That’s the problem. If there’s a financial incentive people will find way to push it.
That’s my biggest concern about assisted suicide for an otherwise healthy person who just wants to avoid the inevitable decline (as in this case). There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this.
The only way I can see to remove that would be to require that your estate can’t go to anyone who potentially has influence over you in the case of assisted suicide for with no terminal illness.
Yet you don't see insurance companies hiring snipers to get rid of their oldest customers. Maybe the solution is to prosecute those who would push MAID too aggressively as we would those who push to suicide.
Their most expensive customers are not the oldest ones, it’s the ones getting targeted genetic treatment for cancer denied. They don’t need snipers: the patient dies for lack of treatment being paid for.
Many western countries make dying slowly with Alzheimer’s very expensive, by the standards of normal families.
Between doctors, nurses and lawyers you can burn through a million bucks in five years easily. And most families don’t have a million bucks cash to spare.
On the other hand, if they die after six months, instead of after 5 years? The family doesn’t lose the farm.
> Between doctors, nurses and lawyers you can burn through a million bucks in five years easily
That would indicate there is a financial incentive in keeping them alive, no?
The "incentive" from the family's perspective, if they're that cold-blooded, doesn't make sense because they could just... not take care of that person.
You’re not understanding. They could just not take care of that person sure. But when the person dies, there will be nothing left to inherit because they will have spent it all on medical care.
So we've outlined a society where: healthcare providers, lawyers, etc. ("the system") stand to benefit from keeping a person alive and suffering because they can squeeze money out of them in their final years. Assisted suicide is being made available and "family pressure to commit suicide" is brought up as a concern? Sure, valid concern I guess, but it just seems pointless as there are already guardrails around these processes and we're not recognizing the benefits of giving more autonomy to people which means their suffering can be stopped.
>healthcare providers, lawyers, etc. ("the system") stand to benefit from keeping a person alive and suffering because they can squeeze money out of them in their final years
Insurers and the government have the opposite incentive, but it's something to be concerned about.
>there are already guardrails around these processes
I don't think there are guardrails that can prevent what I'm talking about. Only the most egregious abuses would even be detectable.
As long as you don't literally tell your mom to kill herself I don't think you could make it illegal. As it stands in the US I don't think you could make it illegal for someone to tell someone they "wish they were dead" in this situation.
Inheritance, and for the government/insurance companies, there's the incentive of the one-time cost of euthanization being lower than the cost of care for the poor, disabled and/or the terminally ill.
We don't talk about it a lot as a society, but some people just like killing people.
The ordinary outlet for them is the military. Sometimes they become serial killers.
A euthanasia industry would attract these people similarly to how police and security work attracts authoritarians and how clergy jobs attract pedophiles.
That's not to say that most people in the industry would enjoy killing people, but it would be a problem. And death is final; it's impossible to fix mistakes. This is the same reason many people are opposed to the death penalty.
> This is the same reason many people are opposed to the death penalty.
Death penalty is the government deciding to take your life based on what they believe you did. I agree, mistakes there are bad. Assisted suicide consists of the person dying giving their consent to take their life. Quite different.
Unfortunately consent is not always clear. For example, see my other comment in this thread about the reports on Dr Kevorkian's assisted suicides.
Not only is whether someone gives consent sometimes unclear, it's also unclear if the consent was informed consent and whether it was uncoerced.
Informed consent is obliquely mentioned in my other comment. For example, a patient may falsely believe their illness is terminal.
I realize I replied to a question about financial incentives to talk about non-financial incentives. But coerced consent would often fall under the financial incentive heading. E.g. "consent to be euthanized or I'll contest the will."
Forced "suicide" also has a long history, including in the ancient world. Arguably things like kamikaze might fall into that category. And it's a favorite method of execution in financial and espionage type cases because the method of coercion won't show up in the forensics.
For these sorts of reasons, I think the risk of mistakes is high.
The process in Québec doesn't have those flaws, it is much superior than the one used in the rest of Canada :
To obtain medical aid in dying in Quebec, people must meet all the following requirements:
have a Quebec health insurance card,
be 18 years old or older,
have the mental capacity to make their own decisions about their medical care,
be in one of these situations:
and be in a state where their abilities are severely and permanently getting worse, with no chance of improvement,
have a serious physical impairment that greatly affects their abilities for an extended period,
be in constant and unbearable physical or psychological pain,
be informed about any available means to relieve suffering,
have decided that those means are intolerable.
Once a doctor or SNP assesses the request, they must ask a second doctor or SNP to confirm in writing that the patient is eligible to receive medical aid in dying.
The doctor or SNP must also ensure that several measures to protect the patient have been respected. They must ensure that:
The patient made their request freely and with all the information necessary to make an informed decision.
The patient repeated their request at different moments.
The patient has had an opportunity to discuss the request with their loved ones.
The patient has the opportunity to change their mind right up to the very last moment.
If the patient has trouble communicating, the doctor or SNP must also ensure that the patient was given a reliable means of communication and understands the information they had received.
So... something you're entitled to regardless of how they die? I don't see why, in this hypothetical, a person would spend energy encouraging assisted suicide when they'll get inheritance eventually anyway. Am I missing something?
1. You get the money now as opposed to potentially many years from now.
2. You likely get much more money if they die now without spending it on cost of living, and healthcare.
People do all kinds of awful things in order to get control of an elderly family member’s money—up to and including outright murder. Pressuring a suggestible family member into assisted suicide is a comparatively easy and low risk method.
My brother likely exploited his power of attorney to accelerate our mother's demise and may have injected her with insulin to get the job done. So there's your first datapoint.
What's definite, however, is that he made ~75% of her estate vanish into thin air before throwing her into a low-end nursing home where he wouldn't pay $6/day to have her bathed so she died in her own filth. Nevermind she had a 6-figure pension and longterm care for life. He wanted her gone because dementia had made her unmanageable to him yet he wouldn't let her go to live with any of her other children because he feared he would lose control of the estate through his PoA.
And because he had that PoA, no one could dispute his choices in time to save her. The courts and Adult Protective Services were useless bordering on complicit. The day we finally got a positive court verdict was absolutely 100% coincidentally no connection whatsoever you see 2 days before she suddenly passed.
Lesson learned: when you grow old, don't give anyone on the inheritance train any sort of PoA or they'll instantly become a PoS.
I don’t know how many people are like this. I do know that financial incentives result in more or behavior.
It’s already common for caregivers to begin to resent the people they care for and for old people to worry that they are a liability.
I don’t trust the system to be able to protect vulnerable people who have been coerced. And I don’t want old people in general to feel like suicide is their obligation.
That’s my biggest concern about assisted suicide for an otherwise healthy person who just wants to avoid the inevitable decline (as in this case). There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this.
The only way I can see to remove that would be to require that your estate can’t go to anyone who potentially has influence over you in the case of assisted suicide for with no terminal illness.