I've mentioned National Lampoon's 1973 Last Aid parody before, but I didn't expect anyone to take it seriously.

1. Don't panic. Move quickly to the side of the deceased. Do not waste valuable time trying to revive him.
2. Immediately render the deceased immobile. This may be done by pressing a folded blanket or rolled-up coat over his face and holding it in place for at least three minutes or by pinching the nostrils and using mouth-to-mouth asphyxiation.

In Death and Budgets, David Brooks attempts to apply Last Aid by arguing that living longer is not that worthy a goal.
 

I hope you had the chance to read and reread Dudley Clendinen’s splendid essay, “The Good Short Life,” in The Times’s Sunday Review section. Clendinen is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. If he uses all the available medical technology, it will leave him, in a few years’ time, “a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self.”

... Clendinen’s article is worth reading for the way he defines what life is. Life is not just breathing and existing as a self-enclosed skin bag. It’s doing the activities with others you were put on earth to do.

But it’s also valuable as a backdrop to the current budget mess. This fiscal crisis is about many things, but one of them is our inability to face death — our willingness to spend our nation into bankruptcy to extend life for a few more sickly months.

The fiscal crisis is driven largely by health care costs. We have the illusion that in spending so much on health care we are radically improving the quality of our lives. We have the illusion that through advances in medical research we are in the process of eradicating deadly diseases. We have the barely suppressed hope that someday all this spending and innovation will produce something close to immortality.

Forget all those assurances that American health care is the best in the world. Brooks is here to tell you that (your) life will be nasty and brutish - unless you keep it short. Instead of wasting all our tax money on the illusions of Medicare, Medicaid or ACA, you might as well reduce the surplus population. Let that money go to more useful pursuits, like bailing out banks and financial firms, bailing out TBTF corporations, energy industry subsidies, agribusiness subsidies, the defense industry, and resource wars.

Do you want to live forever?