New Requests for Startups(ycombinator.com)

   Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being 
   performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of 
   technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The 
   patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and 
   assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a 
   cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would 
   not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow 
   physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if 
   you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical 
   personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to 
   perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo. [2]

   my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most 
   physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good 
   night. [2]

   Research shows that most Americans do not die well, which is to say they do 
   not die the way they say they want to — at home, surrounded by the people 
   who love them. According to data from Medicare, only a third of patients die 
   this way. More than 50 percent spend their final days in hospitals, often in 
   intensive care units, tethered to machines and feeding tubes, or in nursing 
   homes. [3]

   More typical was an almost eighty-year-old woman at the end of her life, 
   with irreversible congestive heart failure, who was in the I.C.U. for the 
   second time in three weeks, drugged to oblivion and tubed in most natural 
   orifices and a few artificial ones. Or the seventy-year-old with a cancer 
   that had metastasized to her lungs and bone, and a fungal pneumonia that 
   arises only in the final phase of the illness. She had chosen to forgo 
   treatment, but her oncologist pushed her to change her mind, and she was put 
   on a ventilator and antibiotics. Another woman, in her eighties, with 
   end-stage respiratory and kidney failure, had been in the unit for two 
   weeks. Her husband had died after a long illness, with a feeding tube and a 
   tracheotomy, and she had mentioned that she didn’t want to die that way. But 
   her children couldn’t let her go, and asked to proceed with the placement of 
   various devices: a permanent tracheotomy, a feeding tube, and a dialysis 
   catheter. So now she just lay there tethered to her pumps, drifting in and 
   out of consciousness. [4]