Stay gold.

I've knocked the NYT, and various writers -- there and at other publications. But I hope to always be the first to pay an honest compliment as well.

Here's a story by Timothy Egan, well worth reading:

...
John Kitzhaber, M.D., politician, and son who watched both parents die in a dignified way, cannot stop talking about it.

His parents’ generation won the war, built the interstate highway system, cured polio, eradicated smallpox and created the two greatest social programs of the 20th century — Social Security and Medicare.

Now the baton has been passed to the Baby Boomers. But the hour is late, Kitzhaber says, with no answer to a pressing generational question: “What is our legacy?”
...
With his mother’s death in 2005, Kitzhaber lived the absurdities of the present system. Medicare would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests but would not pay $18 an hour for a non-hospice care giver to come into Annabel’s home and help her through her final days.

“The fundamental problem is that one percent of the population accounts for 35 percent of health care spending,” he said.

“So the big question is not how we pay for health care, but what are we buying.”

He is not, he says, in favor of pulling the plug on granny. The culture of life should be paramount, he says, following the oath he took as a doctor.

But Oregon, years ahead of the rest of the country, has talked and talked and talked about this taboo topic, and they’ve voted on it as well, in several forms.

They found — in line with national studies — that most people want to die at home.