I believe ultimately we will head towards a situation where anyone can request it at any time for any reason. Gating with health conditions is just to ease the transition.
That said, the great problem in countries with tax funded social and health services is the government have a distinct interest in persuading certain people to jump, and this is a serious moral hazard as some of the Canadian experience has demonstrated.
Today though the UK has the opposite problem, which is an enormous private residential “care” system keeping huge numbers of unwilling near vegetables wired up until they eventually die, transferring as much of the family money to the “carers” as possible. They have an awful lot to lose from this too, so I expect the fight to be a lot nastier from here on.
> I believe ultimately we will head towards a situation where anyone can request it at any time for any reason.
Not a chance. This will always be gated by medical evaluation for suitability.
Suicidal ideation occurs transiently in many conditions or life circumstances. Giving these people tools to follow through with their impulses "at any time for any reason" would be disastrous.
> Today though the UK has the opposite problem, which is an enormous private residential “care” system keeping huge numbers of unwilling near vegetables wired up until they eventually die, transferring as much of the family money to the “carers” as possible.
Same as the US.
Nobody below the Fussellian upper-middle class in the US has savings—just accounts that temporarily hold money for the hospitals and elder care & hospice facilities.
>"That said, the great problem in countries with tax funded social and health services is the government have a distinct interest in persuading certain people to jump"
Well, government may have a "distinct interest..." for reasons that are far away from being health related. I think that any hint of encouragement must be severely punished.
Bit of a nitpick but we don't have "an enormous private residential “care” system keeping huge numbers of unwilling near vegetables wired up until they eventually die"
We have enormous private residential “care” system where they sit around in chairs. The "near vegetables wired up" are in NHS hospitals.
I don't think most of the care home folk are going to go for assisted dying. Also it's not as profitable as you might think - real estate is expensive and it's not that easy to get staff to wipe up 24/7.
By Americans? Why do some Canadians try to sweep under the rug actual debates by dismissing them as being "american arguments"? Surely as a Canadian you have seen that there has been a constant debate about the limits and excesses of MAID? Even the CBC has a few yearly articles about someone getting euthanized because they wanted to die because they were too poor and similar.
I mean, we live in a country where the ruling party has 30% of the vote, and 35% when they had a majority in parliament. So why pretend that disagreements with Canadian policy is somehow just coming from Americans not understanding our wonderful country? It's super weird and it's oddly common on places like here and Reddit.
It is not yet law, and will almost certainly be amended. There were real doubts on it clearing this stage in the process, but now the various stakeholders, such as those benefitting from the status quo, will be pushing on the relevant committees much harder.
I was on the fence until a family member was diagnosed with inoperable glioblastoma. I would encourage anyone in opposition, or in doubt, to read about late stages of GBM, and imagine their mother or child going through that end, which is 100% certainly for everyone who got unlucky. There is no cure, and no known cause.
This is not murder, it’s mercy - just imagine being in a soul crushing place of having to end the suffering and life of your parent or child, then being told it’s not possible.
My mother died that way, after a fairly long and cautious consultation process, but through medical assistance. She had a cluster of health problems, and also suffered from mental problems caused by recurring memories caused by dementia. The other prognosis would have been: suffering in a hospice until her body would give up. Now she could die in peace, surrounded by her family. We didn't really know the extent of her suffering, but after the first injection, a strong sedative, she spoke her final words: "I have no pain. I have no pain."
I had a position, then went through a life experience that changed my position.
The alternative is to never change your view, or to early on build a strong view on everything you have zero experience with, such as hospice care or the nuance of every immigration rule.
Yeah I’m glad they care now to support this but what might help folks more is explaining what reflecting on this has helped with other opinions you may or may not have these days!
I am a nurse and work on a unit with quite a lot of the End of life patients. Including patients with MND and COPD which need careful management for breathlessness.
I don't support this legislation. My opposition is based on the fact that enabling someone to have a peaceful death involves a interplay of numerous environmental social and biological factors. The new legislation will need to fit into this complex environment without disrupting the practices which have built up to manage EOL care.
For example suffering for a patient will be significantly eased if the doctor explains clearly what is expected to happen and what the patient is likely to experience.
A patient with COPD, might be afraid to experience breathlessness. But the medical team explain how it will work, the nurses introduce it gradually and the patient does not suffer. Its the interplay of the technology, the professionals, the biological process and, obviously the patient and the beliefs and uncertainty.
Likewise a completely dependent MND patient will requite 16 full time nurses to provide for his needs. They might feel like a burden. Again its an interplay between the patients needs, symptoms and the professionals and technology we use to meet these needs.
If we overlay on this situations the knowledge that the patient could simply take their own life, its not clear to me that this would alleviate suffering.
My grandmother, who I visited today, is a 93yo COPD patient.
She can't breathe. She can't use the bathroom without help. She can't hardly move. She's hooked up to a nasal cannula 100% of the time. Albuterol breathing exercises 4x a day means she can't sleep more than six hours at a time because if she skips one, even on O2, she experiences suffocation.
She coughs so badly that she has constant rib/spine fractures so she's on and off narcotic painkillers that only make life bearable in doses enough to turn her brain into mush.
She wants to die. She's done. She won life. She's the last lady standing. Every single friend from her youth is gone. It's over.
I've already told her that when I get into my 60s I am going to stockpile a cache of painkillers and when the time comes go out on my own terms. There is an exact and precise 0.0% chance that my family is going to cry out in the hallway for days/weeks while I shit/piss myself in bed and slowly drown to death as my organs fail.
But it's too late for my grandmother because she waited until she was under the watchful eye of the skilled nursing facility nightmare.
In my idealized world, there is no violence, no accidents, and all diseases have been cured except for the inevitable and unstoppable phenomenon of heart failure and 100% of ALL deaths are medically-assisted suicide, decided on by the individual once they reach the point where your heart can no longer support independent living but before you get to the Morphine downward spiral.
I am a volunteer FF/EMT so I've seen my fair share of end of life patients in the last 25 years and apparently I am the only responsible adult in my family so I've handled the hospice phase for every member of my family for the last 20 years.
It is incomprehensible to me that anyone who has any exposure to death whatsoever does not fully support a person's right to determine the time and manner of their death-- even if it comes with problems.
The only reasons I can come up with for not supporting it are: a financial stake in prolonged expensive end-of-life care, the belief that the patients are too stupid to determine their fate, and/or trying to impose their personal religious beliefs on the masses.
Some reasons you didn't list: fear of abuse; fear of sweeping other problems under the rug (e.g. loneliness, poverty, lack of elderly care homes); fear of slipperly slope (e.g. extending the program to non-terminal diseases, mental problems etc..); fear of social pressure.
It's not that long ago that people were dying in hospitals while their relatives were forbidden from seeing them, and by the way hospitals were under immense pressure to free up beds.
If I am in horrendous and incurable pain, I hope I have the option to calmly and painlessly end my own life without having to worry about my loved ones going to prison for it.
I watched the debate as it was happening on Sky News and it seemed to be one the most respectful debates in a long time when it comes to a divisive issue (cough cough Brexit).
It requires extreme naivete to believe that this will not rapidly shift from doctor assisted suicide to mandatory removal of medical benefits except "end of life care". The medical-insurance complex in the US cannot wait for this to happen.
It's just another insanity-driving information warfare topic.
Yes, let's imagine all the horrible things that could happen because the government suddenly allowed something that happened anyway - people committed suicide in end of life situations all the time - and let's base it off this one country where the law wasn't written well enough or enforcement is lax or whatever.
Let's use that as an example of why this should be banned always, forever, in all situations, because the X abuse of this in country Y shows it should never be done.
I have family who's dying with dementia. If I ever get into that situation, which I hope I don't, I hope people end it with my permission.
I believe a patient currently & their family members are required to state what kind of care a person should have if things go wrong before a surgery.
Why could the law not just continue this by adding an additional option that states when you would want assisted suicide? I would think lawmakers could specify that insurance or doctors are not allowed to make this decision or let it effect their services.
in single-payer government funded healthcare systems (Canada UK), medically assisted suicide is ENORMOUS cost savings.
imagine paying taxes all your life and hoping to get a good care in later stage of your life, and government just MAIDs you instead of providing care
The current UK/CA social contract seems to be:
you work for 45+ years and pay taxes, but when you get old and sick and need medical care, we will just MAID you and instead give away all your taxes to welfare recipients
In the US there will be share-holder lawsuits against insurance companies that do not enforce this strictly enough. It's just a return to a time when only the wealthy could receive medical care - this time it's just being marketed better.
Out of curiosity why do people need permission or help from their government for this? Is it related to life insurance? Or is it that in some cases people can not get to the hardware store for a mask, hose, some duct tape and a tank of nitrogen? Or is it a business thing meaning someone is trying to corner the market on those crazy expensive suicide pods?
I don't want to die. However, I can imagine many scenarios that are worse than death. In many of them I am too incapacitated to arrange my own painless suicide. Allowing third parties to help in these circumstances, with appropriate controls to ensure this freedom isn't abused, seems to me the least bad option.
> Or is it that in some cases people can not get to the hardware store for a painters face mask, the corresponding hose with the 40mm NATO connector, some duct tape and a tank of nitrogen?
Certainly part of it. Some people by the time they have no other hope are physically incapable of doing that.
Some people would rather not DIY such a consequential thing the same way they rather not brew their own antibiotics or do their own dentistry. Obviously in this case the “worst” which might happen is that they don’t die but suffer even more pain and indignities.
It is also the legal risk for those who remain. Every time someoen DIYs their end as you write it there is a police investigation. (As there should be, to make sure that there were no trickery around the death.) Depending on how things go your loved ones might get arrested and thrown into prison (if the system believes they killed you, or even if something they did or accused of doing is deemed to have “assisted” you). Similarly they might not be able to inherit after you if they were deemed to have assisted in your suicide. And that can be some
small thing, like your partner driving you to the hardware store, or paying for the purchase, or helping you tighten a NATO connector. Now they lost you, they might have lost their home and they might be looking down the barrel of a risky legal case with years of prison as a possibility. That is not something anybody would wish on their loved ones.
All of that makes sense. I guess if I were in that situation I would make a video explaining what I was going to do, then another one showing me setting it all up, send that to my attorney and local law enforcement chief since they are slow to read emails and then park myself outside the mortuary with a letter and copy of the video pinned to my clothes and a final video of me doing the deed to remove any ambiguity. Oh, and a receipt for all the gear.
That makes sense. If that is the case it creates yet another question for me. If someone sends for a driver to go shop and pick up the aforementioned items are they culpable?
Readit News
That said, the great problem in countries with tax funded social and health services is the government have a distinct interest in persuading certain people to jump, and this is a serious moral hazard as some of the Canadian experience has demonstrated.
Today though the UK has the opposite problem, which is an enormous private residential “care” system keeping huge numbers of unwilling near vegetables wired up until they eventually die, transferring as much of the family money to the “carers” as possible. They have an awful lot to lose from this too, so I expect the fight to be a lot nastier from here on.
Not a chance. This will always be gated by medical evaluation for suitability.
Suicidal ideation occurs transiently in many conditions or life circumstances. Giving these people tools to follow through with their impulses "at any time for any reason" would be disastrous.
Whilst I am genuinely supportive of the legislation, I have a disability myself and am cautious about what it might lead to.
Dead Comment
Same as the US.
Nobody below the Fussellian upper-middle class in the US has savings—just accounts that temporarily hold money for the hospitals and elder care & hospice facilities.
Well, government may have a "distinct interest..." for reasons that are far away from being health related. I think that any hint of encouragement must be severely punished.
We have enormous private residential “care” system where they sit around in chairs. The "near vegetables wired up" are in NHS hospitals.
I don't think most of the care home folk are going to go for assisted dying. Also it's not as profitable as you might think - real estate is expensive and it's not that easy to get staff to wipe up 24/7.
I live in Canada, and I keep hearing this kind of stuff brought up by Americans.
What, exactly, is "the Canadian experience"?
It would be best if your sources are not American media outlets intended for American audiences they are looking to manipulate.
Some of the famous incidents: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-maid-rcmp-investig...https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/paralympian-trying-to-get-wh...
The Canadian “care” industry is also a dumpster fire: https://globalnews.ca/news/4870784/gilles-duceppes-mother-fo...
I mean, we live in a country where the ruling party has 30% of the vote, and 35% when they had a majority in parliament. So why pretend that disagreements with Canadian policy is somehow just coming from Americans not understanding our wonderful country? It's super weird and it's oddly common on places like here and Reddit.
This is not murder, it’s mercy - just imagine being in a soul crushing place of having to end the suffering and life of your parent or child, then being told it’s not possible.
It's really good that it's possible.
The alternative is to never change your view, or to early on build a strong view on everything you have zero experience with, such as hospice care or the nuance of every immigration rule.
I don't support this legislation. My opposition is based on the fact that enabling someone to have a peaceful death involves a interplay of numerous environmental social and biological factors. The new legislation will need to fit into this complex environment without disrupting the practices which have built up to manage EOL care.
For example suffering for a patient will be significantly eased if the doctor explains clearly what is expected to happen and what the patient is likely to experience.
A patient with COPD, might be afraid to experience breathlessness. But the medical team explain how it will work, the nurses introduce it gradually and the patient does not suffer. Its the interplay of the technology, the professionals, the biological process and, obviously the patient and the beliefs and uncertainty.
Likewise a completely dependent MND patient will requite 16 full time nurses to provide for his needs. They might feel like a burden. Again its an interplay between the patients needs, symptoms and the professionals and technology we use to meet these needs.
If we overlay on this situations the knowledge that the patient could simply take their own life, its not clear to me that this would alleviate suffering.
She can't breathe. She can't use the bathroom without help. She can't hardly move. She's hooked up to a nasal cannula 100% of the time. Albuterol breathing exercises 4x a day means she can't sleep more than six hours at a time because if she skips one, even on O2, she experiences suffocation.
She coughs so badly that she has constant rib/spine fractures so she's on and off narcotic painkillers that only make life bearable in doses enough to turn her brain into mush.
She wants to die. She's done. She won life. She's the last lady standing. Every single friend from her youth is gone. It's over.
I've already told her that when I get into my 60s I am going to stockpile a cache of painkillers and when the time comes go out on my own terms. There is an exact and precise 0.0% chance that my family is going to cry out in the hallway for days/weeks while I shit/piss myself in bed and slowly drown to death as my organs fail.
But it's too late for my grandmother because she waited until she was under the watchful eye of the skilled nursing facility nightmare.
In my idealized world, there is no violence, no accidents, and all diseases have been cured except for the inevitable and unstoppable phenomenon of heart failure and 100% of ALL deaths are medically-assisted suicide, decided on by the individual once they reach the point where your heart can no longer support independent living but before you get to the Morphine downward spiral.
I am a volunteer FF/EMT so I've seen my fair share of end of life patients in the last 25 years and apparently I am the only responsible adult in my family so I've handled the hospice phase for every member of my family for the last 20 years.
It is incomprehensible to me that anyone who has any exposure to death whatsoever does not fully support a person's right to determine the time and manner of their death-- even if it comes with problems.
The only reasons I can come up with for not supporting it are: a financial stake in prolonged expensive end-of-life care, the belief that the patients are too stupid to determine their fate, and/or trying to impose their personal religious beliefs on the masses.
It's not that long ago that people were dying in hospitals while their relatives were forbidden from seeing them, and by the way hospitals were under immense pressure to free up beds.
I'm thankful to know that when its my time to go, I'll have the choice to skip enduring several days of torture should I wish.
It look like Parliament, via private members bill working at its best.
Lots of debate, lots of people listening to the debate and then voting.
Yes, let's imagine all the horrible things that could happen because the government suddenly allowed something that happened anyway - people committed suicide in end of life situations all the time - and let's base it off this one country where the law wasn't written well enough or enforcement is lax or whatever.
Let's use that as an example of why this should be banned always, forever, in all situations, because the X abuse of this in country Y shows it should never be done.
I have family who's dying with dementia. If I ever get into that situation, which I hope I don't, I hope people end it with my permission.
Why could the law not just continue this by adding an additional option that states when you would want assisted suicide? I would think lawmakers could specify that insurance or doctors are not allowed to make this decision or let it effect their services.
imagine paying taxes all your life and hoping to get a good care in later stage of your life, and government just MAIDs you instead of providing care
The current UK/CA social contract seems to be: you work for 45+ years and pay taxes, but when you get old and sick and need medical care, we will just MAID you and instead give away all your taxes to welfare recipients
Certainly part of it. Some people by the time they have no other hope are physically incapable of doing that.
Some people would rather not DIY such a consequential thing the same way they rather not brew their own antibiotics or do their own dentistry. Obviously in this case the “worst” which might happen is that they don’t die but suffer even more pain and indignities.
It is also the legal risk for those who remain. Every time someoen DIYs their end as you write it there is a police investigation. (As there should be, to make sure that there were no trickery around the death.) Depending on how things go your loved ones might get arrested and thrown into prison (if the system believes they killed you, or even if something they did or accused of doing is deemed to have “assisted” you). Similarly they might not be able to inherit after you if they were deemed to have assisted in your suicide. And that can be some small thing, like your partner driving you to the hardware store, or paying for the purchase, or helping you tighten a NATO connector. Now they lost you, they might have lost their home and they might be looking down the barrel of a risky legal case with years of prison as a possibility. That is not something anybody would wish on their loved ones.
If the law didn’t cover this, then people who provided assistance would be open to criminal prosecution.