Throughout history different societies have dealt with ailing elderly people in different ways, from benign neglect to outright abandonment, to the slaying of, as well as to the nurturing and appreciation of, and all the shades in-between. In America, with more and more people becoming elderly each year, of which many of these elderly people are not in particularly good shape physically as well as mentally, there are legitimate concerns that there may come a time when government agencies will decide whether a particular person will live or die, by a discriminatory usage and allocation of resources and monies attributed to those people.
It would be a tragic mistake of epic proportions if America should ever adjudicate that whether a member of our society lives or dies, or receives the appropriate medicine or care, is based mainly upon whether that person is considered to be of "use" to society at large. That is to say, if the State determines that in its viewpoint, per some sort of standard, that a person does not merit being kept alive or having access to medicine or medical equipment necessary to maintain that life, that the State, not that person, nor that individual's family, will have the power and the right to terminate that citizen's life. Should this tragic state of affairs ever come to our shores, America as we know it will have ended, because without life, and consequently the ability to make decisions about your life, you have sacrificed the most basic freedom that is inalienable to all, which is life itself.
As a matter of course, any country, having the power to determine who has the right to live and who must be put to death, is a country that is not free. Additionally, it is far easier to make these types of decisions about who is allowed to live or to die by the State, when that State is secular or godless, since in not recognizing the soul of a man, that government only sees the physical shell, and believes not that mankind is made in the image of God, but simply is seen as just another animal; and it has been said, "they shoot horses, don't they?"
The true measure of a society is not how it behaves when all is sunshine and glory but how that society behaves when it is pressed up against the wall, when its foundations are truly under assault or attacked upon either from within or without. The character of a society and of its government, will not be exclusively found in documents written by man, but will be found instead in the actions and in the hearts of men. How society treats its poor, its disenfranchised, and its elderly is a true reflection of that society and of that government itself.
The worth of a man, any man, of any age, is not determined by whether that person is productive or not, a criminal or not, a good man or not, but by the fact that all men are created equally by their Creator and that therefore that mankind is endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Any government that deems to take away those rights is fundamentally wrong, and a country that will not respect your life, is no country for old men.