Assisted Living or Assisted Dying?

I often attend networking groups where we go around the room asking people for a brief summary of their business and a tag line for it.

When it’s my turn, I like to say “We put the ‘living’ in assisted living”.

Unfortunately the English government this week changed ‘living’ to ‘dying’ after the word assisted.

They just passed legislation across the ocean that would allow people to elect to take their own life. The legislation allows people with a terminal condition and less than six months to live to take a substance to end their lives, as long as they can make the decision themselves.

Two doctors and a high-court judge would have to sign off the request.

At first glance this may seem compassionate. If you’re in a lot of pain and think you don’t have much time left, why not end it early?

Don’t get my wrong. My political beliefs lean libertarian. I am all for everyone being able to make their own medical decisions.

I’ve also seen first hand how the medical system operates.

Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of Hospice companies. They take care of my residents who qualify for their service.

Yet my caregivers hint to me that some Hospice companies seem to load the patients up with morphine, just a liiitttttllle too much.

I can’t prove anything. And I am definitely not accusing anyone in particular. I understand there’s a fine line between morphine to ease their pain as they pass away and overdosing to accelerate the end.

There are also way too many stories of people being told by their doctor they only have a couple months to live and then they make a dramatic turnaround.

We have had lots of people become healthy enough in our assisted living homes that they no longer qualify for Hospice.

With the legalization of assisted dying, it seems like it may make the decision to end it all that much easier.

Recovering from being near death is hard work. It’s also doable in some cases. This legislation makes it much more tempting to take the easy way out.

It’s also instructive to take a look at countries that have had assisted dying legislation in place for a long time to see how it’s going.

Take the Netherlands for example. They have this legislation for 20 years or so. According to Robert Young in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Euthanasia:

‘Sixty percent of the assisted dying cases were voluntary’ means 40 percent were not voluntary. Sure people may not be in good enough health to make the decision and may have appointed a power of attorney.

However the article says that ’the vast majority of cases were of patients who at the time of their medically assisted deaths were no longer competent’. Not all cases. The vast majority of them. That means there were some cases where the patient was competent and they euthanized the patient without their consent.

That’s murder as far as I know.

Between doctors providing erroneous forecasts of people’s demise, and the tendency to just ‘encourage’ the end of life in medicine sometimes, it seems like assisted dying legislation can be and has been abused.

Or maybe it’s just my belief that everyone should fight for every day they’ve been given on this earth?