, most had cancers that were terminal, and so were not candidates for organ 'harvest'. There certainly are injuries and illnesses that require temporary life support or feeding tubes, where people recover from need of them.

Agreed that in this situation circumstances were probably not such that EMT arrived at the scene or the situation was such an emergency that life-support was hooked up and the hospital's determination was similar. Age may not apply in the circumstances you state but I believe it is relevant when it comes to standard procedure and life-support measures. You most likely will not be hooked up or given life-support measures unless you can be a potential organ donar.

I think there becomes a point where there just is no hope of recovery from need of machine. When the patient is vegatative or comatose with no reasonable expectation of consciousness, I think many of us would say that further prolonging has a diminishing return...

I agree with what you say but that decision is in the hands of the person and if the person has the will to live beyond the time to control that situation I do not believe we have the right to commit them to a death of convenience. The will to live is very strong no matter what the circumstance.

For the patient, and for the family whose lives are ALL consumed by an emergency without end.

I do not understand this statement.

I would agree that life support is probably a default choice in cases of catastrophic accidents such as automobile crashes and the like, where a young or healthy person is critically injured. I would never argue that it shouldn't be, even if the only hope is organ donation.

For the patient, and for the family whose lives are ALL consumed by an emergency without end.

I do not understand this statement.

What I mean to say is that when there is a family member on life support or in prolonged critical care, the entire family stops functioning, and relvolves around the care of the patient. That's just what happens. I have certainly lived through this for short durations... short meaning up to a year of "emergency priorities" where nothing else happens and you do whatever it takes for the time it takes... but it would be agony to live with the expectation there there is no end in sight... That it will conceivably always be like that, even potentially consuming all the time, dreams and resources the whole family has. It's a family acting in emergency mode.... without end.

Look, sitting here listening to the TV while typing and there's this Cialis ad on and it's promising "4 hour erections"~!

In a day and age where that's common fare for the elderly, it's just a matter of time and they'll be shooting the old codgers up with suitible "donor" stem cells to restructure, renovate and rehabilitate their ancient body organs.

We may very well arrive at a time when folks will get selected to "pass on" based more on their relative decrepitude than on their age.

This time may be no more than 15 or 20 years in the future!