The problem isn't that the urgent request went through, it's that she requested hospice or palliative care and was denied. And, let's be honest, POA should not be sufficient to euthanize a person who is awake, aware, and revoked consent.
"Do no harm" has been replaced with "put them down if it's cheaper and we can get away with it"
That's a separate problem from the parent post, and the point of my post was that her husband requested the decision on the assisted death, not the government.
I didn't mean to suggest that the government is going to hide under people's beds and stab them in their sleep if they get sick.
The government is responsible for funding every aspect of this process, though. It regulates the controls and rubrics over who gets what kind of care. The husband may have instigated it, but the system is broken if a person eligible for euthanasia isn't eligible for palliative care or hospice.
Most importantly, I continue to contend that MAID is turning into something that isn't what Canadians voted for. It is, however, turning into something that its opponents feared might come to pass.
Thats how I read it as well. The deeper issue is that he shouldn’t even be able to contact them when they deemed her lucid enough to not be eligible just a day earlier, especially when they were keen enough to notice he was burned out.
Separately, why do these services have to move so quickly? It seems like it’s either glacially slow in other countries where people pass before even finishing the paperwork, or insanely fast like in this case. There really should be a balance.
Since we're talking about Canada, ostensibly the government, as the provider of healthcare, wants it to be inexpensive enough that the citizens have a first-world level of care... as opposed to euthanizing sick people because it's easier than providing hospice or expensive treatment.
After all, using the monopoly power of government and taxation is meant to be more efficient and provide more services at lower costs.
A cynical person might presume that MAID is being used as a cost savings measure more than an empathetic alternative for those who do not wish to wait to die of natural causes.
Are the headlines the tip of the iceberg, or the exceptions that gain notoriety? When the government and health care system are so deeply intertwined, who has access to the data but not an incentive to obscure the facts? With any luck, time will tell.
Oh, mostly just the hospitals, the insurers, the medical device manufacturers, the pharmacy benefits managers, the pharmaceutical companies, the group purchasing organizations, and the clearinghouses. Everyone who can take a bigger cut if there’s more money sloshing around the industry.
