Thank you for the ping Fred.
I'm sure these two stories are just the tip of the iceberg.
It is not only hospice doctors and nurses doing this, but personal family doctors who are advising family members to stop nutrition and hydration on elderly relatives.
I know this from personal experience.
Yes, we are all aware that when someone is about to die from organ failure the patient's doctor will do what he can to reduce pain, and doses of morphine administered at the end stage are carefully monitored though ultimately fatal; the patient's doctor treads a fine line between mercy and euthenasia. As the widow of a doctor who treated many elderly people, I was always aware of this, it's a terrible responsibilty for a medical professional but they deal with matters of life and death with compassion. My husband instructed me that should he suffer intractible pain without hope of improvement, no herioc measures should be allowed to keep him alive, but if he was simply non-communicative or not mentally alert, as in alzheimer's disease, he wanted to be nursed and taken care of in a nursing home.
There is something terribly wrong in the US IMO. That a patient's guardian or next of kin is able to literally obtain a sentence of death from a judge by applying for a court order to admit the patient to a hospice where the law of admittance is that the patient MUST NOT be expected to live more than six months, opens the door to nothing less than an expedient method of fast-tracking inheritance.
My godmother, my dear dear Auntie Marie Colman Kratt, was dehydrated to death by a crappy sub-standard "nursing" home in Arizona in the 1980s. No one went to jail, "She just wouldn't take any food." Auntie was in dementia from severe Alzheimers, but would eat slowly if fed. It was too much work, I guess.
Sick world.