ABSTRACT
Setting Limits, Daniel Callahan has put forth a provocative thesis: that "intergenerational equity" might require us to rethink some of the traditional goals of medicine as they affect care that is provided to the elderly. The elderly are currently the heaviest users of health services, and the great bulk of those services are spent in "forestalling death" and in "warehousing" persons until their deaths. Callahan proposes a new conception of life and the natural end of one's life in old age, a conception that focuses on the fact that one's life on the whole has had numerous and bountiful experiences whose richness in old age now suggests completeness. Callahan argues for moving beyond the decade-old agenda of anti-ageism to his newer agenda. Callahan's argument seems to rest on the presumption that there is little value in providing certain health services to persons who have reached the end of full and natural lives.
