Most Canadians are very proud of their government-run single payer system. But as I have blogged about before, their taxes are very high. And they have wait time problems. One of my friends in Canada who is a fan of the blog and the podcast just had to travel to America to pay $24,000 out of pocket for a knee replacement. The alternative would have been to wait 2 years for it.

Anyway, Canada has figured an interesting way to cut costs and reduce wait times.

Here is an article about it from a leftist writer at Common Sense:

In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional. In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act. MAiD was now the law of the land. Anyone who could show that their death was “reasonably foreseeable” was eligible.

[…]There have been a total of 31,664 MAiD deaths and the large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died.

[…]Today, thousands of people who could live for many years are applying—successfully—to kill themselves.

Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths.

It’s not just for old, disabled people. The law is actually being used to end the lives of children now:

Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors.” According to Canada’s Department of Justice, parents are generally “entitled to make treatment decisions on their children’s behalf. The mature minor doctrine, however, allows children deemed sufficiently mature to make their own treatment decisions.”

This is similar to how depressed children can decide to transform if they think that will help them. You have to wonder where the money is coming from for all of this child-directed “health care”.

Hugh Scher, an attorney… told me: “While other countries have explored extending assisted suicide to minors, those governments have insisted on substantial safeguards, including parental notification and consent. Canada is poised to become the most permissive euthanasia regime in the world, including for minors and people with only psychiatric illness, having already removed the foreseeability of death or terminal illness as an essential condition to access euthanasia or assisted suicide.”

Isn’t socialism wonderful?

What does the government of Canada think about reducing the costs of their single-payer system by eliminating sick people?

In October 2020, the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer issued a report stating that MAiD would cut healthcare costs by over $66 million. In 2017, Aaron Trachtenberg, a research fellow and a doctor at the University of Manitoba, and Braden Manns, a health economist and nephrologist at the University of Calgary, published a paper predicting that MAiD could slash healthcare costs by as much as $100 million yearly.

Daily Caller notes:

The broad eligibility has led to more than 10,000 Canadians being euthanized in the most recent year for which data is available, making it the sixth leading cause of death in the country, the AP reported.

Some disabled Canadians are choosing to be euthanized not because of their disability, but because of mounting medical debts, the AP found.

Sean Tagert, a 41-year-old man suffering from ALS, opted for euthanasia in 2019 in part because he couldn’t keep up with high costs to allow him to continue living at home with caretakers, according to AP. Roger Foley, a man hospitalized in Ontario with a degenerative brain disease, was told by one staffer that it would cost $1,500 per day to keep him alive in the hospital before mentioning euthanasia, the outlet reported.

But I thought Canadian health care was “free”?

By the way, if you’re looking at the chart above, and wondering what the number of “medically-assisted deaths” is for 2021, far-left CTV News reported on that:

More Canadians are ending their lives with a medically-assisted death, says the third federal annual report on medical assistance in dying (MAID). Data shows that 10,064 people died in 2021 with medical aid, an increase of 32 per cent over 2020.

There isn’t a single secular leftist on the planet who has a problem with this. It’s survival of the fittest all the way for them.

I find this very concerning. It’s important for voters to understand the cost of single-payer health care. There is a reason why health care is not one of the legitimate functions of government, according to the Constitution. Monopolies don’t work for consumers.