You can always pick an extreme example of drooling, pants-shitting, etc. etc. But the problem is that "option to die" usually morphs into "duty to die" and then into "involuntarily dying."
Uncomfortably close (linked from article):
"His words were 'assisted suicide death was legal in Canada,'" she told CBC. "I was shocked, and said, 'Well, I'm not really interested,' and he told me I was being selfish."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/doctor-...
And from the article:
Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care.
“Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”
"Roger Foley, who has a degenerative brain disorder and is hospitalized in London, Ontario, was so alarmed by staffers mentioning euthanasia that he began secretly recording some of their conversations.
In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital’s director of ethics told Foley that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care."
https://www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca/web/default/files/Documents/Report...
"The predicted gross reduction in health care costs amounts to $109.2 million while the cost of administering MAID is estimated at $22.3 million. Thus, the difference between the two represents a net cost reduction for provincial governments of $86.9 million."
It's perhaps also worth noting that with 38 million Canadians, you're talking about roughly $2 per person. I don't think that's a meaningful amount of money at the national level. Government spending on healthcare is roughly $8000 per person.
There is a significant cost to providing care in the last year of a person’s life. It would seem opaque or “hiding something” if legislation around assisted suicide failed to discuss financials entirely.
the very fact that a patient has to be, legally "experiencing unbearable suffering, with no prospect of improvement, and to have a voluntary, sustained wish to die" is ripe for abuse, as the article makes clear has already happened.
A euthanasia proponent said, "Whether things are clear for doctors is a difficult question, as unbearable suffering is different from one person to another."
Maybe the Netherlands: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/18/death-on-demand... seems ideal to you. Not to me. Not even to a lot of Dutch doctors.
And while any standard of "sustained" and "prospect of improvement" will have their edge cases, that's arguably still better than either absolute of availability.
The problem is ensuring it's truly voluntary, which seems rather difficult
So he was given a sedative against his will. His last words, “God damn you”, we’re shouted to the nurse injecting him. Then he was poisoned to death.
And of course things went bad in Germany. “Euthanasia” was not a Nazi innovation. It was being advocated in Berlin throughout the 1920s, from very humane motives.
It was relegalized in Germany a few years ago - I don’t know why it’s excluded from the list of countries that allow it. Bad optics?
So “the family” knew.
But the “the family” was more interested in securing his inheritance and title.
Which is ironic considering how quickly he threw it away.
There are massive systematic pressures on our healthcare system and the 'oldest' people who don't work or pay taxes are the big 'cost points'.
The evils perpetrated in the death camps and elsewhere were nothing more than the logical end conclusion of eugenics in general.
Medical ethics usually desires preserving options down the road as much as possible.
Well, not very easily if I'm legally prohibited from doing so! IMO medical ethics is wrongly biased towards preserving life at all costs.