The Cost-Cutting Expedient of Medical Assistance in Dying for the Elderly Ill

"MAID [Medial Assistance in Dying] has already become in Canada a form of elder care."

"The people who are dying from [Canada's] MAID are disproportionately vulnerable. They're disproportionately disabled. They're disproportionately elderly."

"It is very difficult to not see assisted suicide or euthanasia as some sort of escape hatch. Or maybe overflow valve is a better way of putting it."

"When you have long wait times and sick populations, it's very difficult when you have a legalized pathway of suicide that does not become a tempting program." 

Alexander Raikin, fellow in bioethics and American democracy, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington

 

"It's not even hypothetical. It's Canada today,"

"[There are] news stories of people who don't even have a lethal condition."

"They go in for a potentially disabling condition, and they're referred for MAID, because their condition's expensive."

Lyman Stone, demographer, Pronatalism Initiative, Institute for Family Studies 

New research suggest medically assisted dying could result in substantial savings. But the study's author says costs should not be considered when individual patients consider the option. (Chris Kreussling)

 

Public health systems in both Canada and the United States have for far too long been facing unsustainable delays in delivering critical health care to their ailing and elderly citizens. It can take months for a referral to a specialist to become a reality. Patients are left dangling, awaiting treatment and surgery. Wait times mean that people suffer longer, their condition deteriorates, sometimes to the point of no return. And while needed surgeries burden an ever-slower delivery time for anxious people requiring attention to prolong their lives, one service is able to swiftly accommodate those who wish to access it and are given help in doing just that, by the medical community.

 

This is the finality of treatment offered by Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying. Its adherents are passionate about its purpose as they see it, reducing pain and suffering for those whose deaths are imminent due to an incurable or unmanageable stage of a disease. End-of-life issues such as the voluntary choice for closure is of massive importance to those in society who believe it is the human, charitable thing to do; offer people the medical means to leave life. And they want that offer to be extended; to those whose mental anguish as well as physical stem from psychiatric conditions.

 

In Canada, people have been known to make that final choice as a result of the misery their life has become; dispirited beyond reckoning by endemic poverty,  homelessness, illness. Ethicists place themselves in either side of the issue, many of them uncertain whether this is the moral path that should be proffered to those eager to take advantage of it. Or choosing that path because they cannot foresee any other choice that could alleviate their pain and suffering. 

 

The MacDonald Laurier Institute

 

Now another issue comes to the fore in the argument, the fear that as health care costs continue to rise, and the medical community remains hard pressed to serve the needs of a growing population, might MAID be viewed as a health-service cost-cutting device? MAID is an option for adults whose deaths are reasonably foreseeable, for those suffering from an irremediable condition. Those with mental illnesses are set to be included in another year. In 2024, 16,499 individuals chose MAID to end their lives; that was 5.1 percent of Canadian deaths; the numbers rise year-over-year. One in 20 Canadian deaths are now attributable to MAID.

 

 Medical aid in dying laws, allowing for prescribed drugs for patients with a death prognosis within six months is available in the United States in 14 states. Data indicate that 1,242 people took advantage of that prescribed aid-in-dying medication in 2024. Now, demographers and health experts feel that MAID may become an increasingly advantageously grotesque way to curb the growing cost of elder care, as the number of elderly citizens reaching their final years continue to mount.

 

Canadians over 85 years of age represent the swiftest growing segment in the country and that number is forecasted to double and more, over the following  several decades. There were 58 million U.S. citizens over age 65 in 2022, a number that will explode to about 82 million by 2050. In both the United States and Canada, seniors are expected in short order to represent close to a quarter of the entire population. 

 

An ambulance is shown at the emergency department entrance at the Windsor Regional Hospital Met campus. Photo by Dan Janisse /Windsor Star