Requiring living wills
Another reason to oppose mandatory living wills is that they are just plain hard to write. The last time the Schiavo train wreck was crashing through the media, I looked up the applicable laws, and sat down to do my good duty and write one for myself. After I’d spent an hour or so developing my philosophy of life and end-of-life care, and starting to realize how much research would be required to actually set out what I’d want done in various circumstances, some more interesting or important activity came up and it got set aside. The problem is not just that I feel certain that I’m going to live forever, or at least a long time anyway, nor that my opinions are likely to change over the years. The big problem is that such a document is irrelevant unless your mind and person are permanently destroyed, are effectively (though not quite legally/medically) dead, never to return. The purpose of the document is to tell your survivors what to do with your dead corpse. Do whatever’s cheapest / easiest / makes you feel better, I won’t care, I’ll be dead. And if my lack of a living will creates havoc on an international scale? Well, that’s too bad, I guess, but I will still be (quite literally) unable to care.
The right thing from a policy perspective is to ensure that there are reasonable defaults, with some procedures and case law surrounding how to deal with the difficult cases. That was my other problem — once I understood what the default was, I was perfectly happy with it, and felt no need to modify it. There are areas where the defaults are so dreadful that the law effectively bans the default (US estate law eg), but I don’t think this is one of them.