When should we just let old people die ?

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This topic raises a lot of interesting questions. A couple clusters that come to mind for me:

When a person finds themselves at the beginning or middle of a trail of organ transplants, particularly in decades where they're senior but not really 'old' by most standards today (thinking old 80's and 90's, senior being 60's and 70's), what kind of information are they getting from their doctors? Is this very often coming from a situation where the doctor can tell that they'll be dead in a few years if they don't and tack on maybe a couple years if they get all the transplants? What I'm really trying to get at - how often are these situations really foreseeable? How often do the doctors themselves have any idea whether that organ is a 10 or 15 year life extension by itself or just one stepping stone on a series of four or five transplants that degrade quickly and the patient dies anyway in a few years time?

At what point should our culture encourage hospice care? In what situations is it even applicable considering the circumstance? I know that this is a moving target as medicine advances and conditions circulate in and out of fatality. It also might be difficult to tell when a person has met that threshold that their best bet for quality vs. quantity of life is to check in to hospice, contemplate their lives, and prepare themselves as best they can psychologically for death?

Does considering the question this way change its mood?
"We should just let old people die when _________"

Sounds good. $%^& the young.

I don't have any moral qualms with that if there no such objective thing as morality. I just prefer people to be somewhat clear in what it is they're saying, particularly if it's against a stance that most people would consider to be within reason.

At least the good news - in another ten or fifteen years we probably will be growing major human organs in vats so without the limitations based on donors this will probably be as moot a point as the stem-cells/aborted fetuses controversy. Issues that we'd never be able to sanely resolve on a level of societal moral negotiation seem to be resolved by science these days when we're lucky.

I get that these topics are close to a lot of people and as well I understand that going through something oneself has a way of changing any person's perspective regardless of what they might have believed before.

I think what I was trying to point out was that a person who knows that they'll be taking an organ that will barely make a difference and doing so purely out of fear of death is in a much different position than the person who likely has at least five, ten, or more years of life ahead and where depriving them of that organ would be a direct cause of prolonged suffering and misery and the deprecation of their quality of life.

The brainwashing and indoctrination bit was sarcasm, partly on how chagrined I'm becoming with how pernicious peoples self-reference is getting in politics these days - often to the point where reality and the big picture are just a nuisance getting in their way or even a fiction made up by those who want to oppress them (ie. phallogocentrism) because its what their feelings tell them is true.

Government clearly has a lot involved, I don't know about 'by the people' but the 'for the people' part is definitely burdened by complexities - ie. fuel, foreign policy, foreign dictators and the ethical compromises in bolstering them, selling ammunition and armaments to the third world to save money on our own, etc. etc.

This is part of why I really don't like the fetish of the last twenty or thirty years that people have to take everything they want to the federal level. It's where good ideas go to be modified into a parody of themselves if they get passed at all.