1. “Should the Grandparents Die?”: Allocation of Medical Resources with an Aging Population

Abstract

The question in my title—a deliberate inversion of Kuhse and Singer's now-famous question, “Should the baby live?”—is one that is being asked more and more frequently. As Gerald Gruman has observed: It is questionable if today the young comatose patient is the prototype for the discussion of issues of death and dying. A more probable crucial issue is that of the elderly: a reservoir of relatively defenseless persons, perceived, through bigoted “ageism,” as unproductive and pejoratively dependent. In them, modernization has created a population stratum that, in a state of nature or conditions of scarcity economics, “ought” to be dead.The medical care needs of aged persons, and how we, as individuals and societies, will fulfill these needs in an era of a perceived scarcity of medical resources, are a frequent topic of discussion today. The “scarcity” of medical resources is frequently a given in discussions of allocation priorities.