Euthanasia Nation

If this does not shock you, nothing will ever shock you. It comes to us from Canada, via Ross Douthut, and it deserves to be a coda to the great healthcare debate.

Recall, wistfully if you like, the constant drumbeat of praise for the great Canadian healthcare system. It ought, the defenders of Obamacare assured us, be the role model for our own reforms. Government controlled health care will treat more people more effectively than will private health care. 

If, perchance, you live in Canada and you are sick and the system cannot find a proper treatment, not to mention a cost-effective treatment, the system tells you to go out and kill yourself. It’s altruism; take one for the team.

Note that it does not pretend to be what is best for the patient. It pretends to be the most cost effective solution to the fact that they have run out of options. Get it-- if the system has run out of options, you are morally responsible-- and should commit suicide

In a country ruled by Fidel Castro’s illegitimate son, what did you expect? In a country that prides itself on being much more enlightened than ours, the best argument for the national health care system is-- euthanasia. It means that Canada is no longer a serious country.

Ross Douthut describes the situation up north. Just in case you think I am kidding;

In recent years, Canada has established some of the world’s most permissive euthanasia laws, allowing adults to seek either physician-assisted suicide or direct euthanasia for many different forms of serious suffering, not just terminal disease. In 2021, over 10,000 people ended their lives this way, just over 3 percent of all deaths in Canada. A further expansion, allowing euthanasia for mental-health conditions, will go into effect in March 2023; permitting euthanasia for “mature” minors is also being considered.

Guess what-- suicide is not considered to be treatment:

It is barbaric, however, to establish a bureaucratic system that offers death as a reliable treatment for suffering and enlists the healing profession in delivering this “cure.” And while there may be worse evils ahead, this isn’t a slippery slope argument: When 10,000 people are availing themselves of your euthanasia system every year, you have already entered the dystopia.

Better yet, it saves money and makes the healthcare system look more affordable:

Indeed, according to a lengthy report by Maria Cheng of The Associated Press, the Canadian system shows exactly the corrosive features that critics of assisted suicide anticipated, from health care workers allegedly suggesting euthanasia to their patients to sick people seeking a quietus for reasons linked to financial stress.

So, suicide is cheaper. It will save you money. And it will save the state money. Seriously, is this what it means to have a right to die, and to die by your own hand:

The idea that human rights encompass a right to self-destruction, the conceit that people in a state of terrible suffering and vulnerability are really “free” to make a choice that ends all choices, the idea that a healing profession should include death in its battery of treatments — these are inherently destructive ideas. Left unchecked, they will forge a cruel brave new world, a dehumanizing final chapter for the liberal story.

Douthut wonders how this all arose from classical Western liberalism. He could have asked how it was implemented by Fidels’ bastard son-- but that might have been too easy.

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