This week, we came across a study published in the OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying that “explores the potential economic savings from expanding medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Canada.”
What would the country save, the authors ask, if the program were expanded “to include vulnerable groups that cost the government more than they contribute in taxes”?
These include “individuals with severe mental health issues, the homeless, drug users, retired elderly, and indigenous communities.” The researchers looked at “both voluntary and non-voluntary scenarios.”
Lo and behold, the savings are significant — up to nearly $1.3 trillion over the next 20 years if Canada went the “non-voluntary” route.
“For example,” the authors note, “for the retired elderly population, the savings could be $54.2 billion in the voluntary scenario or as high as $1.2 trillion in a non-voluntary scenario.” There’s even more money to be saved if the state dropped the requirement that doctors administer the drugs and let the work be outsourced.
(For reasons they did not share, the authors failed to consider the cost savings of transporting these undesirables by rail to industrial-sized gas chambers.)
The authors admit that throwing Canada’s suicide program wide open could end up “fostering a troubling reliance on assisted death as an economic solution.” But as we noted last week, Canada has already crossed that line, and whatever the authors’ reservations, their analysis only builds on the case for the country to keep moving forward.
Canada isn’t at the leading edge of this trend in modern medicine. The idea has long been pushed by “experts” as a way to save money.
A 1997 paper in Health Services Management Research argued that “reducing medical care costs near the end of life should not be a taboo subject” and “a policy of voluntary euthanasia could have a large impact on the rationing of health care resources.”
That same year, in the Supreme Court case regarding a constitutional right to suicide (in which it ruled that there is none), various groups filed briefs in support of such a right, with one saying “the cost effectiveness of hastened death is as undeniable as gravity. The earlier a patient dies, the less costly is his or her care.”
Another said, “Managed care and managed death [through physician-assisted suicide] are less expensive than fee-for-service care and extended survival. Less expensive is better.”
And other countries have been pushing suicide as a way to balance their health care budgets (always in the guise of humane reasons).
All of this talk rests on the assumption that there is a correct amount of money to be spent on healthcare. The left is constantly bemoaning the fact that the U.S. spends too much, compared to other industrialized nations, and that the government must impose price controls. Even President Donald Trump has proposed effectively importing European price controls on prescription drugs to cut healthcare costs.
But this concern about spending “too much” applies only when the government is picking up the tab and decides that there are better uses for those funds. Nobody complains that the U.S. spends “too much” on cars, or entertainment, or vacations, even though all involve tradeoffs.
In a free market, it’s individuals who make decisions about such tradeoffs for themselves and their families. If they want to spend down their life savings, or borrow money, or mount a GoFundMe campaign, to provide for grandma’s end-of-life care, that’s their and their grandma’s choice.
Not fair, the left says. Healthcare is different! Money shouldn’t factor into healthcare decisions! Healthcare is a universal right! And, so, they’d much rather have some bureaucrat make life-and-death decisions “for the greater good.”
Canada shows us where this thinking leads. It’s a dead end. Literally.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
I & I Editorial Board
The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.