Comment by hypeatei
3 days ago
> There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this
What financial incentives are there in killing someone?
3 days ago
> 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.
Not taking care of your mother while she's dying of Alzheimer's is not as easy as you might think.
Some countries have nationalized healthcare
You’re not understanding. They could just not take care of that person sure. But when the person dies, there will be nothing left to inherit because they will have spent it all on medical care.
2 replies →
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.
Unfortunately consent is not always clear. For example, see my other comment in this thread about the reports on Dr Kevorkian's assisted suicides.
Not only is whether someone gives consent sometimes unclear, it's also unclear if the consent was informed consent and whether it was uncoerced.
Informed consent is obliquely mentioned in my other comment. For example, a patient may falsely believe their illness is terminal.
I realize I replied to a question about financial incentives to talk about non-financial incentives. But coerced consent would often fall under the financial incentive heading. E.g. "consent to be euthanized or I'll contest the will."
Forced "suicide" also has a long history, including in the ancient world. Arguably things like kamikaze might fall into that category. And it's a favorite method of execution in financial and espionage type cases because the method of coercion won't show up in the forensics.
For these sorts of reasons, I think the risk of mistakes is high.
1 reply →
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?
1. You get the money now as opposed to potentially many years from now.
2. You likely get much more money if they die now without spending it on cost of living, and healthcare.
People do all kinds of awful things in order to get control of an elderly family member’s money—up to and including outright murder. Pressuring a suggestible family member into assisted suicide is a comparatively easy and low risk method.
3 replies →
A long, costly illness will consume the entire inheritance - at least in the US.
You seem to be forgetting that sometimes people want things now.