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People working in the system don't have the same faith. From the article: > In October 2020, the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer issued a report sta
by Amezarak 4y ago
People working in the system don't have the same faith. From the article:
> 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.
> “I do worry MAiD is an easy solution to bed shortages and the terrible lack of resources patients are facing,” Dr. Ramona Coelho, a family physician in a suburb of Toronto, told me. She added that “the perverse disincentive that exists for administrators and governments with providing MAiD rather than care and resources to live can present a real danger to the lives of vulnerable or marginalized persons.”
There have also been reports of medical staff pressuring patients to sign up for MAiD to save the government money.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/08/canadian-man-assisted-suicide-being-pushed-on-me-by-hospital/ https://nypost.com/2022/11/08/canadian-man-assisted-suicide-...
> “They asked if I want an assisted death. I don’t. I was told that I would be charged $1,800 per day [for hospital care]. I have $2 million worth of bills. Nurses here told me that I should end my life. That shocked me.”
In the US, "medical error" is the third leading cause of death. Nurses and doctors are regularly fired or sued for serious wrongdoing. There's good ones and bad ones, competent ones and incompetent ones. Every profession is a mixed bag. I am sure it is no different in Canada.
You can never, ever, trust a system. You can trust individuals.
- mcrae 4y agoI'm not sure if the economic angle is convincing, since Canada spends over $300B a year on healthcare [0]. Are you suggesting MAID was introduced to save "as much as" 0.03% of healthcare expenditure? [0] https://www.cihi.ca/en/news/covid-19-expected-to-push-canadas-health-spending-beyond-300-billion-in-2021 https://www.cihi.ca/en/news/covid-19-expected-to-push-canada...
- carapace 4y agoThe economic angle is convincing only to sociopaths. Sane people don't kill people to save money.
- loeg 4y ago> Sane people don't kill people to save money. Of course, that isn't true in the abstract. Some number of people die in the US annually for lack of government spending on healthcare, and presumably we could spend less and kill more people, or vice versa. Government healthcare systems are kind of fundamentally a tradeoff between spending and saving lives.
- josephcsible 4y agoThere's a difference between killing someone and not saving someone's life.
- MockObject 4y agoOn a spreadsheet, they look quite the same.
- josephcsible 4y agoDoes this mean you should always pull the lever in the trolley problem?
- loeg 4y agoThat seems like a philosophical argument.
- josephcsible 4y agoSure, but believing them to be the same is also a philosophical argument.
- carapace 4y agoYou're not sick, or old yet. It gets less philosophical the longer you live.
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoThe hubris is astounding. Pick up a history book and lay your eyes upon the horrors that have been enacted by "good people". Literally every organization over a few hundred people where everyone is mostly just optimizing for their KPIs within their role behaves like a sociopath.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y agoNo, it was intended to save a lot more. Like Civil Forfeiture, the medical system should never see a single cent "saved" via suicide. Because otherwise, yes, we're saying we think they'd optimize for it.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y agoI would suggest that, just as Canada decided they had to remove the “reasonably foreseeable death” criterion in response to a court decision, they’ll find some financial pressure in the future that forces them to expand MAiD programs. It’s likely to sound less like “we ought to kill some people to save money” and more like “here’s a great revenue-neutral idea for expanding access to the important MAiD program”. If handing out lethal injections is considered to be no big deal, I don’t see how the Canadian healthcare system could avoid these pressures. You can’t make just one deal with the devil.
- ttul 4y agoNo, this is simply not a thing just because the NYPost wrote about it.