From my point of view a huge amount of our health care dollar is spent during the last few weeks of life. We can't seem to accept death as the final chapter of life and let go. Of course I blame this on the doctors, at least in the VA systerm. I don't know what it is like out in the "real world" but what we do to keep people alive past all reason just makes me want to scream and throw things.

Pat - the same occurs in the civilian world as well. The standard statistic that I hear is 60% of the entire healthcare cost of a person's life will be spent in the last 6 weeks or so.

However, we need to look past just the dollars and see some of the contributing causes. While it's true that we don't accept death well, where did that come from? Maybe I'm cynical, but in America, if there's no profit from it, we'd let the person pass away much sooner. So, I look at two sources - medical 'stuff' manufacturers (both equipment and pharmaceuticals) and trial lawyers. One comes out with some new device that will potentially help hold off death. A hospital doesn't use it. Said hospital gets a multi-million dollar lawsuit, which it looses (even though the subject might have only hung on for another week - and even that would have been pain-filled or they might not have even known they were there). Then, to prevent further cases, they buy the new product and start using it.

Does this mean I'm all for letting people just die when things get expensive? No, however, if things progress to the point where there is no justifiable hope, maybe it's time to surrender to the inevitable.