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The Pros And Cons Of Physician Assisted Suicide

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The practice of physician assisted suicide is one that has been administered and debated since the ancient Greeks and Romans in the 5th century BCE, which is partly due to the fact that at that time, there were no defined beliefs in the values of individual human life. In the modern world, advances to science, technology, moral philosophy, and perhaps more evidently, to the economy, has greatly impacted the way people view euthanasia, with many organizations already supporting it and others arguing against it. Emanuel Ezekiel, an MD and Chair of the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center, writes in his report for the New England Journal of Medicine that he “estimate[s] that legalizing physician-assisted suicide …show more content…

As Levin explains, if the cost of assisted suicide is lower than the cost of actual treatment, then there would be more incentive for patients to choose euthanasia in order to relieve financial stresses from their providers. In the same way, physicians who benefit from cutting health care spending could potentially push patients to choose assisted suicide over actual treatment. However, while adopting assisted suicide practices would immensely cut down costs, it is also true that with the enormous financial benefit, patients would then have the option to die with dignity. Terminally ill patients are already on the road to death, and any more treatment would only really present a larger financial burden on the providers of the patient, whom are usually members of that patient’s family. For poor families, just being able to pay this medical fee puts a huge amount of economical stress on them. However, if the option of physician assisted suicide were available to patients, they would have the option of saving their families a significant amount of money, retaining both dignity and rectitude. As the current system is now, terminally ill patients suffer and wither away uselessly until their deaths, all the while seizing hundreds of thousands of dollars from their families. Although it may seem inhumane to encourage the terminally ill to die instead of getting treatment, it must also be taken into consideration that they are already going to die. Euthanasia would simply make their death meaningful and virtually painless for the patient and economically painless for

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