t
oday, Canadians are experiencing a three-word addition to what Ronald Reagan called the nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you kill yourself.”
Soon after the announcement that Canada would expand its medically assisted suicide program to include those with mental illness, the popular Canadian department store chain Simons issued a new advertisement celebrating the policy. The video features a woman saying, “Last breaths are sacred; you just have to be brave enough to see it,” over a montage of her being wheeled to places of natural wonder. The department store’s logo is featured prominently at the end of the commercial.
Amid global outrage over the video and the policy, the Canadian government has announced it will delay the program’s expansion, but the battle is far from over, as the underlying issues driving the policy remain unchanged. Having produced a fantasy health care system that ultimately deprives Canadians of basic physical and mental health services, the Canadian left now offers medically assisted suicide as the compassionate and fiscally responsible solution to their failure.
In 1984, the Canadian left slapped together a single-payer health care scheme by which citizens would pay into a provincially administered, federally and provincially funded health-care system that provides access to most health services at no extra cost, with a mission to “protect, promote and restore the physical and mental well-being of residents of Canada and to facilitate reasonable access to health services without financial or other barriers.”
But maintaining a low-cost, easy-access, government-run health-care program in a large, democratic country with a growing dependent-to-workforce ratio just isn’t working out for Canada. Low pay for medical professionals, who still have to pay for college and medical school, has created an acute shortage of doctors in a country that once boasted one of the best doctor-to-population ratios in the world.
Doctors can only bill the government $31 per patient; they can only see a maximum of 50 patients per day; and they can’t bill for time-consuming tasks like checking labs, writing referrals, and conducting physical exams.
