False Claim: Allowing MAiD means “skipping to the end because the beginning and middle are expensive”
In an article on the website Todayville, Kelsi Sheren, when talking about veterans access to care and MAiD, wrote “What [the veteran] does not deserve is a country that skips to the end because the beginning and middle are expensive.
First, veterans deserve far more support than they get from our government. That is unquestionable. However, this statement contains two claims that are not supported by the evidence.
MAiD is never the beginning—or even the middle—of a person’s care journey. A common claim made by opponents of MAiD is that it is being used as a substitute for appropriate health care. It is not. We have spoken about this at length before. A person cannot have MAiD until they have either tried, or seriously considered, treatments that might relieve their suffering. If appropriate treatments have not been made reasonably available, the person cannot meet the legal eligibility criteria for MAiD. For conditions such as PTSD, which Sheren discusses in her article, that would typically require many years—if not decades—of comprehensive assessments and treatment trials. There is no circumstance in which someone could be found eligible for MAiD for a mental illness without that comprehensive treatment history.
MAiD is not about saving money. This is another common claim that has no factual basis. It is most often traced back to a widely criticized paper written by two engineering professors at Western University, neither of whom has expertise in medicine, psychiatry, health economics, bioethics, or any field directly relevant to the paper's conclusions. Their analysis was not based on the actual MAiD population, but on a hypothetical scenario built around some of the most ethically problematic assumptions imaginable. In contrast, real-world data consistently show that people who receive MAiD are more likely to have access to higher levels of health care, including specialist services and palliative care, and tend to come from more socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds than the general population. The evidence does not support the claim that Canada is steering people toward MAiD because treatment is "too expensive."