41–50 of 870 posts
If we can prevent five, ten or perhaps twenty percent of people having gruesome deaths, then not doing so feels like a moral failing.
"Nearly all of those who requested assisted dying - around 96% - had a foreseeable natural death. The remaining 4% were granted euthanasia due to having a long-term chronic illness and where a natural death was not imminent". This is basically clickbait; the law is changing how people die of terminal conditions, but only a tiny fraction of those are deaths that really trace to the new law.
The corollary to the article is that almost all deaths in Canada result from severe or chronic medical conditions .. and now 5% of those cases are resolved via voluntary euthanasia.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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My experience with advanced cancer is that it is not. I routinely see people from the UK and Canada raising funds for legitimate treatments my insurance will cover because their governments won’t. To be fair, those treatments are paid for by the government in Nordic countries and France, so it isn’t universal that governments fail their sickest when treatments get expensive.
In single payer systems, that’s determined by a body whose responsibility is to provide the most effective healthcare to all its citizens given a limited budget.
In the US, the monetary value of extending your life is proportional to the amount of money you spend on your health insurance (and appropriate actuarial tables).
Both systems have flaws.
Taking into account that people have the greatest medical costs near the end of their life, should the system save others by limiting either the total available spend or the cost of any particular treatment according to some metric?
Should the system repeatedly and frequently remind people that are older and alone in the world without support from friends or family that euthanasia is an option?
How often reminding them would be considered coercive?
Is it coecerive if the system decides if you are over 70 years old that euthanasia is the only option you get offered when your condition is one of a long list of non trivial chronic conditions?
What if we find that in practice (as we almost certainly will if we dare to look honestly) people of certain genders, ages, ethnic groups, economic demographics, are more frequently told that killing themselves is an option they should seriously consider, compared to how often it is recommended to the general population?
Should the suicide prevention hotlines be shutdown and instead become suicide suggestion hotlines?
What about cases like chronic depression?
I'm just asking questions from a hacker perspective when people are busy considering offering euthanasia to everybody (sometimes advocating at every age) is some kind of virtuous undertaking.
People don't consider that throughout society in all walks of life and occupations some portion of people are sociopathic and pyschopathic (possibly with uneven distribution), and some plan administrators, whether that be socialized medicine, or large corporate insurance providers, will interpret their incentives to either their own benefit and/or the benefit of their organization, completely at odds with what you might consider the interests of the individual.
My grandma always told me when she couldn’t go on her walks anymore she didn’t consider life worth living. When she got dementia she was placed in a closed hospice, to “protect her”. Now she only walks when I visit, and I only see a shell of the woman she was. Anecdotal of course, but why do people think it’s an ethics question when society is individualistic as can be? There is no choice in being born, why don’t we…
To my mind the main obstacle is kind of orthogonal: how do you protect the people who don't want to go, being pressured or manipulated. I agree that if someone is really, independently and committedly deciding to go, you shouldn't stop them. But how do you express that test in a bureaucratic, legalistic framework? In a friend's family, there was a big rift as one family member in direct line of inheritance was accuse…
I have worked in hospice and they do MAID there all the time. It was a weird feeling to see a family and their loved one head into the downstairs where they would all sit around and tell them person how much they are loved and then that person would end their life. But I know it is the right thing.
My grandma always told me when she couldn’t go on her walks anymore she didn’t consider life worth living. When she got dementia she was placed in a closed hospice, to “protect her”. Now she only walks when I visit, and I only see a shell of the woman she was. Anecdotal of course, but why do people think it’s an ethics question when society is individualistic as can be? There is no choice in being born, why don’t we…
To my mind the main obstacle is kind of orthogonal: how do you protect the people who don't want to go, being pressured or manipulated. I agree that if someone is really, independently and committedly deciding to go, you shouldn't stop them. But how do you express that test in a bureaucratic, legalistic framework? In a friend's family, there was a big rift as one family member in direct line of inheritance was accuse…
I would look into countries where euthanasia has been already implemented. It doesn't seem like it's a widespread problem, so apparently they made it work somehow.
Does it mean it's absolutely bulletproof and no-one will ever be pressured to undergo euthanasia? No, but you can't ever achieve such certainty, and it's better to look at it from the utilitarianism view - allowing euthanasia will prevent much more suffering than it will cause.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience with advanced cancer is that it is not. I routinely see people from the UK and Canada raising funds for legitimate treatments my insurance will cover because their governments won’t. To be fair, those treatments are paid for by the government in Nordic countries and France, so it isn’t universal that governments fail their sickest when treatments get expensive.
There is ultimately a monetary value of extended life. In single payer systems, that’s determined by a body whose responsibility is to provide the most effective healthcare to all its citizens given a limited budget. In the US, the monetary value of extending your life is proportional to the amount of money you spend on your health insurance (and appropriate actuarial tables). Both systems have flaws.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's fairly common for governments to provide a basic level of care for free or heavily subsidized, but not cover more expensive treatments. It's certainly not exclusive to the US.
At least in Europe and the Nordic systems I have experience with, that typically applies to the very expensive novel treatments. There are gene therapies which can cost $2-3 million per patient and those aren't covered by any public healthcare system, AFAIK. But it's not like there is some kind of upper limit on coverage. If you have cancer, you will get treatment regardless of how much your care has already cost.
Every single one of those criteria is subjective, which is why you see these fundraising campaigns for kids with cancer to go and a get a multimillion dollar treatment in the US, because as a parent, accepting that there’s more you COULD do if you just don’t give up is hard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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My experience with advanced cancer is that it is not. I routinely see people from the UK and Canada raising funds for legitimate treatments my insurance will cover because their governments won’t. To be fair, those treatments are paid for by the government in Nordic countries and France, so it isn’t universal that governments fail their sickest when treatments get expensive.