What Happens When Medical Assistance In Dying Is Cheaper than Health Care?

Canada is finding out. Vaughn Palmer: Too many people are dying on B.C.'s cancer-care waiting lists

It costs a lot of money to treat cancer patients. In Canada there are not a lot of choices so there are long waiting lists. So long, that sometimes all hope for treatment is lost while waiting. Then they offer MAID, or Medical Assistance in Dying.

I can't wait until we have socialized medicine!

Those horror stories and others have been reported by a number of B.C. news outlets recently.

Katie DeRosa, who wrote up several cases for Postmedia, says that after each was published, she was contacted by others — patients, families, survivors — with similar stories to tell.

Together these stories amount to a shocking indictment of the state of cancer care in B.C. [British Columbia], one that the New Democrats are struggling to rationalize.

The bureaucrats are pulling out statistics that they hope will prove, "All is well." They aren't convincing everyone.

But it doesn’t take many stories about patients shelling out tens of thousands of dollars of their own money for care in the U.S. — or stories about people choosing death because they can’t endure the pain of waiting — to swamp the impact of all the graphs and charts in the minister’s technical briefings.

There is something drastically wrong with the state of cancer care in B.C., as Premier David Eby has pretty much conceded of late.

The article starts out by detailing several of these anecdotal stories.

It is certainly one way to save money, just not a way that the people of Canada are behind.