Both of my parents (in their 70s) mentioned how they want to go out the same way once they're incapable of living and start suffering. I feel the same about it as well. I understand there are very small amount of cases where people shouldn't be able to take this way out, but it's a net good. I really hate how global media is trying to turn it into a big conversation and "slippery slope", because if anyone who has seen their loved one suffer... they would never want this program to end.
You can talk to real people that work or live in a hospice or care home to better understand the death process (they need volunteers for all sorts of stuff). Or look into the formal studies that have been done on the Canadian side.
Controversial cases aside, MAID is more the scheduling of an event that can be seen coming from quite a ways away. I have family members that work in hospice care, and the reality of death makes it seem cruel not to allow MAID.
This isn't healthy people offing themselves when they turn 90. This is people seeing a slow and certain decline and loss of dignity due to a known illness. If you knew that your last six months would be extremely painful, you would lose the ability to walk, lose concentration to have a cogent conversation, not be able to go to the bathroom by yourself, and finally your body would just shut down; wouldn't you want the option to shorten or skip out on the final parts of that experience?
Consentment fraud is a lesser difficulty than stealing someone’s wallet at gunpoint or horribly mutilating people and leaving them in a bathtub. And yet, the consequences of this fraud are fatal, more fatal than extorting their entire life savings from a person. You just take someone who’s currently lonely, not really looked after, perhaps at odds with their parents… and hop, their life is over. Drug addicts, rape victims, lonely adults. So much taxes can be saved.
Easy fraud for doctors, with plenty of incentives to commit it, and the highest consequences for the victim.
But I genuinely understand your concerns.
I find this a bizarre way to assume that a person who has committed their entire lives to helping people would behave.
And people can become zealots for what they believe is best for others
Meanwhile private insurers definitely deny coverage to people with chronic illnesses (not everyone who is sick or dying is on Medicare/Medicaid). In a single-payer system those folks wouldn't slip through the cracks and .... the doctors would be incentivized to keep them alive! (assuming doctors are profit-motivated sociopaths like your average HN poster)
It's not complex, most of it is actually covered even in paramedic training. It's just that instead of sticking the ventilator tube in they inject some potassium chloride. Last month Costco was selling it for about 50 cents a pound. (Potassium salt for water softeners.)
The main cost will be the evaluation, not the procedure.
If it's not, unfortunately, I've seen what people will do anyway. Allowing people to die with dignity and on their own terms is something that I believe in.
I look at my grandma. She's 85, in the middle stages of Alzheimers (usually find and lucid, but sometimes thinks she's in Michigan or Georgia when she's been in Oregon for 4 years), constantly soils herself, can't get up from a chair without assistance (even then it's a struggle), and can barely walk, even with a walker. She got COVID and somehow survived, but got permanent lung damage and now needs an oxygen tank.
She's not living, she's merely surviving. I don't want to be like that. If I found myself in the state she's in, I like to think that I'd admit that I've had a good run, but it's time to move on.
People tell me I'll change my mind (perhaps similarly to how people treat people who say they don't want kids). But I doubt I will. I've seen lot's of older people (and people who's lives are not good) still want this when it comes to the time when it applies. The only reason it's not more commonplace is social stigma (and legal obstacles) against it.