The cases you mentioned wouldn't even have been issues 50 years ago. They'd all just be dead. Thanks to life-supporting measures like feeding tubes, incubators, CPR, defribulators and respirators, advanced directives go from a non-issue to a major issue. The rising costs of healthcare (what a catch phrase!) and the plummeting rates of quality of life due to such intervening measures disrupts the natural chain of life and death. Medical legislators may have a deathwish for everyone else but themselves, but when you really think about it, just letting people go is not only more humane, it's a necessary fact of life. What the medical community should do is study other ways of life saving measures and once found, outlaw the ones we have. Frankly, the ones we have are crap and only work 10% of the time. Every life-saving measure has a serious side-effect people rarely consider. CPR only works after a few cracked ribs. Small price to pay for a young healthy body but cracked ribs could be a death sentence for the elderly. Defribulation is great if they don't piddle away at CPR for an hour, by the time the heart starts beating again the brain is irreversibly damaged. Terry Schiavo's husband just got sick and tired of seeing his wife suffering. Yes it's hypocritical that there would be so much fanfare over something that truly happens daily, but if there's no fanfare over these issues at all, the medical society will never have to come up with something better, and as long as they are terrible at the things they do, we'll continue saying good bye to gramma by disconnecting her feeding tube and turning off her respirator, instead of letting her just die naturally of the stroke she had in the first place.