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Whenever people discussed euthanasia/suicide/MAiD online in the early oughts, it was always some corner case of a person completely paralyzed who could maybe bl

• hikingsimulator 4y ago
  The 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 ago
    Canada’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 ago
      Healthcare 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 ago
        It 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.
        • hikingsimulator 4y ago
          I usually find this reasoning to be fallacious. Sure this hypothetical person in an hypothetical setting might hypothetically exist in an hypothetical future. However, bringing it up doesn't provide value to the topic at hand. Your point doesn't refute what I said, or answer a point I made -- I never said it was always a problem. At best I said it very much was now.
          • prirun 4y ago
            You've apparently never been in a precarious health situation. I have, my mother has, and she chose to end her life because her daily living situation had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer take care of herself. And no amount of money or increased healthcare would have changed her circumstances.
        • II2II 4y ago
          > 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. There are different forms of acceptance. Yes, accept that some cases are not fixable. On the other hand, we should also be looking at what led to it being not fixable. There is a huge difference between seeking assisted suicide due to deteriorating physical and mental health from medical causes and seeking assisted suicide due to a lack of medical, psychological, and financial support from the outset.
    • bmelton 4y ago
      "Paid for" does not necessarily mean "good" just as "expensive" doesn't necessarily mean "bad." I'm not trying to opine on the Canadian health care system, as I've never experienced it nor given it much thought, but arguendo, if a part of the calculus for wellness is "is it cheaper to kill them?" that would be a deal-breaker. (Again, not saying that's what is happening, but I am always skeptical of the payor's ability to dictate the treatment for reasons you can infer) There's such a sliding scale of what is good and right here, and I think reasonable people can draw their lines at different places. Plot these as points on a line, and I think everyone will draw a line somewhere: * suicide should be allowed * medically assisted deaths are different from suicide and should be allowed * people assisting in death should be prosecuted * if it is hard for law enforcement to distinguish assisted suicide from murder, prosecutions are allowed * it is okay for your doctor to prescribe death * it is okay for the state to encourage death as the most cost efficient means of care * it is okay for the state to withhold care if it is too costly to administer * it is okay for the state to kill anyone they deem burdensome A definition of "good" may still contain characteristics that cross a line that a reasonable person has drawn, and I can't imagine how someone might convince another grown adult to draw their line somewhere other than what feels intuitive.
      • linuxftw 4y ago
        Incentives are different between state and private actors. The state has many tools at it's disposal to encourage or even force suicide (aka, murder in the latter case). The state is the ultimate arbiter of whether or not someone is mentally incapacitated, thus they can determine who lives and who dies. I can't think of anything more shameful than encouraging a non-terminal person to kill themselves.
      • empressplay 4y ago
        There is already a calculus of cost per annum applied to medical interventions in the Canadian health system -- eg, we wouldn't give a heart transplant to a 96 year-old, generally speaking. Also, suicide hasn't been illegal in Canada for 50 years!
    • betaby 4y ago
      "Canada’s welfare state is pretty good though." It's not. Not at all! If you have a positive experience please share it. Also please provide a comparison, even anecdotal one.
      • voisin 4y ago
        My wife gave birth to our three children. Here are the costs: First child: $10.00 Second child: $10.00 Third child: $2.50 These were the parking fees for 24 hours (there were no complications necessitating longer stays) in the two different cities she gave birth (the third child was born in a much more rural area with cheaper parking). I cannot stress enough that it cost us $0.00 beyond these amounts. These costs include the use of a midwife in all three instances, with around 12 visits in advance of birth, then 2 midwives or 1 midwife and 2 nurses for the actual delivery, then 4-6 visits with the midwife post-birth, several of which were in our home. I would say that’s a positive experience.
        • betaby 4y ago
          I don't follow really. You are comparing $10 to what? I can't think about a lot of countries with 'paid' childbirth. Also while childbirth falls under the health care I wouldn't think about it if asked. Also, lumping parking there? Why? In the poor country I'm originally from ambulance riding is free, and yes, one additional person can ride it too. I would think about illness treating first and foremost if asked about health care. Your comment is just sad to me.
          • voisin 4y ago
            I think the majority of HN readers seem to be American, so the costs are drastically different where births can be 10s of thousands of dollars, even with insurance. That’s why I brought it up. Any country that does free childbirth and ambulance rides and appointments with doctors and specialists, I would suggest has an excellent healthcare system, even if not perfect.
            • rayiner 4y ago
    • mbfg 4y ago
      There's a word for people who think health care is very good.... "healthy". There is nothing like illness to dissuade you of that belief. I'm not talking about the cost, or administration of healthcare, which of course is often lousy (esp in the US). I'm talking about it's capabilities, which is a universal problem.
  • nvahalik 4y ago
    > It's the utter failure of the welfare state from catching people sinking that's to blame. You can blame policies and programs, but in reality the issue has always been the value of human life. If human life isn't valuable then ending it is easy.
    • flanflan 4y ago
      How does "valuing human life" help people who would be deaths of despair under a program like this? That just sounds like idealism.
    • hikingsimulator 4y ago
      Life is ultimately valuable, that's why allowing people to have complete ownership over their own destiny is good. Forcing people to die in pain, misery, and utterly debased is a misplacement of values in my opinion. And this is often than not a symptom of capitalist valuation. The value of a life is too often viewed as economic [1]. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354671644_VAluing_Life_as_an_Asset_as_a_Statistic_and_at_Gunpoint https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354671644_VAluing_L...
      • nvahalik 4y ago
        > pain, misery, and utterly debased I think this is because we often see pain and misery as "bad things" that must be avoided at all cost. This tends to lead to the assumption that people who have pain and misery in their lives don't have "good lives" and that the only real option then is to end it. Pain and misery have purpose and meaning. It can cause people to look beyond themselves. Some very beautiful things have come from people who were in deep pain.
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        • empressplay 4y ago
          It would be a cruel person indeed that would suggest that someone must suffer in agony because it suits their definition of morality.
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  • poulpy123 4y ago
    No. Killing poor depressed people isn't a failure of the welfare state but a deliberate choice by the people behind this program
• _eht 4y ago
  >Slippery slope is no longer a fallacy, I guess. It is validly one of the 15 logical fallacies used to illustrate parts of arguments.
• okasaki 4y ago
  I once attended a memorial lecture on euthanasia at Oxford university. It started with euthanising people who are in great pain and are obviously going to die in the next 24 hours, and by the end a psychologist in the audience was arguing for euthanising depressed teenagers. It felt like we hadn't just slipped down the slope, we basically rocketed into the ground. I will never support this movement.
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  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    In US the government is allowed tk kill you - as apparently capital punishment is constitutional. Yet you are not allowed to kill yourself? I don't think that morally defensible
    • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      If you wanna eat a bullet that's your initiative. My issue is when the medical system, which has a pretty crap track record when it comes to dealing with people who's suffering is curable, starts offering suicide to people as an out. These institutions can't put people on the right pills and we're supposed to trust them to suggest (or not) that people end their lives? Not to mention the perverse financial incentive it creates to give people who need expensive care crap care and generally drag feet hoping they choose the out.
      • imtringued 4y ago
        I can't eat wheat. I don't know if it's the gluten or if I'm celiac. Nobody diagnosed me. Wheat bloats my stomach and clogs my intestines almost gas tight and sometimes the pain can be extreme because it feels like your intestines are being torn apart. This makes you feel like your own body is conspiring against you because society has decided to put wheat everywhere and everyone else is fine and the doctors tell you it's not the wheat. From this perspective the "sane" choice against generic unexplainable suffering because of randomly occuring physical pain would be to get a different body but that isn't possible so suicide it is. Except, my solution is peppermint tea and avoiding wheat at all costs. I don't care how many people tell me that I don't have celiac disease or that I should be able to eat wheat. I can't, I know my body better than the doctor or you or the industrial complex that puts wheat everywhere.
• loeg 4y ago
  I think this might be historical revisionism. The idea that all conversations about assisted suicide 20 years ago were solely about the extremely disabled seems unlikely.
• sdiacom 4y ago
  In a society that does not give any value to people's lives beyond their productive output, this will inevitably be an outcome of euthanasia. It merely provides a more dignified alternative to the existing paths to what we call "deaths of despair". People who were forced to starve, to subsist, to suffer empty, meaningless lives of toil and/or misery, now have an alternative to the continuation of their suffering. This does not mean the alternative is good, but neither is its absence. One would hope that seeing how many people would rather choose to die in their own terms, as opposed to continuing to toil to enrich their landlords while they have to choose between food and heating, would steer us towards building a better society, one where people have not only freedom, but autonomy over their own lives. And if it doesn't, well, then I suppose I'm glad we have an alternative to the society we're building.
  • moralestapia 4y ago
    >People who were forced to starve, to subsist, to suffer empty, meaningless lives of toil and/or misery, now have an alternative to the continuation of their suffering. Hope you don't find yourself in that demographic at some point of your life.
    • Daishiman 4y ago
      Suicide has always been an alternative, as is just suffering quietly for decades and ending your life naturally with no lessons or meaning to your suffering.
  • emptysongglass 4y ago
    My wife was very suicidal in her teens and early twenties. She tried to kill herself a number of times and even ended up in one of those infamous padded rooms. Long story short, she's no longer suicidal and is happy she wasn't successful. I don't agree with expanding scope to "mature minors": life is change but life as a minor is breathless transformation we can't even cognize for ourselves until years later looking back.
    • sdiacom 4y ago
• clnq 4y ago
  I suppose this is an unpopular opinion, but when I am old or if I have a severe incurable disease, I want to choose how I die. And if a doctor has the grace to give me a dignified death, I do not want them to be prosecuted for it or to have to do it in secrecy (as medics already do). Whether it's a slippery slope or not, I think it is progressive not to gatekeep medically assisted suicide too much. Modern medicine should offer a choice for each individual - to live or to die, not a prescription to live through suffering and pain at an immense economic and societal cost. Death is a normal, natural part of life that will come for all of us. The amount of suffering before death should be each person's choice.
• hackeraccount 4y ago
  Hard cases make bad law.