Socialized Medicine’s Darkest Metric: Why Americans Must Reject ‘Medicare For All’

The explosion of assisted suicide in Canada shouldn’t surprise anyone, standing as it does at the nexus of cultural and political trends. While few make the connection between Canada’s rise in assisted suicides and its health care system, Americans seeing the Left push for so-called “Medicare for All” should pay much closer attention. When voters hear politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed talk about the supposed benefits of socialized medicine, they should recognize the direct correlation between it and Canada’s growth in assisted suicide.

The expansion of assisted suicide has become part of a culture of death that views any life other than that in “perfect” health as not worth living. In Europe, Belgium and the Netherlands permit assisted suicide for children and adolescents. Recent reports indicate that Dutch authorities last year euthanized a one-year-old infant, taking its life before the child could make a decision for itself. Remember too the incredibly high abortion rate for infants diagnosed in utero with Down syndrome — parents snuffing out the lives of their children before they even start.

While assisted suicide has become normalized in far too many countries, its rise in Canada stands out. From 2016 through 2024, the number of assisted suicides grew more than 16-fold, rising to become one of the leading causes of death. Nationally, one in 20 Canadians die from assisted suicide — in some regions, that rate approaches one in 10.

That trend has something to do with Canada’s system of socialized medicine, also called Medicare. As the Fraser Institute has documented, more than one million Canadians still wait for care — in a country with one-tenth the population of the United States. Waiting times for surgery and other specialized treatment average over six months, but can run much longer depending on the province and specialty. For instance, Fraser found that patients on Prince Edward Island wait 52 weeks, or an entire calendar year, just to get an MRI.

Little wonder then that assisted suicide has become an “alternative” for far too many people who cannot receive actual health care. There are stories where Canadian patients cannot get Medicare to pay for their surgery — but “if I ask for assisted suicide they have everything ready to go.” Whether through long waiting times, peer pressure, or a combination of the two, many aged and vulnerable Canadians may feel pressured to end their lives simply to save its creaking health care system money.

That unethical and macabre form of health care cost containment may move southward if the progressive Left gets its way. As one of us wrote seven years ago, neither the House nor Senate versions of single-payer legislation include language prohibiting a national single-payer plan from covering assisted suicide. That remains true for the current versions of the legislation as it was in 2019.

Moreover, both the House and Senate single-payer bills include language requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to re-evaluate the benefit package each year, taking into account “changes in medical practice or new information from medical research.” The growth in the number of states permitting assisted suicide — now 13 states and the District of Columbia, up from eight states in 2019 — makes it more likely that a future administration could consider euthanasia a “health care service” that a single-payer system should fund.

As impolitic as it may be to say in some segments of our secularized society, life is a gift from God, not something to be trifled with. We have seen in Canada a real-life example of how government dehumanizes the individual into a number — in this case, dollars and cents — in ways that encourage Canadians to end their own lives. It illustrates the evils of socialized medicine and makes the moral case against “Medicare for All.”

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Chris Jacobs is Founder and CEO of Juniper Research Group, and author of The Case Against Single Payer. 

Mary Marslender is founder of Leverage PR, a political strategist and disability advocate.