Can't seem to post to this thread on Open Boook regarding futile care so I'll post it here.
The bottom line on health care resources whether money or not is that they are limited and insufficient to need. Somebody's going to die for their lack. The question is who is going to die and how many souls will have an early date with death because of improper resource allocation. The hospital administrators are juggling the question of reducing the total death toll from lack of resources while this group or that advocates for one particular case or another.The hospital administrator may look callous in any particular case but they're playing a different game and I'm not so sure that their way of following the culture of life is not ultimately the better one. The bean counter can serve the culture of life just as well as the heroic nurse or surgeon. It would be wise to imagine how such a figure should act.
I would suggest that anyone who wishes to continue futile care should be able to. Systems do make errors and what appears futile sometimes is not in reality. They should not do so on somebody else's dime, though. They should not condemn perhaps multiple people to earlier deaths because we know about the one case but the others are safely nameless, faceless, unidentified.