Last week I touched upon the fact that while the health-care system is essentially intended to preserve and extend life, it is so inadequately funded, and set up in a manner that is so impossible to operate satisfactorily without incurring unsustainable costs, that assisted death has now been tightly integrated into the system. Since wait lists are notorious and health care is in fact already rationed, and the greatest single challenge to our health-care budget and personnel are the elderly, the economics of socialized medicine has created intense pressure for elderly people and their families to acquiesce, under the theory that assisted dying is death with dignity.
In this view, the way to provide the highest-quality health care for the largest possible number of people is to evangelize the elderly and infirm on the virtues of an early passage to the hereafter, in order to free up space and personnel for patients with a greater useful life expectancy. Because of the extreme delicacy of this subject, it is impossible to know to what extent the elderly receiving care are hastened into palliative care and then accelerated into the assisted achievement of mortal dignity. The rationalization of this informal practice is that it enables the health-care system to conform more closely with its budget, to achieve more positive outcomes by focusing on patients with a more hopeful future and the whole transfer of attention is papered over with ever more elaborate laudations of the virtues of an expedited precipitation into eternity.--
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