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Comment by splittydev | Hacker News Reader

Well, this is absolutely crazy... I hope she and her family manage to fight this decision somehow. I get that she's seriously ill, but denying her the option to live for even a day longer is absolutely insane and should be illegal.

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Kind of, sometimes, but not always. On the other side of this is the "daughter from California" scenario https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_from_California_syndr... which you also don't want to end up in. There has to be some threshold for the doctors to say "I get what you're trying to achieve but the choice is to die today or in a few days while medicated like crazy with tubes everywhere because you they can't breathe/eat/move".

Well, that's the downside of publicly funded healthcare: government pays for your treatment, so government gets to decide if you are worth the expense. Which of course is completely fucked up.

And with privately funded healthcare, there may be no treatment at all. That's even more fucked up.

Well, there's always a treatment if you have money to pay for it. And if you don't you still have options like various charities, crowdfunding, etc. That's still a better scenario than the court ruling that the best thing for you is to die.

Well then they have that option in addition to state healthcare, so what on earth are you talking about?

GoFundMe as a form of accessing healthcare isn't great.

Private healthcare is available in the UK (or in this case in Canada). It appears that she is being actively prevented from using it.

But that's not what's happening - they're not saying "we can't afford to keep her alive" - they're saying "she's incapable of making her own medical decisions because she's not listening to her doctor's advice (which is to die)".

that person can still go private. no one will deny her that right.

but state funded healthcare makes sure even the poorest get some form of care. and yes, they will triage.

How can she? The judge just declared her incompetent to make her own medical decisions.

the trial was about the NHS. they are free to use a different provider.

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