Governments murdering people to save on healthcare

Medically assisted suicide could in theory be a good thing - Switzerland was the only country to allow it for decades, but it had nothing to do with Euthanasia. A person in Switzerland seeking medically assisted suicide:

• must do so out of their own initiative
• absolutely no one else may suggest it, let alone encourage it
• the suicide candidate must undergo an extensive examination to establish the motivation
• most commonly, this path is chosen by those who are incurably ill
• no one who might profit from the person's death may be involved in any way
• a doctor provides a poison that will lead to a painless death
• the person wanting to commit suicide must personally take this poison
• even the suggestion to push people to commit suicide to "save money" for the healthcare system is unthinkable and has never been part of the conversation

The Swiss system is based on the recognition that government cannot legitimately prevent a person from choosing to die on his or her own terms and that suicides happen anyway, but can be botched and dangerous or traumatizing to others, e.g.  jumping in front of trains or from bridges. There's a famous suicide bridge in the heart of the city of Lausanne, the Pont Bessières, which passes 23 m over a city street, which implies a guaranteed death on impact. 

There was a graffiti on a building on the lower street, Rue Centrale, next to the bridge, painted like a traffic warning sign - a triangle with a white background and a red border - with a falling person and the label "Attention, chute d'espoir" (warning: falling hope)

So the Swiss assisted suicide law merely wanted to give desperate people a chance to chose a decent way out - or ideally a conversation that might actually change their mind.

For decades, people who were severely ill traveled to Switzerland to take advantage of this option.

This is how anti-suicide organizations view and present it:

https://www.suicideinfo.ca/csp-statement-on-the-physician-assisted-death/

Unfortunately, that is not how most governments saw it when they started talking about or introducing medically-assisted suicide.

The "healthcare" and "cost" debate

In most countries, suicide is illegal, because governments view the people they rule over as their property. There was a shift, over time, as socialist governments were forced to realize that actually providing the healthcare that they promised in exchange for exorbitant taxes cost them a lot of that sweet, sweet money they would prefer to use for something else, like paying off active voter blocks.

Here is a summary of the changing discourse based on the Canadian example with its socialist "free healthcare for everyone" promise.

They started complaining about "a tiny percentage of old people representing a huge share of the cost" - as a transparent attempt to separate those useless non-voters from the voters who were most interested in a socialist healthcare system - to talking about "medically assisted suicide" - euthanasia - as cost saving measure and now arrived at the idea of murdering minors without even informing their parents:

The first step was a US study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1998. This was all still very theoretical:

In 2012, the Toronto Star - still a somewhat independent newspaper, back then - criticized the plan of medically assisted suicide by accurately pointing out that this opened the door to abusing the elderly:

By 2016, the Canadian media had become an agency of the government and the discourse had entirely shifted to the issue of cost, which had risen exponentially, as in any socialist healthcare system, but they were careful to blame only a "small minority" for the high cost. An absurd claim - the cost of the entire healthcare system is enormous, but it is useful for government to find a scapegoat they can blame instead of their own mismanagement and the inevitable cost explosion of any socialist system.

By 2017, the media focused on concrete numbers of the potential savings, which someone in government apparently had calculated - just a random estimate. What they wanted were some tall numbers to convince people that they might actually end up paying lower taxes. A ridiculous lie: even if they saved 100% of all the medical expenses, they would not refund a single cent of tax payer money. They'd just "fund" some other vote-buying scheme.

The reason they had to find some a way to reduce strain on the system was obvious - it is clearly collapsing in slow motion, as in all socialist systems, the demand outpaces the supply. So instead of  direct financial cost, people end up with very long waiting periods that get so long that people start dying before seeing a doctor:

In the UK, the hidden waiting list has now exceeded 10 million patients:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11159755/NHS-waiting-list-10million-patients-stuck-hidden-queues-analysis-suggests.html

This leads to unpleasant headlines in all countries with socialist healthcare:

So bring on the euthanasia to lower healthcare spending and the system overload!

Canada prepares law to authorize euthanasia

In June 2022, the Canadian government under Trudeau, a Marxist, passed the first reading of a law to authorize "medically assisted suicide" aka euthanasia:

It's not just the healthcare cost - it's also about saving money on pensions:

Naturally, left-wing media would never accept that euthanasia is a logical outcome of socialized medicine - instead, they will claim that there is just not enough socialism!

There's never "enough socialism", as the increase of socialism automatically increases the problems it generates.

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/people/diabetic-woman-died-after-coma-benefits-stopped-employment-support-allowance-sanction/

Escalation

Although the law is not yet passed, they already started "offering" euthanasia to people with severe depression or experiencing financial difficulties:

They won't stop with depressed adults - the new law authorizes euthanasia for people 18 or older. Now they wonder if they could allow underage children to decide to get euthanized - even without informing their parents!

Their main concern are the "potentially serious consequences for practitioners and institutions themselves", i.e. that enraged parents might actually attack those who murdered their children.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30242079/

California, tu quoque

California also passed a euthanasia bill and the media were hard at work to increase "public support", but the question asked was obviously about people with incurable diseases - something anyone with empathy should agree on - not the wider use as euthanasia for patients generating costs for the government healthcare system...

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/05/california-legalizes-assisted-suicide-amid-growing-support-for-such-laws/ft_15-10-05_assistedsuicide_support/