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A couple of excerpts from the article > In May, Victoria took a hard look at their budget. They couldn’t go on like this for long. “Mom,” Joan recalled Victori
by kneebonian 4y ago
A couple of excerpts from the article
> In May, Victoria took a hard look at their budget. They couldn’t go on like this for long. “Mom,” Joan recalled Victoria telling her, “I don’t think we can survive. We have to apply for MAiD.”
> She had known that her 23-year-old son, Kiano Vafaeian, was depressed—he was diabetic and had lost his vision in one eye, and he didn’t have a job or girlfriend or much of a future... That was when Marsilla learned that Kiano had applied and, in late July, been approved for “medical assistance in dying,” aka MAiD, aka assisted suicide.
> Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7 percent of deaths in the province were due to MAiD; in British Columbia, the number was 4.8 percent.
> Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors.”
> In October 2020, the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer issued a report stating that MAiD would cut healthcare costs by over $66 million.
> In 2017, Aaron Trachtenberg, a research fellow and a doctor at the University of Manitoba, and Braden Manns, a health economist and nephrologist at the University of Calgary, published a paper predicting that MAiD could slash healthcare costs by as much as $100 million yearly.
> He added: “When we have people who are genuinely suffering, and we don’t provide them options for dignified living, but we provide them with what we label as a painless death,
- jimmyjazz14 4y agoIs this for real, it almost seems to shocking to be true.
- jamal-kumar 4y agoYes it is. I'm making preparations to leave the country real. It is essential for my health and waiting a month just to see a GP isn't the kind of place I want to reside. This is in the middle of a huge public healthcare crisis, for context [1] [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-health-care-system-collapse-1.6590461 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-health-care-system...
- ecpottinger 4y ago[flagged]
- tsimionescu 4y agoThere are actually examples downthread of some doing just that - threatening patients that need constant care with torture unless they "voluntarily" apply to the program.
- voisin 4y agoEvery country seems to be having the same issues right now. I think it is the after effects of a once in a century pandemic that health systems were ill-prepared for, and isn’t fully over (huge flu season repercussions if not interacting in the last few years)
- throwaway049 4y agoThank you for pointing this out. In the UK the newspaper and TV rarely place our healthcare crisis in a wider context. I'm in favor of the right to access a painless assisted death, but society should be able to make a better offer to anyone who is not terminally ill.
- smnrchrds 4y ago> Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7 percent of deaths in the province were due to MAiD; in British Columbia, the number was 4.8 percent. That's about in line with the Netherlands, to put things in perspective. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2818%2932554-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
- voisin 4y agoI’d like to see a breakdown for the rationale of people using these programs. The absolute and relative numbers are irrelevant (IMO) if they are largely occurring for the “right reasons” like avoiding increasing pain or similar.
- notatoad 4y agosee section 4 (and specifically chart 4.1A) here: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assistance-dying/annual-report-2021.html#a4 https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assi... 62% cancer patients, 80% coming from palliative care. section 4.5 discusses the new controversial new provision for 2021 which allowed patients to recieve MAiD even if their deaths are not "reasonably forseeable", which accounted for 2.2% of MAiD recipients, or 219 people.
- voisin 4y agoSeems like the law is working exactly as intended then. 219 people, or 2.2% if participants, is an excellent outcome showing the program hasn’t been taken over by greedy children pushing their elderly loved ones toward an early demise.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoI would love to know if, of the 219 people, how many of them are victims of systemic neglect (e.g. chronic condition patient whose meds aren't covered by insurance, suicidal patient who cannot get inpatient therapy, addiction patient who has been denied methodone or other drug-assisted sobriety). Even if it's only 219 people, I think if even half were victims of systemic neglect, I would want very far-sweeping policy changes to prevent these deaths.
- eikenberry 4y ago[flagged]
- blfr 4y agoWhenever people discussed euthanasia/suicide/MAiD online in the early oughts, it was always some corner case of a person completely paralyzed who could maybe blink. Slippery slope is no longer a fallacy, I guess.
- hikingsimulator 4y agoThe problem isn't maid per se. It's the utter failure of the welfare state from catching people sinking that's to blame.
- voisin 4y agoCanada’s welfare state is pretty good though. Healthcare is paid for. I would be interested to know what percentage of people using this maid program are doing so specifically for economic reasons.
- hikingsimulator 4y agoHealthcare can encompass a lot of things. The NHS is supposedly good on paper but stereotypically it doesn't cover dental. Similarly, I meant welfare. I think it goes much beyond just healthcare. Unemployment insurance, state help to access the job market, disability help, etc.
- prirun 4y agoIt would be nice (though likely impossible) if everyone could have unlimited assistance to make their life manageable. But even if that were available, we need to keep in mind that others may not want to continue their life for various reasons. Just because it is theoretically possible to keep someone alive doesn't mean they want that. Living life feeling like a burden to others, being in constant pain, or drugged out completely to avoid pain is not a life everyone would choose to live. So if someone chooses to die, don't always look at that as a problem that could have been fixed with enough resources. Sometimes it's not fixable and we all need to compassionately accept that.
- temp2022account 4y agoThat's amazing, if 5% of the entire world chose to die each year the average human lifespan would be 20
- quantified 4y agoDepends on which 5%...
- xvedejas 4y agoEven if it's the oldest 5%, _eventually_ you'd reach even lower than 20 because the population isn't growing at anything near a rate of 5% per year, and so you'd run out of people that old quickly. You'd see an exponential decline in the Canadian population, halving every 14 years. A -5% rate per year is an extremely unlikely thing to keep up for long
- flanflan 4y agoAgain this is 5% _of deaths_ not 5% of the population. So it's roughly in line with the number of people who die from random accidents in a given year.
- eloff 4y agoIt’s 5% of deaths, not of the population.
- flandish 4y agoThere are times that I, a fighter of depression, and severely exhausted person think: if I lose my jobs (firefighter and software engineer) and things with my alcoholic wife trend toward my being unable to provide that which is required of me, as a man: financial security and a home… I’d just go. Just like the first episode of Futurama. But when I think those things, I realize that’s a perm solution to “short” term albeit painful problems. I can do this. I got this. Then when it gets real bad, I remember Pascal’s wager and if there really are people I can “see” again - like my first wife who died at 41, when I was 31… that little thought experiment/bit of faith saves me. It makes me sad, truly, to see that a bulk of the stories are related to finance. Finance for services that a caring nation would/should provide. Sigh.
- yamazakiwi 4y agoAs an aside, how do you enjoy both of your careers? I, also a fighter of depression, was a firefighter (as well as many other things) in the military and now do software. I sort of miss the firefighting. How do you balance both?
- flandish 4y agoWelp, it’s a bit of an odd combination. I started in sw when I was 18. I am 43 now. I started in fire at 25. So been fire almost 20 years now. Mostly truck work. My city is small but still a “city” at abt 15000 people. We are volly but a few paid. We run abt 700 calls a year. I’m all the standard training - emr too. I think when things got thick with my first wife’s cancer, I was 26 and new at fire and making ok money in sw.. so I “used” fire to have “random” encounters that forced me to stop thinking abt cancer. About death. Which is odd. Cause I’m usually one of the regulars at the medicals, traumas, untimelys, etc… So I got used to that “fire time = me time” feeling. SW didn’t matter and let’s be honest, sw is thick or dense but it’s not hard. Not hard like what we see or sticks to us at fire. So yeah. Juggling? I just… “made do” I reckon. Used it as an escape. And when fire is slow, as sometimes it is, I use training as an escape. When she died when I was 31, fire was there for me. Software - gave me the corporate required bereavement days then it was back to the office because back then wfh was not as common as it should have been. Maybe I haven’t really juggled well. I think also with adhd that I have - “exercising” both my brain and body in these two ways has helped.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- verdenti 4y ago[dead]
- aksss 4y ago> slash healthcare costs When there’s a clear line-of-sight financial incentive in killing the citizenry, the policies will only further loosen qualifications and even incentives over time. This is how you go from a poster child of an advanced stage ALS patient to normalizing the government assisted death of a depressed diabetic. Will it become more frequent (rising from 5% of deaths)? Almost certainly. The knobs here are the qualifications and requirements, decided by financial incentive vs sense of decency. Where that line of collision will be is in age restrictions (minors) and qualifying health conditions. It’s also interesting to think about how this intersects with capital punishment. If the government can off a non-criminal in a profitable way, then something in the math we hear about capital punishment being more expensive than lifetime incarceration is grossly incorrect.
- Nasrudith 4y agoThe entire reason for the direct expenses (as opposed to say, negative reputational effects) is the lengthy appeals process. Euthanasia lacks such gatekeeping.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago> then something in the math we hear about capital punishment being more expensive than lifetime incarceration is grossly incorrect. Due process is the expensive part.
- rayiner 4y ago> Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors.” I hope Canada’s experiment in extreme social libertarianism works out well for them.
- sifar 4y agoThe really sad part of this is it removes the motivation to reduce healthcare cost.
- poulpy123 4y agoI'm a supporter of euthanasia for people with terminal cases requesting it. This Canadian law is putting us several decades back