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That was roughly the quote for my father when he was going downhill, not because of surgeries or drugs or an especially high-cost-of-living area, but because of staff; a "memory care" (think severe dementia) ward necessitates a low patient-to-nurse ratio 24/7.
The point where he couldn't stay in a plain Skilled Nursing Facility ward was probably the same point where his quality of life went negative. Fortunately for him, his underlying problem was tumors that had metastasized to his brain, and there was only a week or two of that hell before the end. (His screams literally changed from "Help!" to "Hell!", which I like to hope was only due to his rapid loss of fine motor control making plosives impossible...)
I don't think anybody was keeping him alive during those last weeks due to perverse profit incentives, though, but rather just because delaying death is just what doctors and nurses do. By this time his treatment for otherwise-potentially-lethal problems had bought him a happy decade or two of borrowed time vs thyroid issues (he got to meet his grandkids!), a few years vs heart issues (he got to live with his grandkids! they got to play in the playscape he helped build!), and a year or two (all but a few months of which were high-to-decent quality of life; he got to take his grandkids to Disney World!) vs the cancer itself. Maybe we don't know when to quit fighting, but quitting too late is at least still a lot better than quitting too early.
I think what's happening is that we've been getting better and better at curing disease, despite making next to no progress, not even really trying to progress, against decay. When we manage to cure half of all death, our foe the Gompertz-Makeham law says that only buys us an average of 8 years ... and not 8 years of extra youth, just 8 years of extra dotage after having survived death. At some point that has diminishing returns, but we're not used to making decisions about diminishing returns; when we were curing things like smallpox there just weren't any to speak of.
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