Do your duty, prepare for your lethal injection.
Tl;dr: Our medical/care system is screwed, governments are all efficiency- and cost-obsessed. They’re fixated on ageing and on the explosion of the ‘economically inactive’ population. These ghouls like the idea of more people taking the voluntary way out.
Is this just paranoia? Am I being a conspiracy nut? My concerns about the assisted suicide bill, currently in the UK Parliament, are not with the risk of coercion by family members or doctors or scumbags of one kind or another (total red herring).
I’m not worried about ‘the slippery slope’ or about the risk that old people might want to avoid becoming a ‘burden’ (they’re already worried about that). My concern is much simpler. It’s about this system, a system of governance that is less and less humane; more and more obsessed with measurement and control, with efficiency and throughput and the management of shrinking resources.
In this system – this diminished and dehumanised system – the pressure to move the sick and elderly, the incurable and the intractable (the awkward, the unemployable, the unproductive) along the expensive health and care timeline and onto the fast track, onto the slip-road out of here, is already enormous.
Do not be under any illusion: there are managers and administrators and government ministers (and global consultancies and insurers and private equity firms) who would very much like to speed things up a bit, to increase the throughput, to just slightly improve the ratios.
They’d like to reduce the pointless expenditure on keeping the sick and the inactive alive and to create in the citizenry – the customer-base, you and me – a new habit – the habit of volunteering to step off this mortal coil a bit early.
Not too much. Just a few months or a year. Barely noticeable. But every little helps. Move along now. Off you go. Thank you for your contribution. It’s been lovely knowing you… See ya!
- I’m ready to make a small bet that within a few years we’ll see the first ‘Dignity Unit™’ or ‘Goodbye Suite™’ in the grounds of a hospital or a care home. It’ll be all pastel colours and there’ll be a wild-flower garden maintained by volunteers. A minor Royal will cut the ribbon…
- This, incidentally, explains why politicians are not freaking out about the fact that life expectancies are now falling in parts of the developed world – including Britain. That looks like a self-adjusting system to these people.