Whether MAID accounts for 1% or 4% of total Canadian deaths, the report said that the financial savings will be significant and will far exceed the expenses to facilitate the MAID program, which are estimated at $1.5 million to $14.8 million in direct costs.
According to the report, 80% of patients who will opt for MAID will have cancer, 50% will be aged 60–80 years, 55% will be men, and 60% of patients will have their lives shortened by one month while 40% of patients will have their lives shortened by one week.
The report said that though they “are not suggesting medical assistance in dying as a measure to cut costs,” their analyses “suggest that the savings will almost certainly exceed the costs associated with offering medical assistance in dying to patients across the country and that the inclusion of medical assistance in dying in the services covered by universal health care will … release funds to be reinvested elsewhere.”
What is the Catholic position?
Lucia Silecchia, a law professor specializing in Catholic social thought at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., told CNA that evaluation of assisted suicide in terms of potential money to be saved pose a grave threat to human life.
“Discussions focusing on the money saved if someone takes his or her life prematurely commodifies human life in a view that values efficiency and usefulness over the innate dignity of innocent human life,” she said. “This can lead those at their most vulnerable to believe that a MAID statute does not merely create a so-called ‘right’ to die but may even impose an unwritten ‘duty’ to do so.”
“To justify or advocate for the taking of life to save money places a price tag on priceless human persons,” she went on. “It sends the message that some lives are worth saving, and others are not.”
Silecchia said that end-of-life medical care is a nuanced topic that demands serious consideration, beginning from the perspective of valuing and protecting human life.
“Taking innocent human life — one’s own or another’s — is impermissible,” she said. “However, it is not morally required to pursue every possibility of extraordinary care — or what Pope John Paul II called ‘extraordinary or disproportionate means’ — when to do so is medically futile or the potential benefits are not justified by the burden. This is a question that requires far more attention and discussion.”
When it comes to Canada’s MAID program and other assisted suicide programs, Silecchia said that they are “based on a false sense of compassion for a person who is suffering greatly.”
“True compassion involves a willingness to bear the sufferings, or passion, of another with them,” she said. “MAID, instead, takes life from such a person and is, in the words of John Paul II, a ‘false mercy’ and a ‘grave violation of the law of God.’”
(Story continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter
According to Silecchia, studies have shown that “those who opt for MAID do so not because of excruciating physical pain but because they fear being a burden or loss of dignity.”
“It is in providing care, support, and love for those who suffer and in rethinking our conception of what a ‘dignified’ life and a ‘dignified’ death entail that attention must be paid,” she said.
Is assisted suicide legal in the U.S.?
Assisted suicide is legal in 10 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The states where assisted suicide is legal are California, Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.
Silecchia said that she expects “high-profile battles about this legislation in numerous states” in the “next year or two.”
As recently as this month, Catholic and pro-life groups in New York and Massachusetts have been urging citizens to oppose assisted suicide laws currently being considered in their states.