It's true that, as Henry Marsh says ("Do No Harm"), the fact that we *can* save people's lives, at least temporarily, using modern medicine doesn't necessarily mean that we *should* always use those interventions ("the cancer specialists think it's a big success if the latest expensive new drug keeps a patient alive for an extra few months[...] And then there is always the fear that you might be wrong, that maybe the patient is right to hope against hope, to hope for a miracle, and maybe you should operate just one more time").
But while many people accept that in principle the population is top-heavy with the elderly, that doesn't generally mean that they are in favour of either themselves or individuals whom they know being killed off for the benefit of the nation as a whole, and I can't see any political party managing to sell such a policy in those terms!
In a similar vein, people who believe that the world is in principle over-populated by humans are rarely in favour of their own locality being depopulated, let alone forcibly depopulated; it is always the faceless masses 'over there' who are breeding too fast and would benefit from a famine or plague to restore the natural balance (look at the response to Covid-19, which had a relatively tiny death rate compared to most historic epidemics...) Certainly nobody was going round saying that Covid was reducing the burden on society by being nature's way of killing off the elderly and infirm.
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It's true that, as Henry Marsh says ("Do No Harm"), the fact that we *can* save people's lives, at least temporarily, using modern medicine doesn't necessarily mean that we *should* always use those interventions ("the cancer specialists think it's a big success if the latest expensive new drug keeps a patient alive for an extra few months[...] And then there is always the fear that you might be wrong, that maybe the patient is right to hope against hope, to hope for a miracle, and maybe you should operate just one more time").
But while many people accept that in principle the population is top-heavy with the elderly, that doesn't generally mean that they are in favour of either themselves or individuals whom they know being killed off for the benefit of the nation as a whole, and I can't see any political party managing to sell such a policy in those terms!
In a similar vein, people who believe that the world is in principle over-populated by humans are rarely in favour of their own locality being depopulated, let alone forcibly depopulated; it is always the faceless masses 'over there' who are breeding too fast and would benefit from a famine or plague to restore the natural balance (look at the response to Covid-19, which had a relatively tiny death rate compared to most historic epidemics...) Certainly nobody was going round saying that Covid was reducing the burden on society by being nature's way of killing off the elderly and infirm.