On "Euthanasia" or active assisted dying in Canada / Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID)
As I keep seeing outrage about this topic washing into my timeline again and again, including today, but rarely if ever hitting what I consider the core of the problem, here are a few thoughts:
In and of itself, there is nothing objectionable about active assisted dying if it corresponds to the wishes of those affected. Quite the contrary, I can imagine various health problems with which I wouldn't want to continue living either.
The rub only emerges when - as in Canada - the healthcare system is a state monopoly. (Canada is somewhere between the German GKV* and the British NHS on that spectrum).
When every person is forced to pay into a common fund, this budget is missing from people's own healthcare provision / private insurance. In the end, an anonymous bureaucracy decides which treatments and measures are covered - and thus ultimately over life and death.
Under this premise, a decision for euthanasia is NEVER truly a personal weighing of treatment burden, quality of life, risk, etc. made of one's own free will.
This affects state healthcare systems btw. even below the "euthanasia threshold." The weighing of which health risks one is willing to insure against by permanently paying xy âŦ into insurance, or which ones you'd rather say "better to live well now and just yeet if I get cancer" - that must be decided by each person for themselves. Anything else is absolutely dystopian.
State healthcare systems are morally absolutely appalling.
*GKV (Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung): Germany's mandatory statutory health insurance system covering about 90% of the population.
