When governments take charge of medical care and expenditures on prolonging life come out of the same pool of money used for the military, road-building, schools and all the other functions of government, the bureaucrats who are the decision-makers have every incentive to encourage a rapid death, if not insist upon it.

Our northern neighbor Canada offers an example of the slippery slope. Wesley J. Smith writes on National Review Online:

Canadian doctors committed thousands of homicides in 2018. According to an interim report published by the government, in the first ten months of last year, doctors lethally injected 2, 613 patients (with one assisted suicide) — and that doesn’t include the homicides committed by doctors in Quebec, Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Nunavut.

This means well over 3,000 people are killed by their doctors each year in Canada, which — if my math is correct — is more than 250 a month, more than 58 a week, and more than eight per day. Heck, that’s about one every three hours.

This won't hurt much, and it will soon be over, anyway

photo credit: torange.biz

Smith notes that already 1.12 % of all deaths in Canada are by euthanasia. And, as he points out, the “reforms” that allowed this are recent, so the numbers are going to increase.

The United States has more than ten times the population of Canada, minus Quebec and the territories omitted from the statistics. So, extrapolating, 30,000 Americans or more would be at risk for being killed because their treatment is regarded as too expensive, if single payer medicine, aka “Medicare for All” comes to this country.

Update:

I want to make clear that by using Medicare for all as a comparison to Canada, I was referring to the lack of availability of private care, privately paid for through insurance, for most or all people. I was not alleging that Canada’s government monopoly on health care was organized  the same as Medicare or whatever “Medicare for All” means. As David Fieldstone repeatedly emails, Canada’s government-run health insurance is ogranized through provincial, not federal entities. In the UK, the entity is a national health program. The specifics vary, but the consequences are the same when it comes to incentives to promote euthanasia.