At the point where the current legal and medical system gives up on a patient, they aren't really dead.

A corollary to this is the fact that some people who are clearly considered alive by the medical system might be good candidates for cryonics: Alzheimer's and mad-cow type diseases destroy the most important brain patterns, and at some point a rational person would take a chance on cryonics.

I read somewhere that on average something like 80% of individual's medical expenses get spent in the last year of life. Clearly much of this is futility. Imagine if this money was used to actually put scientific resources into cryonics? Really, really sad.