Postponing the inevitable (Yes, we are all going to die)

Initiatives to encourage people to live healthier, longer lives are just creating a different set of problems.

A medical friend once told me that if everybody in the UK were to stop smoking, the NHS would collapse. I thought she was offering that old chestnut about smokers and drinkers handing over billions to the state in tax, but it was more subtle argument than that. Her point was that it's much cheaper to treat a 50-year-old who's taking 18 months to die of lung cancer than it is to treat a 90-year-old who's spent the last 20 years slowly fading away from a cocktail of osteoporosis, angina, pneumonia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and non-specific decrepitude.

Of course, it's not really that simple. Recent research in the Netherlands has spawned headlines such as "Healthy people place biggest burden on state" - although this ignores the overall social costs and lost opportunities of poor health. Nevertheless, government injunctions to stop smoking, eat fruit and veg and rediscover the use of one's legs may buy an individual another 40 years of life - but how much of that life will really be productive, healthy and happy?

Any public health initiative, whether on smoking, drinking, exercise, healthy eating or whatever, is lauded by its sponsors as having the potential to "save lives". It's a deliciously redemptionist image - I can just picture Alan Johnson as a hellfire preacher - but it's nonsense of course. They're not saving lives, they're just postponing deaths. And all those people who don't die young from heart disease or cirrhosis or emphysema will get something different but probably equally unpleasant a bit later. It's just a case of moving the beds around on the terminal ward.

my personal translation of Paul’s words...

“To live is Jesus
and to die, well that’s just a whole lot more Jesus!”

=0)

the article indicates it's cheaper to treat a 50 year old with 18 months of lung cancer treatments, then die, than to care for a 90 year old.

I was trying to be funny.

The film setting was 2022. Overpopulation caused a world shortage of food. The Soylent Corporation made nutrition squares. Soylent Red & Soylent Yellow...but the most valuable and most nutritious was Soylent Green

In "Soylent Green" old people were to be euthanized when they reached a certain age.

"What is the Secret of Soylent Green?"; in the revealing trailer, two conveyor belts were shown, one with body bags, the other with green food; the title referred to a type of artificial food substance (reportedly made from plankton) rationed out to the populace.

In the film's conclusion, New York City Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) made the horrifying, predictable discovery of the true composition of the Soylent Corporation's new artificial food product Soylent Green - it was composed of the recycled bodies of the deceased inhabitants of the society's euthanasia centers; he made a desperate plea to police chief Hatcher (Brock Peters) as he was dragged away after being shot in the leg: "It's people! Soylent Green is made out of people! They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food... Soylent Green is people! We've gotta stop them somehow!"

In “Soylent Green” old people were to be euthanized when they reached a certain age.

I have to laugh :). Your discription of the movie sounded like my son’s when he went to a movie when he was young. He could repeat the movie almost word for word - who needed to go to the movies after that. I couldn’t believe he could do that now, it seems, so can you. :)

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