In socialist systems, where human rights are either restricted, ignored, or abandoned outright, human beings go from being citizens to subjects and, in time, to serfs. T'was ever thus, and always will be. Now, while Canada isn't completely communistic - yet - their health care system is certainly reflecting many of the faults of socialism. Canadians who can afford to are coming south to the United States with health issues. Canadians who can't afford to are increasingly dealing with rationing of care, long waiting lists, and insufficient care in general.
It gets worse. Over the last ten years, Canada has had what they call Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, which was sold as an easy way out for people with agonizing and terminal illnesses. But these kinds of things inevitably expand, and that's what's happening in Canada now, where about five percent of all deaths are by MAID. And you can't tell me that five percent of Canadians suffer from an agonizing and terminal illness.
And yet, here we are. A recent editorial at Issues & Insights has the brutal facts and numbers.
In Canada, if your doctor refers you to a specialist, you’ll likely have to wait 15 weeks to get an appointment. Then another 13 weeks to get treated. Just getting an MRI will take 4 1/2 months, on average. But if you want to kill yourself? You can get a same-day appointment.
Welcome to the healthcare system that Bernie Sanders and his socialist pals want to import into the U.S.
A decade ago, Canada legalized “Medical Assistance in Dying,” or MAID. At first it was limited to those whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable,” such as end-stage terminal cancer patients. Five years later, it was expanded to those whose “death is not reasonably foreseeable.” People with a disability or non-terminal illnesses could get a doctor to snuff them out. Lawmakers expanded it again to include those suffering solely from a mental illness, which the government expects to implement next year.
There you have it. Canada has seen fit to do the unthinkable: Euthanize physically healthy people who are suffering from mental illnesses. They have already expanded it to those whose "death is not reasonably foreseeable," which is bad enough.
I&I presents a couple of examples:
MAID is already big business in Canada. Nearly 100,000 Canadians have availed themselves of this form of “healthcare,” and it now accounts for more than 5% of all deaths in the country.
And the government seems to be doing everything it can to make it a runaway hit. Lawmakers waived the 10-day waiting period for those whose deaths “are reasonably foreseeable,” and the rest have to wait only 90 days.
The result is that same-day or next-day killings are common, which one member of the MAID Death Review Committee said “reveals remarkable fast‐tracking of euthanasia.”
“One elderly woman declined MAID and preferred palliative care,” he wrote. “When a hospice placement request was rejected, her husband, who had been assessed as struggling with ‘caregiver burnout’ asked for an urgent MAID assessment. She was euthanized that day.”
Same-day or next-day? Yes, indeed. An elderly woman who wanted to live was killed on her husband's word. While we're on the topic: Let's dispense with the "euthanized" horse squeeze, shall we? This woman was murdered because her husband was tired of taking care of her.
There's more:
Nor does the state appear to care much about enforcing its own rules.
The Toronto Globe and Mail this week reported on a case involving a 45-year-old who suffered from Crohn’s disease, whose doctor approved him for death at a meeting in a coffee shop, and then followed up with dozens of text messages encouraging him to go through with the euthanasia, including one bashing family members who opposed him committing suicide. The doctor even drove him to the facility to administer the fatal drug cocktail.
This doctor hectored and coerced this patient into agreeing to this state-sponsored murder. The doctor counseled the patient to ignore the wishes of their own family. That's criminal by any sane definition.
Read More: Canada on Pace to Hit Historic Milestone of 100K Deaths — by Legally Assisted Suicide
What Dems and the Left Want for America - Canadian Woman Waits 12 Hours in the Emergency Room
Many of us have dealt with friends and family who were in dire medical straits. I can offer some examples from my own family. My mother lived about the last ten years of her life in severe pain from rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis. She was in such severe pain that she wore a fentanyl patch on her back 24/7, and was still in pain. Her doctor told her that her spine was a stack of rice cakes. My father cared for her with love and tender compassion until he died; then the rest of the family pitched in, and until she died, Mom never stopped taking joy in her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And then, there's my wife, who has a heart condition that requires specialized - and expensive - medicines to manage, and may have a reduced lifespan even so. But she continues to take great joy in every day in our Alaskan home, whether it be 70 degrees outside, or 30 below, rain, snow, or sun; her love for the Valley and the Great Land makes the health issues worth dealing with.
In Canada, both of them very likely would have been pushed to allow their doctors to kill them.
This is the inevitable end state of socialized medicine. Patients stop being patients; they stop being people. They become numbers, and when the numbers are inconvenient, they become disposable. That's not how medicine is supposed to work. That's not how a healthy society is supposed to work. And yet... This is, now, how Canada works.
