HitRed wrote:Canada halts assisted suicide program for mentally ill due to lack of doctors
The law was expanded in 2021 to include people experiencing "grievous and irremediable" conditions, such as depression and other mental health issues.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/canada-ha ... ck-doctors
That's a serious distortion of the facts, wrong on several counts. Basically they are taking two separate and unrelated issues and trying to make them part and parcel of the same thing, which they are not.
1. The Medical Assistance in Dying program (or MAID) isn't being halted by any means. It continues as before. What has been halted is the planned expansion into allowing MAID for people with mental conditions. We have allowed MAID for people with terminal illnesses for a long time, and that will not change. There was a planned expansion of the program for people with untreatable depression and other mental illnesses. That planned expansion was first postponed about two years ago due to political opposition in the Senate. Since then, political opposition has grown, on many sides. On the right, you have conservatives and religious people who are against assisted suicide by any means. On the left, you have victims' advocacy groups who see MAID for mental patients as a cynical attempt by the government to cheaply dispose of problem patients that might otherwise require decades of expensive therapy.
With many groups on both left and right opposing the expansion, the government really didn't have any political allies in favour of the expansion. So, first they postponed it for a few months until 2023, then they postponed it for another year until 2024, and now it's been postponed indefinitely.
2. There is a doctor shortage in Canada. Just like every other Western country, we have an aging population and the dominant cadre among doctors, just like in every other profession, is retiring. And, just like most other Western countries, we've tried to counterbalance our aging population with rapid immigration. The immigrants themselves include many doctors, but the local authorities won't recognize their foreign credentials, so they end up working as hospital orderlies or whatever while they go through the Byzantine requirements to get their credentials recognized. Meanwhile, many people don't have a regular family doctor.
Canada is hardly unique in this problem. I saw it firsthand with my grandfather. When we first got out of Czechoslovakia in 1968, I went to Canada to live with my parents but my grandfather went to Germany. Back home in Czechoslovakia he had been a cardiovascular specialist, an expert in his field, a published author. He thought any German hospital would be glad to have him, but in fact the German authorities said his medical degree was worthless because it wasn't in German, this despite the fact that he had published postdoctoral research in his name that had been translated into German journals. They insisted that he had to rewrite all his exams in German, and he never quite managed it. Ended up working for minimum wage as a research assistant in a clinic. So this is not a new story or a uniquely Canadian one. Eventually the new immigrant doctors will work their way through the system, but it will take a decade, and meanwhile a, yes, doctor shortage does continue.
3. (2) above has absolutely nothing to do with (1). The MAID program is run by nurses, not doctors. There are a handful of doctors in the system as consultants, but overwhelmingly 99% of the consults and procedures are carried out by nurses only. Fox News is doing its usual job of making connections between unrelated subjects for political propaganda purposes.
Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2024 8:57 am
