As a Canadian I want to point out this article is quite misleading.<p>The issue is far more systemic than this article claims. In Canada MAID is the 6th leading cause of death, and is rising so fast it is basically guaranteed to be the 3rd cause by 2025.<p>Doctors that will not back the MAID initiative are fired, every year they expand the criteria under which you can be euthanize, right now they want to expand it to include poverty.Their are reports of children and confused elderly being tricked into euthanasia without their families knowledge. And we get reports on how much all this is saving the government.
Sad but unsurprising story. How do you reach your targeted cost per user without implementing death panels? “Sympathetic” agents will feel this pressure more and more, but there is a way to avoid this solution that is even more insidious.<p>No need to preemptively offer to help kill somebody. Just make their life so miserable that they ask for it.<p>Refusing them the medical care they need to not be miserable will go a long way toward that goal.<p>Edit: plot twist: I just realized this could be the official way that death panels are implemented. A “black spot” is placed on the person’s record indicating that no more treatment is to be paid for, unless they ask for somebody to kill them. Agents are, of course, forbidden from telling the person with the black spot. So this agent would indeed have been trying to skirt the rules by clueing the person in to their status. Thus, the agent clandestinely fighting death panels would be fired. It does not seem outside the realm of possibility to me that this truly might have been an agent fighting an active death panel.
While this is likely not due to an official policy, it is certainly due to a conflict of interest.<p>Medical personnel should not be involved in euthanasia. While they have the requisite medical knowledge, medicine should be about saving lives, or at least palliative care.<p>Euthanists should be a separate thing, if they exist at all. Euthanasia is about death, not life.<p>No one should go to the doctor for medical care and be provided death. Such a situation destroys trust.
This whole article and comment thread is a strawman, in that it presents a single case in spmething that simply should not be adjudicated on a case by case basis.<p>Euthanasia, death panels, palliative care management, healthcare budgets, transparency or lack thereof ...<p>These are all (full stop) system level decisions. Show us <i>all</i> the data, <i>all</i> the decisions, <i>all</i> the controls, <i>all</i> the dollars.<p>Then as a society we decide the parameters, the gray areas, and then each case fits in one area or another.
The Independent article is a but blogspammy (little by way of original reporting, and more than half the page is ads). This CBC article is one of its sources and I found it more informative: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted-death-macaulay-1.6671721" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted...</a>