"Up in the ICU hopeless 95 year olds will sit on ventilators and other life support machines for weeks because doctors don’t have any discretion in stopping futile care. You can be a 30 year old pregnant woman, and you will die waiting for your ICU bed in the emergency room."

I recently went through a situation where my family member was the 95 year old. The immediate family had no basis to judge whether the care being given was futile or not. The doctors, the "palliative care" specialists, completely s** the bed there. We would have been open to good, quantitative, rational medical arguments -- the type of data-driven conclusions that guide the rest of the medical world -- but instead the palliative team (external consultants actually) seemed capable only of the basest emotional and social manipulations. We concluded from the lack of rational arguments that there was in fact no well-reasoned basis to discontinue care, and that the palliative team was really just a crew of hired guns brought in to lower hospital costs.

If you do in fact see this inefficient rationing of precious care as a major source of burnout, it seems to me that there is an enormous, wide-open opportunity to conduct studies on predicting outcomes for ICU patients & other patients with advanced conditions. It really made my spine tingle when every single doctor I asked about this simply had no reply.