Mrs. Kline
Period 2
10 April, 2017
Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide
To die is a frightening idea. Exceedingly frightening is the idea of passing away slowly, painfully, and with little dignity, only to leave behind emotional trauma and a possibly unmanageable debt for loved ones. Such is the reality for unlucky patients with prolonged terminal conditions. While it may seem to be a helpless scenario, there are methods of physician-assisted suicide that could be provided to hopeless patients in order to minimize these grievances. Euthanasia is the painless killing of a patient who is suffering from an incurable and painful condition, or in an irreversible coma. Currently, the practice is illegal …show more content…
The freedom of choice is the foundation of liberal democracies and free market systems, and therefore it is a right that should be applied to all aspects of a person’s life, including the instance where they are on their deathbed choosing to be granted an early death. Lonny Shavelson, MD, stated June 9, 2016, “when they say ‘I don’t want to live in this bed for the next three weeks waiting to die’ it’s an odd change in the consent procedure. Suddenly they become wrong and we become right. That does not make sense to me. Dying should not be completely separate from everything else we do in medicine” (“Euthanasia”). As Shavelson …show more content…
This is something that could benefit the U.S. specifically. A report done by The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development stated that in the United States, even though health spending is less than fifty percent publicly financed, the money spent on health per capita is much higher than the public spending in other OECD countries, not including Norway and the Netherlands. This is largely because of the expansions in coverage (“Euthanasia”). Healthcare spending could be reduced if the cost of maintaining a terminally ill patient was eliminated.
Not only would Euthanasia benefit the U.S. financially, it would also financially benefit patients and health providers. Although it is important to maintain the comfort and health of a patient, spending resources and money on a patient that is destined to pass away eventually takes away from the availability of those resources for patients who have a chance of survival. The cost also racks up on the hospital bill, which family members have to pay. “The cost of maintaining [a dying person]...has been estimated as ranging from about two thousand to ten
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