i started looking at it and i thought this is like a robin cook book.arm. >> reporter: robin cook wrote "coma," a medical thriller about brain dead patients being kept alive teno says the financial incentives in the medical system are aligned with doing more at the end of life, procedures and hospitalizations, rather than letting go. >> we pay for another day in the icu. we don't pay for the physician to sit down and have that really difficult conversation with that family about what would your mother want under these circumstances. those conversations were politically-dubbed as death panels in 2009 during the debate over obamacare. under the original healthcare proposal, doctors would have been paid to have end of life conversations with their patients. that provision was eventually removed from the health care bill. according to a recent pew research study, 66% of americans, say there are some circumstances in which doctors should allow patients to die. 31% believe they should do everything medically possible to save lives in all cases. >> i've heard