I do NOT believe that these people, thousands of them, give informed consent to this agonizing death. Somebody else is giving the "orders." The obvious question is, who profits by it? Hospitals do, by reducing costs. Families do too, for the same reason, and because sometimes they stand to inherit by snuffing grandpa.
The statistics say that about 22% of cognitively impaired patients have feeding tubes. 11+% are dehydrated/starved to death. Depending on how they are using these figures, that means that patients with a feeding tube will be murdered in about one-third of the cases or possibly one half of the cases. In the hands of lawyers, the PEG tube has become a leading murder weapon!
The euthies/bad hospices can bump someone off in five to six days these days.