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Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

bbc.com

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Re: Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

#211

Post by tail_exchange »

spiralganglion wrote: post #12
jbm wrote: post #7

I find it overall very unnerving how quiet this is and how the Canadian press never really finds issues with this. I often saw Japanese media moving lock-step with the police (in terms of vocabulary to use for certain crimes, how to report certain issues), and thought it was creepy as hell. However, the complete lack of questioning of the purpose behind a sudden legalization of euthanasia (in a country with public he…

I've felt since I was young that I'd like to choose when and how I will die. I'm perfectly comfortable with the thought. I'm in my 30s and have a lovely life and family. I'm in no rush to end things. But when I'm old and the scales tip, I'd like to be the one to decide that it's time. I might not ever get there, but I want the option.

Amen. I want the option to leave gracefully and in peace, if a time comes where I cannot perform my basic needs by myself. I never chose when and how I would be brought into this world, so I think it's fair that I can choose when and how to leave.

Will I actually do it? That's irrelevant. I may decide to live and fight as much as possible, and that's fine, but I want the option.

Re: Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

#212

Post by Tiktaalik »

ben30 wrote: post #13

Fifteen years ago, flying into Vancouver, a local told me charities would give homeless people one-way bus tickets there from colder regions of Canada to prevent winter deaths. No return tickets in spring. Calls into question what we consider "charitable" when the solution is just moving vulnerable people elsewhere. Worrying parallel: will euthanasia become another "solution" for those who can't afford proper care an…

> Fifteen years ago, flying into Vancouver, a local told me charities would give homeless people one-way bus tickets there from colder regions of Canada to prevent winter deaths

This is kind of one of those urban myths btw. Like yes it has technically happened before but if you chase down the stories it's not at all common and it's more of a situation of someone having some family or relationships in a province away and people trying to help by connecting them.

Re: Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

#213

Post by patrickhogan1 »

tifik wrote: post #191
patrickhogan1 wrote: post #148

Strange question but how does this affect life insurance? Typically a suicide would not be covered.

From a morbidly capitalistic point of view, insurance companies should rejoice at the prospect of a very ill person opting for assisted death. I imagine the procedure to end ones life would be much cheaper than multiple years of procedures and medicine to keep them alive. And if this is the case (which I don't actually know for sure, I'm just speculating), then insurance companies would be incentivized to 'nudge' cer…

This is true in health insurance but not true in life insurance. Life insurance policies pay out at time of death with certain exclusions. Common exclusions are death by: suicide, killed while committing crime, killed by policy holder beneficiary.

Therefore, the longer one lives, the benefit accrues to the insurance co, because the more premium policy holder pays to LifeInsuranceCo (LIC), LIC has more time to earn interest/investment profits from those premiums, and the cheaper the payout from LIC to policy holder beneficiary, because of inflation and since most payout amounts (eg $1M) are fixed at time of policy issuance.

Re: Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

#214

Post by groby_b »

darth_avocado wrote: post #153
guyzero wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had apparently expressed his intention before she passed. I do not know all the details and this is second hand, but he apparently had a plan.

I would’ve expected at least a waiting period longer than a week after a traumatic event. Of course I don’t know all the circumstances around it.

>Of course I don’t know all the circumstances around it.

And that's the point. The person expressing the wish (and expressing it before the death) did.

People make choices. We should let them, wherever possible. Yes, there are consequences - but we also let people fly wingsuits and base jump, and those have known consequences as well. Would you also enjoin people from doing that after a traumatic event? What about mountain climbing? Diving? Crossing the street?

If you apply the "no major choices after a traumatic event for a while" line of thought, we'd need to install temporary guardians for anybody who has a traumatic event. That doesn't work.

Re: Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

#215

Post by kerkeslager »

tifik wrote: post #191
patrickhogan1 wrote: post #148

Strange question but how does this affect life insurance? Typically a suicide would not be covered.

From a morbidly capitalistic point of view, insurance companies should rejoice at the prospect of a very ill person opting for assisted death. I imagine the procedure to end ones life would be much cheaper than multiple years of procedures and medicine to keep them alive. And if this is the case (which I don't actually know for sure, I'm just speculating), then insurance companies would be incentivized to 'nudge' cer…

> From a morbidly capitalistic point of view, insurance companies should rejoice at the prospect of a very ill person opting for assisted death. I imagine the procedure to end ones life would be much cheaper than multiple years of procedures and medicine to keep them alive.

This would make sense if life insurance and health insurance were covered by the same insurer, but they rarely are.

The more fundamental problem here is that insurance is a) to prevent financial hardship b) in the case of a rare event. Neither death nor serious illness are rare events for the elderly, and more often than not, health insurance fails to prevent financial hardship, so both of these fail as insurance in these situations.

Re: Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

#216

Post by kerkeslager »

nashashmi wrote: post #171
asynchronous wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wondering this myself, insurance in the states already tries to weasel out of every single charge if possible.

Does the ill person have a premium/annual plan?

That was implied, yes.

Re: Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

#217

Post by hackable_sand »

brap wrote: post #189
ben30 wrote: post #13

Fifteen years ago, flying into Vancouver, a local told me charities would give homeless people one-way bus tickets there from colder regions of Canada to prevent winter deaths. No return tickets in spring. Calls into question what we consider "charitable" when the solution is just moving vulnerable people elsewhere. Worrying parallel: will euthanasia become another "solution" for those who can't afford proper care an…

>will euthanasia become another "solution" for those who can't afford proper care and treatment? Yes, and I would argue that despite the awful connotations, this is not a bad thing. It’s simply a fact of life that some people have more than others. Sometimes it’s not fair, but it’s still way better than any other social/economic alternative. And those who have more can afford better treatment, that is expensive. So,…

That is psychopathic.

It would be a bad thing.

Re: Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

#218

Post by sdwr »

xyzzyz wrote: post #207

I support assisted suicide for people who are not capable of doing it without assistance (because dying moments of many people are really not pretty, as many stories in this thread attest to), but I think that the cases of medical and legal industries killing physically healthy young people due to mental issues are sick and wrong. Physically healthy and young people do not need assistance in committing suicide if the…

Plus they get to avoid the pain, chance of partial recovery, messy cleanup for their family, and carrying out a criminal action.

Not saying it's right, but there are practical reasons why "dying" looks a lot more attractive than "killing yourself"

Re: Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

#219

Post by snakeyjake »

lolc wrote: post #165
snakeyjake wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you need to try very hard to convince a terminally-ill patient in constant agony to end it, poor or not. My 93 year old grandmother has COPD and she wants to end her life but cannot. She is NOT poor. In her state in the US, a bipartisan bill was introduced to allow for euthanasia but the religious extremists killed it. She coughs so badly, even on oxygen with frequent albuterol treatments, that she is c…

Sounds horrible having to live through that. Out of curiosity, because I assume you've discussed these questions: If she refused treatment except for opiates, would that allow her to die faster?

If she came off of oxygen and albuterol, she would be dead within a day or two or three.

It would be an agonizing death, worse than her current situation.

So instead of drinking something and peacefully going to sleep one last time she has to slowly degrade until the machinery of the healthcare system sees fit to give her a dosage of morphine large enough.

That's the shittiest part of all of this, nearly 100% of all hospice deaths are medically assisted already. Personnel just keep upping the morphine as the gurgling increases in order to make it stop because the gurgling is "pain".

Eventually the doses get so high that literally every single person on Earth who knows what morphine is knows, irrefutably, that the morphine killed the patient.

But nobody calls it that. You can't call it that. You "managed the symptoms".

The only thing MAID does is speed up the clock.

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