In fairness, Dr. James MacLean didn't kill a patient at Tim Horton's as part of Canada's very flexible assisted-suicide industry. MacLean instead did his medical assessment of his patient outside the coffee shop location and determined that suicide was a viable option for, er ... [checks notes] ... diarrhea and "mental health issues."
Remarkably, that's not the only evidence of MacLean's cavalier attitude toward his Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) practice. And as the National Post reports, it's also not the only evidence of Canada's cavalier attitude toward MAID, either:
A London, Ont., doctor who assessed a patient with inflammatory bowel disease and a history of mental health issues for MAID outside a Tim Hortons location and later personally drove the man to the place his life was ended has agreed to a minimum six months’ supervision.
In another case, Dr. James MacLean failed to administer one of three drugs used in assisted deaths — one that paralyzes the body’s muscles, including the muscles involved in breathing. The patient resumed spontaneously breathing again after initially being pronounced dead, and after MacLean had already left the home.
Let that second case percolate in your mind for a bit. MacLean had one job to do, and he couldn't bother to stick around long enough to verify that he had completed it. Ho hum, just another patient to kill, busy busy busy. Imagine the horror of the family when this patient came back to life, not to mention the pain and suffering of the patient him/herself.
It's bad enough that the Canadian government – and its single-payer health care system – plays God when it comes to assisted suicide. It's much worse when they play an uncaring and capricious deity in dealing death, whether it manifests in a café-chain parking lot or in a botched homicide.
As the lede notes, though, MacLean faced consequences for his action ... sorta. Basically, he got a finger wagged in his face, and now has to have someone review his records on MAID cases in the future. Nothing says we care about the health of Canadians more than letting the Tim Horton's Grim Reaper continue to operate with some vague notion that 'supervision' was the missing ingredient in these cases. It wasn't just these two cases, either:
“What is striking is not only the seriousness of the concerns identified in these cases, but the limited regulatory response,” said Dr. Ramona Coelho, a family physician and former member of the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario’s MAID death review committee.
As part of an investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) into two public complaints made against MacLean, an independent assessor appointed to review a number of MacLean’s charts concluded that he “did not meet the standard of practice of the profession, displayed a lack of judgment and that his conduct exposes or is likely to expose patients to harm or injury in five out of twenty charts reviewed,” according to a summary decision of the college’s inquiries, complaints and reports committee.
In other words, an audit of MacLean's MAID practice shows that he fails to meet the Canadian standard of care in 25% of his cases. His conduct either creates harm or injury, or the potential for it, in one out of every four patients MacLean sees. And yet, not only will Canada allow MacLean to continue his MAID practice, the only consequence for his gross negligence and incompetence was a verbal "caution" and six months of chart reviews. MacLean didn't even get a written reprimand for leaving a MAID patient without ensuring that the process had been completed, let alone the other cases that the audit uncovered.
Clearly, the medical establishment in Canada cares much more about MAID than it does about its patients. What this tells us is that the entire political and medical establishment in Canada takes a very cavalier attitude toward assisted suicide. The reasons are obvious: the more patients that Canadian doctors like MacLean can funnel into MAID, the more cost savings they can get from their single-payer healthcare system. We warned about this repeatedly when Canada began to adopt MAID; the combination of government-controlled health care and assisted suicide set up economic incentives that rewarded disposal of patients rather than chronic care. At some point, systems respond to these incentives, and Canada reached that point years ago.
It's gotten so bad that death practitioners are now dealing it out in fast-food parking lots for chronic diarrhea and cramps, and can't even be bothered to stick around before removing someone else from the healthcare risk pool. This is what they call humane treatment in Canada, and if progressives have their way, the US will be next.
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