...and it's getting harder on the families too with nothing to really address it. It used to be one day you'd drop dead, or get really sick and be dead not long after, and your family after a terrible shock could begin readjusting to the new reality without their loved one. Now you can have what used to be a death sentence and continue living for years or even decades. But the systems which support the patient's life are not supporting their families, who have to live with the stress and financial burden of keeping their loved one alive, and the prolonged grieving process which can now take up a huge chunk of their lives and still doesn't really prepare them for death anyway.
I'm not saying that we need to get rid of medical advances that prolong life, it's just that these things have created new problems that we aren't dealing with and that not many people are really talking about.
The problem is it's not black and white what the long term outcome will be. A cancer diagnosis that was terminal 20 years ago could mean in 20 years you'll die of a heart attack with a short period of horrible treatment.
It gets even more dicey when you start talking about things like "well, the 20% chance is you'll survive this. The 80% chance is you'll die". Almost everyone is going to want to roll the 1/5 chance of living rather than taking the "you do nothing and you die" path, even if the 1/5 path is horribly terrible.
I'm not saying that we need to get rid of medical advances that prolong life, it's just that these things have created new problems that we aren't dealing with and that not many people are really talking about.