An explosion of life-extending interventions for older and ill persons is changing the face of many medical specialties. The routine and innovative treatments are prolonging more lives of old ages and ill people. The number of patients who receive surgery and other non-primary care interventions that extend a life is on the rise (Kaufman 2009).This essay will discuss the cost/benefits analysis of extending a life. It will consider the impacts to a family of the continued paycheck as contrasted with the ongoing expense of healthcare for a critically ill person.

Modern medicine has become very efficient at maintaining the terminally ill alive by treating the hurdles of the underlying illness that the unavoidable procedure of dying has become more difficult and is often prolonged for no good reason. With the current system set-up, primary care physicians have no time to spend, seeing how patients respond or if an adjustment in the medication is required. The simplest thing, hence, for everybody up the stream, is to admit the patient to the hospital. Once somebody is admitted to the hospital, they are often seen by many specialists who will perform all kinds of tests whether they are important or not.

Hospital owners, have to keep the hospital full of paying patients. In order to pay their workers and meet other financial obligations. When it comes to a high cost, hi-tech treatments that are capable of extending a life, there are few or no limitations. The law requires Medicare to honor all treatments regardless of the cost. It will pay a certain amount of money for patients with breast cancer to get the chemotherapy drug Avastin, even if it extends life by a month and a half only. It will pay another amount of money for an old man with cancer to get a surgically implanted defibrillator if he happens to have an issue with the heart too (Meyer 2010).

According to Meyer (2010), the major issue is that majority of the patients that are treated vigorously would like less assertive care. They wish to be given home care. They would like to go to hospice if given a chance but they have no choice due to the high costs associated with hospice treatments. Most of the people want to die with dignity and peacefully. Research conducted with cancer patients showed that majority of them do not wish to pass through ample treatments that have terrible side effects if there is no guarantee for a better quality of life. Eventually, their relatives and next of kin have to decide if it is important to keep them alive, connected to machines at a tremendous expense, without expectation of recovering or to let the nature to take control (Meyer 2010).

Rise in health costs can strain a family as well as government’s budget. Improvements in medicine and technology have prolonged the lives of Americans at a cost. New processes are usually expensive and lead to rise in health care spending. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) gave a report that the major increases in health care spending could be as a result of the improvement and circulation of new technologies and medical services. While technological innovations can cut spending in many areas, in terms of health care, such growth also leads to alterations in practice, which together tend to increase spending. Consumer demand and the rise of use add to costs. Other contributing factors to increasing health care expenses are increased labor costs, resistance of consumers to governed care limitations, the aging of the population, unhealthy lifestyles, and a growing generality of high-cost illnesses, lack of information technology, administrative costs and defensive medicine (Bake et al 2008)