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 constantly fracturing her ribs and spine and going on regimens of narcotics to keep the pain down to bearable levels-- which cause unending constipation and generally scramble her brain.
Can't move, can't talk, can't breathe, can't sit without pain, can't even shit.
Can't die either.
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?
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.
Not one was talked into euthanasia, complaints were made, oversight is strong, the case worker dismissed, further guardrails added, and even had any of the veterens chased up on the MAID suggestion there were secondary layers in place that required interviews with other medical professionals.
This HN thread already has several links to the same case (eg: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted... and https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-maid-rcmp-investig...) it's well publicised.