Canada's surge in deaths under MAID outpaces other countries | Hacker News Reader

Canada's surge in deaths under MAID outpaces other countries

thestar.com

17 pointsvoisin7 comments

Everyone has the choice to kill themselves with a gun, knife, car, or whatever. IMO it isn'toutlandish to help them do it in a less messy, less painful way.

We treat old animals better than old people, by letting animals die humane deaths. With people, we expect them to languish in some kind of medical facility until they are stripped of all human dignity and all of the assets they worked a lifetime to earn, then have the government (taxpayers) pay for them until they finally die.

Everyone should IMO have the right to die a humane death if they choose, without resorting to violence and a huge mess to clean up. Legislation to require a few counseling sessions before giving them drugs to end their life is reasonable, but in the end, if they still want to proceed, we should allow it and make it easier to leave a painful life.

If I specify, while I am able, that under x, y, z circumstances I want to be put to death, then even if I become incapacitated, it should happen. My family or the medical system should not have to struggle with this decision when I have spelled it out beforehand. The main reasons IMO that we don't have such a system is because medical corporations make a fortune from this human suffering, and relgious people believe we don't have the right to take our own life.

“Who am I to say, ‘You’re suffering, it’s too bad, you just have to find a way to live like this,’” says Dr. Cheryl Rowe, a Toronto psychiatrist who routinely treats vulnerable patients living with the added challenges of poverty and homelessness.

“It's a failure of medicine. There are so many doctors that believe that they have to keep their patients alive at all costs. And it took a long time for doctors to begin to realize that that wasn't the case.”

See this is where I take issue. I'm a MAID proponent, but *do not* muddle up societal failures into here. There are many medical situations I can empathize with and understand why we need a MAID route... but if we start to mix societal failure in there and weigh them in the decision process, I take huge issue... that would be so fucked up (pardon my language).

And yet there are many examples of exactly that.

I know someone personally who was offered MAID because they didn't want to treat him. Happily in the end this person got the procedure done and they are alive.

Canada has become a brutal shit show. Homelessness is rampant everywhere.

We are reaping the costs of our previous bad decisions. We should have been targetting a surplus of doctors the last 40 years instead of cutting the number of doctor training positions in the 90s like we did. We should also be restricting immigration, except for applicable spots of vital need until we can get our healthcare (and housing) situation under control.

> We should also be restricting immigration, except for applicable spots of vital need until we can get our healthcare (and housing) situation under control.

Some would say the demographic bomb of our aging population means immigration at these levels is fulfilling a vital need.

That would be true if we were actually aggressively targeting vital skills shortages but we aren't doing a very effective job of that and are instead bringing in people with less obvious reason to be here, that earn less money and exacerbate the shortage area problems.

I also have a philosophical issue with that line of thinking in that we should probably be figuring out how to solve our birthrate issue before we invite more people here because after a generation or two those immigrants also have lower than replacement birthrates unless they are in a strongly religious community (which is not really that exciting to an atheist who really enjoys civil liberties). There's no point in being an ecological sink for the third world, we should have policy and system in place that support the current population in maintaining itself and immigration should be extra to help fill in our underpopulated country.

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