Comment by sarchertech
3 days ago
That’s the problem. If there’s a financial incentive people will find way to push it.
That’s my biggest concern about assisted suicide for an otherwise healthy person who just wants to avoid the inevitable decline (as in this case). There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this.
The only way I can see to remove that would be to require that your estate can’t go to anyone who potentially has influence over you in the case of assisted suicide for with no terminal illness.
Yet you don't see insurance companies hiring snipers to get rid of their oldest customers. Maybe the solution is to prosecute those who would push MAID too aggressively as we would those who push to suicide.
Their most expensive customers are not the oldest ones, it’s the ones getting targeted genetic treatment for cancer denied. They don’t need snipers: the patient dies for lack of treatment being paid for.
> There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this
What financial incentives are there in killing someone?
Many western countries make dying slowly with Alzheimer’s very expensive, by the standards of normal families.
Between doctors, nurses and lawyers you can burn through a million bucks in five years easily. And most families don’t have a million bucks cash to spare.
On the other hand, if they die after six months, instead of after 5 years? The family doesn’t lose the farm.
> Between doctors, nurses and lawyers you can burn through a million bucks in five years easily
That would indicate there is a financial incentive in keeping them alive, no?
The "incentive" from the family's perspective, if they're that cold-blooded, doesn't make sense because they could just... not take care of that person.
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Inheritance, and for the government/insurance companies, there's the incentive of the one-time cost of euthanization being lower than the cost of care for the poor, disabled and/or the terminally ill.
We don't talk about it a lot as a society, but some people just like killing people.
The ordinary outlet for them is the military. Sometimes they become serial killers.
A euthanasia industry would attract these people similarly to how police and security work attracts authoritarians and how clergy jobs attract pedophiles.
That's not to say that most people in the industry would enjoy killing people, but it would be a problem. And death is final; it's impossible to fix mistakes. This is the same reason many people are opposed to the death penalty.
> This is the same reason many people are opposed to the death penalty.
Death penalty is the government deciding to take your life based on what they believe you did. I agree, mistakes there are bad. Assisted suicide consists of the person dying giving their consent to take their life. Quite different.
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Inheritance.
So... something you're entitled to regardless of how they die? I don't see why, in this hypothetical, a person would spend energy encouraging assisted suicide when they'll get inheritance eventually anyway. Am I missing something?
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