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...
Exposure to Radon is the #1 cause of lung cancer on non-smoker. Canada ranks third on indoor radon concentration worldwide.
Colorectal is significantly effected by diet, physical activity and obesity.
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.
> Making a case requires evidence
Where's the evidence that (1) Californians specifically, (2) are experiencing extended suffering, and (3) what evidence exists that suffering specifically is unnecessary?
I'm just pointing out dropping a comment like the first answer and defending it with the second is doing exactly what is being claimed -making a case without providing real evidence.
Tons of people are making the case.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-canada-euthanisin...
"Since then, things have only gotten worse. A woman in Ontario was forced into euthanasia because her housing benefits did not allow her to get better housing which didn’t aggravate her crippling allergies. Another disabled woman applied to die because she ‘simply cannot afford to keep on living’. Another sought euthanasia because Covid-related debt left her unable to pay for the treatment which kept her chronic pain bearable – under the present government, disabled Canadians got $600 in additional financial assistance during Covid; university students got $5,000."
So again: Why isn't the take that Thousands are dying to soon to save money?
"As long as we're trading conspiracy theories,"
Other than my "conspiracy" theory being main stream media reported and a simple statement backed by fact. Not your cockamamey bullshit:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-vete...
"According to the report, the veteran called VAC seeking support for PTSD when the employee brought up medical assistance in dying, or euthanasia, unprompted."
Oh wait... that's the wrong one. That's not the Wheelchair one... hard to find the right one in the mountain of evidence.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/03/canada-offered-to-help-euthani...
"A paraplegic former Canadian military member is ripping her government, which offered to euthanize her after she complained about delays having a wheelchair lift installed in her home."
If main stream, reliable news sources are 'conspiracy theories' then I'm not sure what you consider real news.
"my conspiracy theory has a lot more going for it than yours does."
Other than the fact that my "theory" has backing evidence... and yours is shit pulled out of your ass. You really need to learn what a conspiracy theory is and when real life evidence makes it not a theory.
>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.
Eliminate MAID and these people will still suffer… because MAID isn’t the problem. They need better care and support in the first place.
This is a perverse sort of argument. I'm in favor of social services (UBI or otherwise) sufficient to prevent homelessness. There are a lot problematic things situations in this society. But these aren't going away tomorrow - in our world homeless will be with us for a while and you shouldn't add to the problem of homelessness the problem of social services making it easy to just end your life if you're threatened with homelessness.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps you're being hyperbolic, but respectfully, if you really haven't seen any sign it doesn't feel like you've been looking that hard. There have been numerous steps for addressing both housing and food prices, and neither of those can be solved overnight.
One only needs to look at how high profits are in those sectors in the USA compared to other OECD countries, and then look at the quality of those services compared to other OECD countries.
Spolier: Americans pay the most, and get the worst.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/us-health...
The state will stop caring once you dont have prospects for paying more taxes, but before then, the state has your health as a higher priority than even you do. Eg. The government doesn't like it when teens do risky behaviour, and tries to stop it, because it will have bad health, and thus tax results.
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.
Many Canadians, especially older ones who grew up when Canada was still a very high-trust society, have what could be described as a reverence for authority figures. This involves a significant degree of obedience, bordering on subservience.
Medical professionals are often among the most revered authority figures to these Canadians, even to the point of being seen as infallible. There are Canadians who won't question any advice made, nor any suggestions given, by these medical professionals.
If a medical professional were to recommend euthanasia to these kind of Canadians, even if it wasn't something that they really wanted to do, I think a significant proportion would feel obliged to go along with it, as irrational as this may seem.
This attitude became quite apparent over the last three years, when many Canadians completely bought into the many obviously nonsensical, and sometimes even outright harmful, policies being pushed by medical professionals and public health officials.
At the same time, however, those three years have been a significant eye-opener for some Canadians, too. For these people, the trust they once had in the various medical professions was completely shattered.
With a larger proportion of the Canadian population no longer trusting Canada's medical professionals and health care systems, it doesn't surprise me at all that we're starting to see more questioning of policies such as this one.
It should but it's possible to push real hard. There are literally TV interviews where MAID participants are like "I would like to live but they convinced me it's for the better"
I'm actually personally fine with counseling people to die, even moderately aggressively. In many cases it's the right thing to do and we should probably be doing it more. The problem is that when there is a conflict of interest because the org that is telling you to die is the org that benefits from it.
Given this conflict at best the Canadian government should be providing death services for free and mentioning it is an option. And that's it. They should be letting other nonprofit orgs with no funding from the govt counsel people to die.
The risk is that vulnerable populations such as the elderly and the sick will be (or are being) subjected to pressure. The case where a medical "ethicist" was trying to shame someone into accepting death because of the cost they were inflicting on the medical system was chilling, and convinced me that this was a real issue. Surely we can agree that we don't want that?
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.
The reason why abortion and suicide are considered fair game for regulation by some people is that it has potentially drastic impacts on the future of everyone around you and theoretically society as a whole.
There is a nanny state to some degree in all societies, and if we are obligated to put cancer warnings on cigarettes I think preventing incentives loops that lead to medically encouraged suicide is also fair game.
As with abortion, why must I cheerfully pay taxes for policy affecting individuals that's morally objectionable?
This is interesting to think about, though. Ideally people shouldn't be forced to pay for things they are opposed to, right? Or do we just take it for granted that is morally acceptable to be forced to do something if 51% of our representatives at some level of government say so?
What if wars were funded voluntarily? Perhaps we wouldn't have so many offensive wars. Wouldn't it be proper for drivers to pay all their associated costs, like a use tax? And property taxes if you want police and fire protection? Maybe opt-in for things like social security? Etc.
I understand this would be a significant change, and come with its own problems, and might not work for everything, given the way we currently govern ourselves. But doesn't the sentiment behind the idea has some merit, selling people on the idea of funding public works instead of forcing them? Maybe not everyone pays for everything, but does that need to be a deal breaker? If an idea doesn't have enough support to be voluntarily funded, perhaps it's not a good idea?
I guess that I like questioning assumptions...
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.
This is such a conflict of interest. How are you supposed to trust organizations and people who, when you ask for help, might be motivated to take advantage of your vulnerability?
I think many people view it as being selfish. Killing the pet to avoid the hassle of dealing with it's illness and avoid the expense of it's medical care.
I don't particularly agree, I think it can be compassionate but also understand where this view comes from.
The expense of medical care for pets is often the wrong way of looking at it. A dog doesn’t understand chemotherapy, it only knows it feels really sick. It doesn’t understand invasive surgery, it just knows pain, and wearing the cone of shame. Dogs don’t have the same inner life that we do, so a lot of medical interventions would cause a lot of suffering for what, a few months more life?
And if you don’t want the hassle of dealing with a pet’s illness, don’t get a pet. The relationship you build with a pet should make you understand you owe them your loyalty in the bad times, not just the good.
Killing a pet that is practically family and has been part of your life for 10+ years is not something people do to avoid responsibility.
It's already apparently 2.5% of deaths in Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assi...
We have credible reports of a person aged 23 who was approved for medically assisted death because they were diabetic and depressed. https://www.thefp.com/p/scheduled-to-die-the-rise-of-canadas
The top 1% of patients use approximately 30% of the total cost of health care. https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
The Canadian health care system is extremely strained. We are already in an age of hallway medicine as there aren't enough staff to treat the people in rooms. https://www.cma.ca/news/canadas-health-care-crisis-what-we-n...
This would also suggest that once we get even better at cancer treatments, the rate of people dying to MAID will drop dramatically.
Later in the stats, ~80% of people have lost the ability to engage in activities of daily life (which IMO is a terrible place to be).
I don't think your reference supports your claim at all. In fact, it suggests that it's doing exactly what it is meant to do: ending unnecessary suffering for those who are dying of diseases we don't yet have a cure to.
You're of course welcome to be on either side of this issue, but please edit swipes like that out of your comments here. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(Your comment would be fine without that bit.)
Sorry about that. I meant it neutrally but that didn't come across. I won't post again anything that suggests snark.
Thanks, Will
This is mind blowingly archaic as an attitude and very dangerous. Maybe you don’t know many people or are lucky to only be surrounded by mentally healthy individuals but many in the spectrum of depression and other ailments which are pretty common feel suicidal. They fight the urge not to consider this fate. If a doctor comes and tells them maybe you should consider killing your self, it’s alright, I’ll help you, guess what, they’re going to feel utterly helpless.
Agreed that MAD for cancer patients and patients with unimaginable incurable chronic pain is not bad, but there needs to be immense scrutiny into every case where this dangerous tool is used for people who have mental disorders.
MAID didn't create or change the conditions these people are in and it's not like the Conservatives pushing this narrative are known for anything but outrage and cuts to social safety nets..
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-maid-rcmp-investig...
[0] https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/dying-for-the-right-to-live/
[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/woman-with-disabilities-nears-...
[2] https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/woman-with-chemical-sensitivit...
[3] https://www.thestar.com/2022/assisted-death.html
[4] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-maid-rcmp-investig...
[5] https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/canadian-soldier-with-ptsd-out...
[6] https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/paralympian-trying-to-get-wh...
