Legal euthanasia is a slippery slope, as Canadian Roger Foley has demonstrated by releasing tapes of hospital staff seeming to urge him to take his own life.
"You have already violated my preferences...So what is the plan that you know of?" Foley asks the man."Roger, this is not my show," the man replies. "I told you my piece of this was to talk to you about if you had interest in assisted dying."
In a separate audio recording from January 2018, another man is heard asking Foley how he's doing and whether he feels like he wants to harm himself.
Foley tells the man that he's "always thinking I want to end my life" because of the way he's being treated at the hospital and because his requests for self-directed care have been denied.
The man is then heard telling Foley that he can "just apply to get an assisted, if you want to end your life, like you know what I mean?"
When Foley says that he is being forced to end his life, the man protests and says that's not the case.
"Oh, no, no, no," the man is heard saying. "I'm saying if you feel that way...You know what I mean? Don't get me wrong. I'm saying I don't want you to be in here and wanting to take your life."
Euthanasia is much cheaper than medical treatment, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the incentives in a government-run system line up in that direction.
