John Hardwig, a medical ethicist and social philosopher, has now picked up the cause of the duty to die. We need not address here whether an old person should preserve his heirs' inheritance rather than spend it on medical care. For the time being, that is a private, not a political, matter of how one spends one's own money. This sort of thing is not considered beyond the pale in the increasingly fragile welfare states of Western Europe. If government finances medical care, such public policies are inevitable.
Money is limited.
Tough choices will have to be made. Politicians and bureaucrats will make them. What starts as a right to medical care ends as the authority of the state to say who lives and who dies. For all the criticism that is leveled at Medicare and proposals to reform medicine in general, too little attention has gone to that uncomfortable fact. If government controls medical spending, it controls you, including the very length of your life.