In countries with universal health care is it true they kill sick people who are too old by euthanasia?

Question

In countries with universal health care is it true they kill sick people who are too old by euthanasia?

Answer 1

maybe in some nations, but what I do know is true is that in the UK they turn away people who smoke to go home and die because the health care system believes that because they smoke.........they deserve to die from the cancer they gave themselves.

Sounds like liberal compassion. (when it fits their agenda)

Answer 2

No! Years ago there was a report that Sweden had a higher suicide rate than the US. There were a lot of reasons suggested for that, and one was that when people got old and sick they didn't want to be kept alive in hospitals. But there's never been any evidence of a regular program of euthanasia.

Answer 3

No, usually not. However, some countries with universal health care allow the elderly and terminally ill to choose euthanasia for themselves. It is a much more dignified way to die.

Answer 4

No. New Zealand has universal healthcare and euthanasia is illegal. We also don't turn away smokers.

Answer 5

One country that does this is the Netherlands. They had an unofficial policy for many years and then passed legislating allowing for euthanasia. The legislation reads as though it has many safeguards, but in practice, they are euthanizing patients who are not terminally ill, the depressed, and "defective" infants even if the parents didn't request it. Each year they also have a number of "NVEs"--Non-Voluntary Euthanasia deaths, aka murders in other countries, and those are done with impunity.

One organization that tries to warn people about this (because euthanasia is proposed as "merciful" in assorted countries with regularity instead of increasing palliative care options) is the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.

Here's part of their coverage of the Netherlands--and things are worse now from all indications--
"The Remmelink Report-- On September 10, 1991, the results of the first, official government study of the practice of Dutch euthanasia were released. The two volume report (6)--popularly referred to as the Remmelink Report (after Professor J. Remmelink, M.J., attorney general of the High Council of the Netherlands, who headed the study committee)--documents the prevalence of involuntary euthanasia in Holland, as well as the fact that, to a large degree, doctors have taken over end-of-life decision making regarding euthanasia. The data indicate that, despite long-standing, court-approved euthanasia guidelines developed to protect patients, abuse has become an accepted norm. According to the Remmelink Report, in 1990:


2,300 people died as the result of doctors killing them upon request (active, voluntary euthanasia).(7)

400 people died as a result of doctors providing them with the means to kill themselves (physician-assisted suicide).(8)

1,040 people (an average of 3 per day) died from involuntary euthanasia, meaning that doctors actively killed these patients without the patients' knowledge or consent.(9)

14% of these patients were fully competent. (10)

72% had never given any indication that they would want their lives terminated. (11)

In 8% of the cases, doctors performed involuntary euthanasia despite the fact that they believed alternative options were still possible. (12)

In addition, 8,100 patients died as a result of doctors deliberately giving them overdoses of pain medication, not for the primary purpose of controlling pain, but to hasten the patient's death. (13) In 61% of these cases (4,941 patients), the intentional overdose was given without the patient's consent.(14)

According to the Remmelink Report, Dutch physicians deliberately and intentionally ended the lives of 11,840 people by lethal overdoses or injections--a figure which accounts for 9.1% of the annual overall death rate of 130,000 per year. The majority of all euthanasia deaths in Holland are involuntary deaths.

The Remmelink Report figures cited here do not include thousands of other cases, also reported in the study, in which life-sustaining treatment was withheld or withdrawn without the patient's consent and with the intention of causing the patient's death. (15) Nor do the figures include cases of involuntary euthanasia performed on disabled newborns, children with life-threatening conditions, or psychiatric patients. (16)

The most frequently cited reasons given for ending the lives of patients without their knowledge or consent were: "low quality of life," "no prospect for improvement," and "the family couldn't take it anymore."(17)

In 45% of cases involving hospitalized patients who were involuntarily euthanized, the patients' families had no knowledge that their loved ones' lives were deliberately terminated by doctors. (18)

According to the 1990 census, the population of Holland is approximately 15 million. That is only half the population of California. To get some idea of how the Remmelink Report statistics would apply to the U.S., those figures would have to be multiplied 16.6 times (based on the 1990 U.S. census population of approximately 250 million)."
http://www.internationaltaskforce.org/fctholl.htm

The Netherlands is probably the country where this is most out in the open, but it's not unheard of elsewhere, whether or not they have "universal health care."

One man who has studied euthanasia, especially in the Netherlands, is Michael Fumento. He wrote an article in 2002 that responded to an attack against Maggie Gallagher's column warning of the difference in the law and practice of euthanasia in the Netherlands. Here's an excerpt:
"The ambassador claims, "The main requirements are that the request must be voluntary, the physical suffering must be unbearable with no prospect for improvement, and the request must be reviewed by a second, non-treating physician." That may be how the statute reads, but as Dr. Pieter Admiraal, at one time the nation's leading proponent (and practitioner) of euthanasia, told me, in reality "the courts are never against you" if you commit euthanasia.

In one famous case, three nurses at the Free University Hospital of Amsterdam killed several comatose patients. There was no possibility of consent, no suffering, and no doctor's opinion. Yet, at trial, the nurses were found guilty only of acting without the guidance of a physician.

Even a decade ago, convictions for involuntary euthanasia were so difficult to obtain – and those that were obtained were so consistently reversed by higher courts – that prosecutors essentially threw their hands up and stopped even trying. The term "voluntary" has become so meaningless that even babies with serious but fixable birth defects often are killed, and the pressure on old people to "give consent" is tremendous."
http://www.fumento.com/deathlett.html

"Now They Want to Euthanize Children
In the Netherlands, 31 percent of pediatricians have killed infants. A fifth of these killings were done without the "consent" of parents. Going Dutch has never been so horrible.
by Wesley J. Smith " http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/616jszlg.asp

The above article notes what I hit on before and the fact that newborns through children (and older) ARE being euthanized there.

Again, it's not just the Dutch, but they seem to be the most public about the issue.

Answer 6

You mean like Great Britain or Finland?
No, they don't.