Comment by hypeatei
3 days ago
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.
> People do all kinds of awful things in order to ...
Okay, sure, but how much of the population is this awful and does it actually matter since they can't consent to someone else's suicide anyway?
I don't think this is as much of a widespread issue as its made out to be, to be honest.
My brother likely exploited his power of attorney to accelerate our mother's demise and may have injected her with insulin to get the job done. So there's your first datapoint.
What's definite, however, is that he made ~75% of her estate vanish into thin air before throwing her into a low-end nursing home where he wouldn't pay $6/day to have her bathed so she died in her own filth. Nevermind she had a 6-figure pension and longterm care for life. He wanted her gone because dementia had made her unmanageable to him yet he wouldn't let her go to live with any of her other children because he feared he would lose control of the estate through his PoA.
And because he had that PoA, no one could dispute his choices in time to save her. The courts and Adult Protective Services were useless bordering on complicit. The day we finally got a positive court verdict was absolutely 100% coincidentally no connection whatsoever you see 2 days before she suddenly passed.
Lesson learned: when you grow old, don't give anyone on the inheritance train any sort of PoA or they'll instantly become a PoS.
I don’t know how many people are like this. I do know that financial incentives result in more or behavior.
It’s already common for caregivers to begin to resent the people they care for and for old people to worry that they are a liability.
I don’t trust the system to be able to protect vulnerable people who have been coerced. And I don’t want old people in general to feel like suicide is their obligation.
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.