>One of the greatest reasons for concern is the sheer scale of Canada’s euthanasia regime. California provides a useful point of comparison: It legalized medically assisted death the same year as Canada, 2016, and it has about the same population, just under forty million. In 2021 in California, 486 people died using the state’s assisted suicide program. In Canada in the same year, 10,064 people used MAID to die.
70% of the Canadians reported cancer as the reason for MAID. It sounds like thousands of Californians are experiencing unnecessary and extended end of life suffering.
Canada has over double the number of deaths due to lung cancer and nearly double the deaths due to colorectal cancer compared to California.
Essentially cancer looks different in California than Canada. This makes drawing conclusions that there are thousands suffering unnecessarily extended end of life experiences difficult.
The site you linked estimates 60,000 cancer deaths in California this year, I would assume it's safe to assume what the eventual prognosis was for those cases. Nearly 10,000 of them from lung cancer, and over 5,000 from colorectal cancer. If those are your examples of cancers with unpleasant end of life experiences and less than 500 people in the state used MAID, then it would seem as though thousands are suffering. Though I don't know how liberal your hospice system is with morphine & fentanyl.
"It sounds like thousands of Californians are experiencing unnecessary and extended end of life suffering."
Why is that your take? Why isn't it "Thousands of Canadians are being killed too soon in an effort to save the government money"? or some other take? We already have stories of Canada asking Veterans to join "MAID" instead of getting a wheelchair...
> Why isn't it "Thousands of Canadians are being killed too soon in an effort to save the government money"?
Because nobody's made that case.
Making a case requires evidence. Not handwaving and appeals to movie plots.
> We already have stories of Canada asking Veterans to join "MAID" instead of getting a wheelchair...
As long as we're trading conspiracy theories, the person who reported that was paid off by the right wing to make MAID seem horrible, and therefore something that should be ended, and my conspiracy theory has a lot more going for it than yours does.
>The majority of persons receiving MAID during 2020 were reported as having cancer as their main underlying medical condition (69.1%). This is followed by cardiovascular conditions (13.8%), chronic respiratory conditions (11.3%) and neurological conditions (10.2%)
Some additional breakdowns:
>Cardiovascular conditions were the second most frequently cited main condition for persons receiving MAID. Congestive heart failure was the most frequently cited heart condition in this category (42.2%). Under respiratory conditions, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) was the most frequently listed condition.
>Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, was the leading neurological condition reported for persons receiving MAID (35.2%), followed by Parkinson's disease (18.1%) multiple sclerosis (MS) (9.7%), and progressive supranuclear palsy (4.4%).
> The Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, the leading organization of Canadian euthanasia providers, has sat on credible evidence by its own members that people are being driven to euthanasia by credit card debt, poor housing, and difficulties getting medical care.
Did I miss the actual concrete evidence this is being purposefully being used to reduce certain populations?
Not sure if I understand, but the article gives a number of examples, such as:
> Mary knows that she could control her pain if she could take vitamin pills, eat a special diet, and go to physiotherapy. She can’t afford it. “Mary identifies poverty as the driver of her MAID request,” Gibb-Carsley writes on a slide accompanying her talk, emphasizing the. “She does not want to die, but she’s suffering terribly and she’s been maxing out her credit cards. She has no other options.”
I'm wondering, does this example work as anti-euthanasia instead of pro-UBI to anyone reading it (or the rest of the article)?
It seems excessively cruel to me to try and force people to live in misery big enough to make the want to kill themselves instead of alleviating the misery. Like, the article seems to frame the argument that MAID can be used to lobby for better welfare as a ridiculous idea, but that's really it: if the only thing keeping people in your society from killing themselves that it's hard and scary, what the fuck is your society doing to these people.
Extreme poverty is a chronic condition for the vast majority of people and is a undisputed cause of suffering. It's curable, theoretically, but not in practice.
It doesn't really matter what the intent of the government and medical establishment is; In fact, it may not even be coherent to attribute intent to such an entity. What matters is what the system does, and the evidence clearly indicates that the MAiD system is resulting in the deaths of the socially marginalised.
> the evidence clearly indicates that the MAiD system is resulting in the deaths of the socially marginalised
The enter point of the MAiD system is to result in deaths. I think the intent matters a lot. I don't think it's a cause for alarm if we find some subpopulations that use a medical service more than others. I do think it's alarming if people are scheming to kill poor people.
I'd say any state-facilitated euthanasia needs to be extremely carefully considered in situations where suicide is a recommended and facilitated option to avoid homelessness and related disasters.
Of course, I'm also in favor of just not organizing benefits so that disabled people wind-up facing homelessness and so being willing to choose death.
The whole argument against MAID feels ridiculously like the anti-abortion position. The other option to providing it is having them end their life in a way that might be risky or fail to succeed in a way that leaves them painfully scarred for life or suffering more than they had to.
Why are people forced to live if they don't want to?
I am sympathetic to those who wish for assisted suicide to prevent pain for diseases or illnesses they've succumbed to. I agree with your thesis that death may be preferential to suffering, and should be available to those who seek it.
On the other hand, there are articles like this[1], wherein the main factor for the requested euthanasia is income.
"But until recently, he was able to live comfortably, sharing his modest home in Medicine Hat, Alberta, with his service dog.
Changes to his state benefits when he turned 65 in May meant his income was cut and he's now left with around $120 per month after paying for medical bills and essentials."
The bogeyman against a state monopoly on medical care has long been that the state will seek cost effectiveness over quality of care, and this adds the additional paranoia of worrying over whether other social safety net programs may lean into the notion that perhaps it isn't as beneficial to fund those who are less productive members of society due to age or inability when it is easier to put them down.
I don't have a particular dog in the fight either way, but where I want medical assisted euthanasia to exist as an option against suffering, I have some concern that it could become encouraged for what I consider less appropriate ailments, like poverty.
My prediction is that this poor man is the leading edge of a massive tsunami that is heading towards Canadian shores. Housing/rent prices are beyond insane in Canada, we have 500k+ immigrants per year, and with food prices now on the rise 10% to 20% at least, I can't imagine how many people there are going to be who can't afford a roof over their heads.
And I've seen zero sign that this is even on the radar of government, though perhaps that's what MAID is for. At least it's an option to homelessness.
I think it is more analogous to the laws prohibiting people from selling their own organs. The problem isn't that organ transplants are immoral, the problem is that allowing it can create perverse incentives especially for disadvantaged groups.
If you squint at MAID one way, you can see all the good it does for people who really need it. If you squint another way, you can see the medical system just killing off the people it failed.
I don't have a problem with people getting MAID, but I do have a problem with medical practitioners pushing it on people who want to live but can't get basic resources to deal with very manageable disabilities.
We ensure that there are thousands more of them, promote them, and ensure that they are rewarded for denying health care to as many people as possible (after collecting money from the victims).
We'd need to do a bit of branding on the whole thing, of course. We would first want to ensure that they are not medical professionals making these decisions. "Adjusters" has a nice ring to it.
We could build an entire industry out of this. And I think if we did all of that, many people's problems with euthanasia would be ameliorated.
Being counselled to suicide should be ineffective if they want to live, no? This isn’t a 30 hour police interrogation without food, water, or sleep. Options are presented, and in some cases living with the debilitating sickness is worse than suicide. I think if they want to live, it is likely they want to live if the debilitating illness wasn’t there, but given that fact they choose death.
Euthanasia is a decision you will never regret. We force people to live if they don't want to because of other people's feelings. Per the article, 'many people are choosing euthanasia because they’re not getting the “supports and cares” they need.'. On one hand, someone ends their suffering and stops caring about any 'what if' scenarios. On the other hand, a lot of people feel bad and look bad because they were involved in creating and supporting or failing to support the system that failed to provide the support and care the deceased needed. And the surviving friends and relatives who do care about the lost potential.
> Why are people forced to live if they don't want to?
Because we live in a society, not some libertarian utopia of sovereign citizens. Your life doesn’t belong only to yourself, but it belongs to all of us. Your parents, your kids, your friends, your acquaintances. We are all affected by what you do to yourself and, concomitantly, get a say in it.
If a person belongs to the society, then sick, suffering people are not a value but a cost and killing them becomes net gain for society.
It's very dangerous to give away body autonomy freedom to the collective as it could be potentially weaponised to target not only sick, old and poor but political opponents as well.
your life belongs to you. the options to end it on your own terms is IMHO an act of ultimate freedom. the same way where you should be free to do whatever you want as long as your actions don't impair the freedom of someone else.
Bodily autonomy is not a libertarian -only ideal, and the way you've phrased it comes across as some sort of extreme collectivism. I'm curious if anyone has a name for this philosophy.
I have bad news for you. You will never gain the ability to pick and choose what your taxes fund, and the other people paying taxes have entirely different sets of important things that they wish to fund, and different sets of things that they are horrified that their taxes are supporting.
It's strikes me as worrisome that someone who's paid to perform euthenasia would also be in a position to counsel it to patients. That seems like a rather serious conflict of interest. Discussion of this sort of thing should only ever be initiated by the patient to an objective third party review board. I personally have serious concerns about the ethics of any doctor offering death as medical advice.
This is a weird article to me. It seems to criticize the program for not failing to adequately force people to live in a society that makes them want to die. It even quotes someone pointing out that a high usage rate by people driven to give up on life by out of control housing and cost of living prices without sufficient income, or those unable to afford other treatments could be a leverage for arguing for better designed welfare (UBI?) or markets - but it's framed as callous, ridiculous idea while we still make it "too easy to die"?
Like, I don't think people need a lot of help convincing themselves of not wanting to die unless they are already desperate, and making access to death harder is like forcing the homeless to take a one way bus to another town - you are just hiding the problem. As long as nobody is pushed to use the program, the same arguments that say "well, nobody is forcing you to take that shitty job/pay that exorbitant rent" apply.
It's just that in this case, the signal sent by multiple people choosing death over life because the system isn't working for then is very clearly "what the fuck are you doing to poor people", which is an uncomfortable question, so the impulse is to make access to death harder - then you can again ignore the fact that these people might commit suicide anyway, or suffer immensely, because that will show up just as mental illness or personal failure in the statistics
No, it is not more affordable. At least in France where assisted suicide is not an option (yes, we are a barbaric and coward country in some aspects).
As for the gift of happy, healthy and fulfilling life - you may want to have a word with my wife suffering from MS. It is fortunate that we have neighboring countries that are not as hypocrite as France is and where you can end your life when you want to.
Readit News
70% of the Canadians reported cancer as the reason for MAID. It sounds like thousands of Californians are experiencing unnecessary and extended end of life suffering.
Canada has over double the number of deaths due to lung cancer and nearly double the deaths due to colorectal cancer compared to California.
Essentially cancer looks different in California than Canada. This makes drawing conclusions that there are thousands suffering unnecessarily extended end of life experiences difficult.
https://cancerstatisticscenter.cancer.org/#!/state/Californi...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9067380/#!po=28...
Why is that your take? Why isn't it "Thousands of Canadians are being killed too soon in an effort to save the government money"? or some other take? We already have stories of Canada asking Veterans to join "MAID" instead of getting a wheelchair...
Because nobody's made that case.
Making a case requires evidence. Not handwaving and appeals to movie plots.
> We already have stories of Canada asking Veterans to join "MAID" instead of getting a wheelchair...
As long as we're trading conspiracy theories, the person who reported that was paid off by the right wing to make MAID seem horrible, and therefore something that should be ended, and my conspiracy theory has a lot more going for it than yours does.
Deleted Comment
>The majority of persons receiving MAID during 2020 were reported as having cancer as their main underlying medical condition (69.1%). This is followed by cardiovascular conditions (13.8%), chronic respiratory conditions (11.3%) and neurological conditions (10.2%)
Some additional breakdowns:
>Cardiovascular conditions were the second most frequently cited main condition for persons receiving MAID. Congestive heart failure was the most frequently cited heart condition in this category (42.2%). Under respiratory conditions, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) was the most frequently listed condition.
>Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, was the leading neurological condition reported for persons receiving MAID (35.2%), followed by Parkinson's disease (18.1%) multiple sclerosis (MS) (9.7%), and progressive supranuclear palsy (4.4%).
Edit: Just realized that was the 2020 report (with around 7500 using MAID). The 2021 report is here: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assi.... Cancer is down a bit in this one (69% to 65%).
Or perhaps palliative care is better in California.
I’m not Californian, and I seriously doubt what I just wrote. But there most certainly are more factors that need to be considered here.
Did I miss the actual concrete evidence this is being purposefully being used to reduce certain populations?
> Mary knows that she could control her pain if she could take vitamin pills, eat a special diet, and go to physiotherapy. She can’t afford it. “Mary identifies poverty as the driver of her MAID request,” Gibb-Carsley writes on a slide accompanying her talk, emphasizing the. “She does not want to die, but she’s suffering terribly and she’s been maxing out her credit cards. She has no other options.”
It seems excessively cruel to me to try and force people to live in misery big enough to make the want to kill themselves instead of alleviating the misery. Like, the article seems to frame the argument that MAID can be used to lobby for better welfare as a ridiculous idea, but that's really it: if the only thing keeping people in your society from killing themselves that it's hard and scary, what the fuck is your society doing to these people.
1. Are people in poverty or with mental illness more likely to choose MAID on their own.
or
2. Are there people actively trying to encourage vulnerable populations to choose MAID?
Dead Comment
The enter point of the MAiD system is to result in deaths. I think the intent matters a lot. I don't think it's a cause for alarm if we find some subpopulations that use a medical service more than others. I do think it's alarming if people are scheming to kill poor people.
Dead Comment
People with disabilities and/or grievous suffering from illness(es) tend to be depressed, especially when finances and supports are lacking.
If we restrict MAID to the wealthy without mental conditions, we end up prolonging the suffering of many people.
Of course, I'm also in favor of just not organizing benefits so that disabled people wind-up facing homelessness and so being willing to choose death.
Dead Comment
Why are people forced to live if they don't want to?
On the other hand, there are articles like this[1], wherein the main factor for the requested euthanasia is income.
"But until recently, he was able to live comfortably, sharing his modest home in Medicine Hat, Alberta, with his service dog.
Changes to his state benefits when he turned 65 in May meant his income was cut and he's now left with around $120 per month after paying for medical bills and essentials."
The bogeyman against a state monopoly on medical care has long been that the state will seek cost effectiveness over quality of care, and this adds the additional paranoia of worrying over whether other social safety net programs may lean into the notion that perhaps it isn't as beneficial to fund those who are less productive members of society due to age or inability when it is easier to put them down.
I don't have a particular dog in the fight either way, but where I want medical assisted euthanasia to exist as an option against suffering, I have some concern that it could become encouraged for what I consider less appropriate ailments, like poverty.
[1] - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11516989/Canadian-m...
And I've seen zero sign that this is even on the radar of government, though perhaps that's what MAID is for. At least it's an option to homelessness.
If you squint at MAID one way, you can see all the good it does for people who really need it. If you squint another way, you can see the medical system just killing off the people it failed.
We ensure that there are thousands more of them, promote them, and ensure that they are rewarded for denying health care to as many people as possible (after collecting money from the victims).
We'd need to do a bit of branding on the whole thing, of course. We would first want to ensure that they are not medical professionals making these decisions. "Adjusters" has a nice ring to it.
We could build an entire industry out of this. And I think if we did all of that, many people's problems with euthanasia would be ameliorated.
Same here. This fucking abomination of a doctor should be screaming bloody hell and knocking on government doors to have them address the problem.
Here we are: rich developed democratic country basically telling our poor to go fuck themselves and die.
Because we live in a society, not some libertarian utopia of sovereign citizens. Your life doesn’t belong only to yourself, but it belongs to all of us. Your parents, your kids, your friends, your acquaintances. We are all affected by what you do to yourself and, concomitantly, get a say in it.
your life belongs to you. the options to end it on your own terms is IMHO an act of ultimate freedom. the same way where you should be free to do whatever you want as long as your actions don't impair the freedom of someone else.
Dead Comment
As with abortion, why must I cheerfully pay taxes for policy affecting individuals that's morally objectionable?
Like, I don't think people need a lot of help convincing themselves of not wanting to die unless they are already desperate, and making access to death harder is like forcing the homeless to take a one way bus to another town - you are just hiding the problem. As long as nobody is pushed to use the program, the same arguments that say "well, nobody is forcing you to take that shitty job/pay that exorbitant rent" apply.
It's just that in this case, the signal sent by multiple people choosing death over life because the system isn't working for then is very clearly "what the fuck are you doing to poor people", which is an uncomfortable question, so the impulse is to make access to death harder - then you can again ignore the fact that these people might commit suicide anyway, or suffer immensely, because that will show up just as mental illness or personal failure in the statistics
As for the gift of happy, healthy and fulfilling life - you may want to have a word with my wife suffering from MS. It is fortunate that we have neighboring countries that are not as hypocrite as France is and where you can end your life when you want to.