Euthanasia is all about the money

By Dr. Vernon Coleman

From `They Want to Kill Us’ by Jack King.

The euthanasia scam is being sold as an exercise in kindness.

“The good news is that we can help you avoid pain and distress and save your family from the agony of seeing you decline slowly. By helping you to commit suicide, we bypass all that pain and take you straight to the closing credits.”

That’s all nonsense, I’m afraid.

Euthanasia is all about money. It has been established that the average annual healthcare cost per person for individuals in their last year of life is 14 times as high as for those not in their last year of life.

As a result, money is being diverted from health care and palliative care into ‘Voluntary Assisted Dying’ programmes (also known as “state-sponsored deaths”) which are designed to cut health care costs. It is a lot cheaper to kill people than it is to provide palliative care.

And, even more significantly, euthanasia programmes are being introduced in order to cut pension costs.

It is no secret that all developed countries are facing huge pension problems.

Many of those who receive State pensions believe (quite erroneously) that the money they have paid in taxes has been put aside to pay their pensions. In reality, of course, pension programmes are simply huge Ponzi schemes. The State pensions which are being paid today are paid out of today’s taxes. And, in twenty years’ time, the pensions which are paid out will be paid out of the taxes which are paid by workers in twenty years’ time. If the size of the aged population can be cut, the annual savings will be measured in billions of dollars.

After thousands of elderly people were murdered in hospitals and care homes during the lockdowns, politicians boasted with glee that the financial savings, in unpaid pensions, would be huge. The more people they kill, the more money they’ll save.

Let us all be honest about it: the pro-euthanasia programme is nothing to do with people’s rights or with reducing pain or distress: it is, inevitably perhaps, all about money.

There are many ways in which the UK’s National Health Service could save money. Sacking 20% of all the administrators would make no difference to the quality of care provided and would cut billions from the annual bill. Driving a harder bargain with drug companies would also save billions. And cutting waste would save billions too.

But none of these cost-cutting schemes is as popular with bureaucrats as the introduction of legal euthanasia.

Rt. Rev. Iain Greenshields, moderator of the Church of Scotland has said that he is concerned that letting terminally ill patients legally end their lives would permanently change the NHS.

“Is this really the way we wish to see precious caring resource directed? Given the pressure on healthcare resources, we are also very concerned that assisted dying could be seen as providing an opportunity for cost saving.”

Rev. Greenshields also said that passing a law approving of legally assisted dying “profoundly changes relationships not only between health professionals and patients, but also within families. We are concerned that, should assisted dying be legalised, the way our society views older people and those with disabilities will, over time, become more utilitarian.”

And the Rev. Greenshields said that even with strict conditions in place, opening floodgates by passing any version of the law (to allow assisted dying) would likely result in later expansion.

The fear among many is that legally approved suicide would result in a massive increase in the number of people seeking assisted suicide due to poverty, homelessness or mental anguish. In Canada, more than a quarter of voters said that the poor and homeless should be allowed to end their lives with Medical Assistance in Dying (“MAID”). And there can be no doubt that legally assisted suicide would be used to solve immigrant and asylum seeker problems, and to deal with perceived over-crowding and overpopulation problems.

It is naïve to assume that legally approved suicide would be restricted to helping the terminally, terminally ill to find a painless death.

Anyone who denies that all this is happening is either ignorant or hiding the truth in order to defend their enthusiasm for legally approved suicide.

“The take-away point is that there may be some upfront costs associated with offering medically assisted dying to Canadians, but there may also be a reduction in spending elsewhere in the system and therefore offering medical assistance in dying to Canadians will not cost the health care system anything extra,” said Aaron Trachtenberg, a resident in internal medicine and one of the authors of a report on assisted dying in Canada.

Astonishingly, a widely quoted Canadian report also stated that “Hospital-based care costs the health care system more than a comprehensive palliative care system where we could help people achieve their goal of dying at home.”

I found this astonishing for it seemed to assume that dying (whether by suicide or not) was an inevitable part of palliative care.

Everywhere in the world, administrators and doctors are drawing attention to the financial advantages that euthanasia can offer.

It is no secret that looking after the disabled, the frail and the elderly can be expensive. Politicians and the promoters of euthanasia claim that the provision of benefits, special buildings and staff means that providing care has become a huge financial burden for national and local governments and for health care providers. The seriously disabled have to be provided with either comprehensive home care and support or with institutional care, usually in a purpose-built building with many, highly trained (and therefore expensive) staff members. As populations have grown in size, so the number of people requiring care and the cost of providing that care has increased massively. And, of course, the seriously disabled individuals themselves are unlikely to be able to do anything to help themselves or to do productive work.

For many years now, the task of providing care for the disabled has been gradually but deliberately moved from governments to voluntary groups. And yet the burden of the costs (often pushed higher by red tape, bureaucratic demands, minimum wages and so on) mean that facilities struggle to cope. Volunteers should be talking to patients, arranging flowers and generally making life better. Instead, they are doing the cleaning and the washing up.

The provision of palliative care has suffered probably more than any other type of care, and administrators and doctors are now openly drawing attention to the real financial advantages which accrue if patients are persuaded to kill themselves (or, since many such patients may be physically incapable of killing themselves, to allow themselves to be killed).

None of this has come as a great surprise, of course.

Campaigners speaking on behalf of the disabled have for many decades warned that the legalisation of assisted suicide, and the extension of the legal boundaries, would lead to society devaluing the lives of people who are disabled (or frail, or elderly or anyone incapable of looking after themselves) and would make the disabled feel that they had a responsibility to kill themselves since their lives weren’t worth living and they were taking up much-needed resources. The usually unspoken fear was that patients would be made to feel guilty if they didn’t kill themselves (or allow themselves to be killed).

And all this is now happening. And it is happening very rapidly.

Death is now seen as a viable alternative to costly and inevitably futile medical treatment.

A paper which appeared in the Canadian Medical Journal drew attention to this possibility very vividly. The authors concluded that Medically Assisted Death could reduce annual health spending by between $34.7 million and $136.8 million. (I always find it difficult to have any respect when such a wide range is offered. It suggests to me that the figures are no more than a guess.)

Moreover, it was pointed out that these savings would outweigh the estimated cost of implementing medically assisted dying by a considerable sum with the cost of offering euthanasia on a wide scale being estimated at between $1.5 million and $14.8 million. (Once again, I had to check the figures since that seems to me to be a very wide range.)

Naturally, the authors of the report stressed that saving money should not be a consideration when considering whether a patient should live or die. But I am not the only observer to fear that this was merely an attempt to avoid official responsibility for the endless series of dilemmas which will now ensue and which will, I fear, be decided by people who are not unduly troubled by ethical niceties.

If the State wants a cull of the disabled, the incompetent, the frail, the elderly and the mentally ill then the State will have no difficulty in finding the people prepared to provide the cull.

Long waiting lists (getting longer in Canada as everywhere else), the effective rationing of medical services (with many operations only available for those who can pay privately) will mean that the pressure to execute euthanasia programmes on a wide scale will probably be well supported by the general public.

Suggesting that doctors and bureaucrats should not take financial problems into account is at best naïve and cynical. Doctors and bureaucrats already take cost into account, and it is now common for life-saving drugs to be unused simply because they cost too much.

The reality is that euthanasia is largely about saving money.

The slippery slope that campaigners have been warning about is very real. And we are already part of the way down the slope and we are moving faster down the slope each day.

The disabled and the elderly are now widely regarded as of little or no financial value.

Money has always had a much bigger effect on health and social care policies than is generally accepted. For example, in Britain, long-stay residential homes for the mentally ill were closed because of political correctness. The result was that countless thousands of individuals who could not look after themselves were thrown out into the “community.” A lack of services and help means that these unhappy souls now spend their days sitting in parks and bus shelters. They would spend their days in the public libraries except that there aren’t many of those anymore. In reality, of course, this had nothing to do with political correctness. It was all about the money that could be saved.

The main reasons that people don’t agree with the legalisation of euthanasia are a fear that vulnerable groups will be killed (or will be expected to put themselves forward in a Captain Oates sort of way to save money and resources) and a feeling that a doctor’s role is to heal people and not to kill them. (Captain Lawrence Oates was the Antarctic Explorer who in 1912, when suffering from frostbite and gangrene, walked out into the snow, leaving his three companions in their tent in the hope that by doing so he would increase their chances of survival. He chose death rather than the prospect of being a burden on his companions. As he left the tent Oates said: ‘I am going outside and may be some time.’ It was his birthday.)

Independent studies and surveys have repeatedly shown that less than 10% of people support legalisation, and when they do, they do so largely because they are wrongly convinced that euthanasia can prevent inevitable and unavoidable pain and suffering during terminal illnesses.

Finally, there is one other reason why the establishment is so keen on euthanasia: it will release a good many organs for use. Two controversial researchers (Dr. David Shaw an ethicist at the Universities of Basel and Maastricht and Professor Alec Morton, a health economist) have argued that killing terminally ill patients would release organs for transplantation – as well as saving money. They argue that changing the legislation to allow more assisted suicide would benefit the people who want to die and the larger general population.

The two authors wrote: “Organ donation could also benefit because there are several reasons why donation, after assisted dying, is better from a clinical and economic perspective. First, if patients are denied assisted dying, organ function will gradually deteriorate until they died naturally, meaning that transplantation is less likely to be successful. Second, patients who choose assisted dying have to go through a lengthy process and organ donation can be easily integrated into that process.”

It has been revealed in Canada that the legalisation of assisted suicide has led to the open solicitation of those considering medically assisted death. In one instance, a chronically ill man was denied health care at home and offered an assisted suicide. There is no little irony in the fact that patients being encouraged to die might themselves be saved if they were considered important enough to be treated as organ recipients rather than as organ donors.

Dr. Moira McQueen, executive director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute said that a primary physician “might well suggest organ donation as, if not an incentive, kind of ‘consolation’ for the person’s own loss of life.”

Since organ transplantation is extremely expensive, and health services are cutting costs, it is inevitable that the organs taken from patients who have been murdered by the State will be reserved for politicians, bureaucrats and others who are regarded as, and treated as, important individuals.

Please excuse my cynicism. I have been practising medicine for a long time and I know how the system works.

Note: The essay above was taken (with permission) from Jack King’s book `They Want to Kill Us’ which is available as a paperback and an eBook from Amazon. You will almost certainly not be able to buy it from a bookshop or any other online seller. Please buy copies and distribute them to friends, doctors, journalists, politicians and others who need educating. (I’ve bought and distributed scores of copies so far and intend to buy and share more.) It will be too late to do anything about the euthanasia threat when you’re lying in bed and your friendly, smiling Doctor of Death approaches you and slips a needle into your arm for a far-from-pain-free death.

Please read the book to find out the extent of the horrors associated with euthanasia. CLICK HERE if you want to buy a copy. Also please share my video entitled `They Want to Kill You. Here’s how they’ll do it’, which you can access from the VIDEO button on http://www.vernoncoleman.com I’m not allowed to use or access any of the social media platforms so please share the video wherever you can. You can also CLICK HERE to see the video. Again, please share the video or the book widely because time is running out.

About the Dr. Vernon Coleman

Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc practised medicine for ten years. He has been a full-time professional author for over 30 years. He is a novelist and campaigning writer and has written many non-fiction books.  He has written over 100 books which have been translated into 22 languages. On his website, www.vernoncoleman.com,  there are hundreds of articles which are free to read.

There are no ads, no fees and no requests for donations on Dr. Coleman’s website or videos. He pays for everything through book sales. If you want to help finance his work, please just buy a book – there are over 100 books by Vernon Coleman in print on Amazon.