Cataract Surgery and Quality of Life

Regarding your article on cataract surgery (May 7): As a taxpayer I can’t think of a better bargain. The surgery permits old people to be independent longer, delaying expensive custodial care. It allows them to be safer drivers, saving on (everyone’s) insurance premiums and the lives of innocents. Does it disturb us that, unlike many medical procedures we pay for, this one “merely” improves the quality of life?

I would rather have Medicare’s money--or my insurance company’s, or mine--spent on things like cataract surgery (or false teeth should I require them) than have it spent on extending my eventual dying a few months or weeks, at great cost in both money and misery.

ELAINE HAMILTON

Pasadena