Definitely not a universal opinion. But it seems pretty common among my physician friends to have fairly specific advance directives that choose death over prolonged (or any) ICU stay in worst-case type scenarios. They keep bugging me to set something up like that for myself.
I am not just saying the original claim wasn’t universal, I’m saying it’s at most a tiny minority opinion (because it’s so extreme, taken literally).
“You should put your wishes in an advanced directive so you don’t suffer in the ICU in ~hopeless situations” (true) and “there are a non-negligible number of cases where the suffering in the ICU is not worth the modest life extension according the patient’s own values” (also true) and “the balance between life extension and quality of life errs, on average, too much toward the former” (plausibly true) are nothing like “the ICU is worse than death for most people”.
