>> a patient who has been languishing in a hospital bed on a ventilator, showing no signs of awareness, and lots of signs of severe and permanent brain damage.
The picture you painted here is pretty much a dead body. The damage is "permanent," the patient is languid, comatose and presumably brain dead (ventilator). There is no hint of hope. The patient is being kept breathing for no reason. I wondered why? It doesn't ring true. Hospitals as a rule don't waste thousands of dollars a day on futile care.
Severe and permanent brain damage very often doesn't meet the technical definition of "brain death". This article is about a change in Canadian practice which eliminates the requirement of "brain death", if (and only if) the patient is unable to keep his/her beating without artificial assistance.
To use a well-known example, Terri Schiavo was not "brain dead" though she had shown no signs of any cognitive function for years (possibly since her original "collapse", though it's not really clear that she didn't have some cognitive function for some period of time after that). The Canadian procedure described here is such that someone whose brain function was in the condition Terri's was, and ALSO whose heart wouldn't keep beating without mechanical assistance, could have the mechanical assistance removed (to determine if the heart really could or couldn't beat on its own) and if the heart stopped and stayed stopped for 5 minutes, the organs could be harvested.
Hospitals are very often forced to continue utterly futile care, at huge financial cost, and in some cases at the cost of lives that could have been saved if the futile care had been ended and organs harvested from transplantation. Even this Canadian procedure doesn't prevent a lot of futile cases from continuing to receive very expensive, long term medical care, since the portions of the brain that control heart beat and respiration can be present and functioning even when the portions of the brain where cognition and sensory processing occur are utterly dead, missing due to trauma (or even never present in the first place, as in the case of some anencephalic babies, who may have enough brain stem to keep automated physical processes going, in spite of the rest of their brains never having developed at all, resulting in a skull full of fluid where the main, cognitive portion of the brain should be).