( CNN ) -- No one has come out yet and explicitly suggested that old folks like me ( I am about to turn 83 ) should be treated the way the Eskimos , as folklore has it , used to treat theirs : put on an ice floe and left to float away into the sunset . We are , however , coming dangerously close . A recent study by Dr. Alvin C. Kwok and his colleagues finds that surgery is common in the last year , month and week of life . Eighty-year-olds had a 35 % chance of going under the knife in the last year of their lives ; nearly one out of five Medicare recipients had surgery in their last month and one in 10 in their last week . Nobody doubts that some of these surgeries were necessary . But major medical and ethical figures argue that they reflect our reluctance to accept death or let go , the surgeons ' activist interventionist orientation and the way the incentives are aligned . As the surgeon Atul Gawande put it in The New Yorker : `` Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy , three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care , five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery . But , ultimately , death comes , and no one is good at knowing when to stop . '' It remained for Daniel Callahan , an influential bioethicist and co-founder of the prestigious Hastings Center , a nonpartisan bioethics research institute in New York , to take the next step . In a May article in The New Republic , Callahan ( with co-author Sherwin B. Nuland ) argues for a cease-fire in America 's `` war against death , '' calling on us to surrender gracefully ; Americans thus `` may die earlier than [ is now common ] , but they will die better deaths . '' Focusing on care for the elderly , Callahan and Nuland warn that our present attitudes `` doom most of us to an old age that will end badly : with our declining bodies falling apart as they always have but devilishly -- and expensively -- stretching out the suffering and decay . '' They hence call on us to abandon the `` traditional open-ended model '' ( which assumes medical advances will continue unabated ) in favor of more realistic priorities , namely reducing early death and improving the quality of life for everyone . They further advocate age-based prioritization , giving the highest to children and `` the lowest to those over 80 . '' The journalist Beth Baker summed up this position : `` After people have lived a reasonably full life of , say , 70 to 80 years , they should be offered high quality long-term care , home care , rehabilitation and income support , but not extraordinary and expensive medical procedures . '' Baker 's interview with Callahan reveals one reason this line of argument should be watched with great concern : Once we set an age after which we shall provide mainly palliative care , economic pressures may well push us to ratchet down the age . If 80 was a good number a few years ago , given the huge deficit and the pressure to cut Medicare expenditures , there seems no obvious reason not to lower the cut-off age to , say , 70 . And nations that have weaker economies , the logic would follow , should cut off interventionist care at an even younger age . Say , 50 for Guatemala ? Above all , age is the wrong criterion . The capacity to recover and return to a meaningful life is the proper criterion . Thus , if a person is young but has a terminal disease , say , advanced pancreatic cancer , and physicians determine that he has but a few months , maybe weeks , to live ( a determination doctors often make ) , he may be spared aggressive interventions and be provided with mainly palliative care . In contrast , an 80-year-old with , say , pneumonia -- who can return to his family and friends to be loved and give love , contribute to the community through his volunteering and enjoy his retirement he earned with decades of work -- should be given all the treatments needed to return him to his life ( which in my case includes a full-time job and some work on the side ) . We should learn to accept death more readily ; we should stop aggressive interventions when there is little hope ; we should provide dying people with palliative care to make their passing less painful and less traumatic . Such a case may not just be that of an elderly person succumbing to a terminal illness -- it can be that of a preemie born too early to survive , a youngster following a car wreck , a worker following a tragic accident . We should learn from the Eskimos -- they long ago stopped abandoning their elderly just because they got `` too '' old . The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Amitai Etzioni .
We 're coming close to saying old people should be cast off , says Amitai Etzioni . Some are arguing for a cease-fire in America 's `` war against death , '' he writes . Etzioni : Capacity to recover and return to a meaningful life is the proper criterion for intervention . We should accept death and stop aggressive interventions when there 's little hope , he says .