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I'm not sure if the economic angle is convincing, since Canada spends over $300B a year on healthcare [0]. Are you suggesting MAID was introduced to save "as m

• LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  No, it was intended to save a lot more. Like Civil Forfeiture, the medical system should never see a single cent "saved" via suicide. Because otherwise, yes, we're saying we think they'd optimize for it.
• carapace 4y ago
  The economic angle is convincing only to sociopaths. Sane people don't kill people to save money.
  • loeg 4y ago
    > Sane people don't kill people to save money. Of course, that isn't true in the abstract. Some number of people die in the US annually for lack of government spending on healthcare, and presumably we could spend less and kill more people, or vice versa. Government healthcare systems are kind of fundamentally a tradeoff between spending and saving lives.
    • josephcsible 4y ago
      There's a difference between killing someone and not saving someone's life.
      • MockObject 4y ago
        On a spreadsheet, they look quite the same.
        • josephcsible 4y ago
          Does this mean you should always pull the lever in the trolley problem?
      • loeg 4y ago
        That seems like a philosophical argument.
        • josephcsible 4y ago
          Sure, but believing them to be the same is also a philosophical argument.
        • carapace 4y ago
          You're not sick, or old yet. It gets less philosophical the longer you live.
  • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    The hubris is astounding. Pick up a history book and lay your eyes upon the horrors that have been enacted by "good people". Literally every organization over a few hundred people where everyone is mostly just optimizing for their KPIs within their role behaves like a sociopath.
    • carapace 4y ago
      > The hubris is astounding. Who me? You have no idea... > Pick up a history book and lay your eyes upon the horrors that have been enacted by "good people". I am a keen student of history, that's part of the reason I seldom leave the house. I know what people are like. It seems to me that we are recovering from some disaster that deranged us in the prehistoric past. My favorite theory was the Younger Dryas comet impact, but I've gone off that recently. But it doesn't matter. Maybe our hominid past was itself sufficiently traumatic, and the condition we are recovering from is the human condition. > Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being. ~Robert Anton Wilson The horrors of the past do not justify the horrors of the present, they motivate the ongoing process of becoming a sane and mature sentient species.
• SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  I would suggest that, just as Canada decided they had to remove the “reasonably foreseeable death” criterion in response to a court decision, they’ll find some financial pressure in the future that forces them to expand MAiD programs. It’s likely to sound less like “we ought to kill some people to save money” and more like “here’s a great revenue-neutral idea for expanding access to the important MAiD program”. If handing out lethal injections is considered to be no big deal, I don’t see how the Canadian healthcare system could avoid these pressures. You can’t make just one deal with the devil.