Below is an excerpt from an article related to end of life issues. Additionally, (watch the 11 minutes interview with Dr. Kevorkian and watch the 60 minutes Frontline Being Mortal documentary) found on You tube 

Given what you have read and watched about assisted suicide v. palliative/end of life/hospice care and the legal issues surrounding the end of life, it is your turn to determine the answer to this question on the best use of limited resources in health care. You must remain within legal boundries - not rely simply on emotional arguments - even if your option isn't law currently - how would you argue to make it legal.

The death of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a former pathologist who helped dozens of terminally ill people die with a suicide machine, has renewed a national debate on end-of-life issues that never went away completely, even after Kevorkian was sentenced to prison in 1999.

In fact, a Gallup poll in May found that physician-assisted suicide remains the most polarized moral issue in the country, with 45 percent saying it is morally acceptable and 48 percent saying it is morally wrong.

And the ferocity of the so-called “death panels” controversy during the health care reform debate remains so potent that in January the Obama administration reversed course on end-of-life counseling regulations due to concerns that passing the regulations would rekindle the furor.

The stakes are high, morally, psychologically and economically.

Caring for people in the final stages of life is one of the most expensive aspects of the nation’s health care system, accounting for as much as one-third of all health care costs, and about 30 percent of Medicare expenditures come in the last year of a patient’s life. Moreover, modern medicine is able to keep human beings — or at least their bodies — alive for increasingly long periods, often in what is known as a “persistent vegetative state,” or PVS.

This comes as the nation’s population continues to grow grayer, with the responsibility of providing for the terminally ill falling on the next generation, and on strained state and federal budgets.

Ethicists also raise questions as to what is the moral use of limited health care resources — on helping the dying or saving the living.