Comment by em500 3 days ago
I'm surprised and fascinated that this is apparently legal in Switzerland. The Netherlands, famous for allowing assisted suicide, has pretty strict criteria for this[1].
In particular, the physician must "be satisfied that the patient’s suffering is unbearable, with no prospect of improvement", which from this article sounds far from the case here.
[1] https://www.government.nl/topics/euthanasia/is-euthanasia-al...
In the US, in the states that have medical suicide, the problem is that you need to:
1. Administer the medication yourself
2. Be of "sane" mind at the time you do it.
3. Have a doctor certify that at the time you choose to do it, you are in unbearable pain/suffering, and there is no realistic relief from it.
This rules out dementia (especially item 2). So people here who are in early stages of Alzheimers go to Switzerland as well.
Euthanasia in Switzerland ^ has been a notorious profitable practice for years, compared to the Netherlands where it's almost exclusively practiced on those with terminal debilitating disease.
^ Yes, it's "illegal" but it's effectively nulled if the means to it are made legal.
It is illegal to profit from assisted suicide in Switzerland. All organizations that are involved in assisted suicide are nonprofits.
Every assisted suicide is then investigated by the police to ensure no profit motives exist.
Why does one have to pay an extraordinary amount for it then? Does all money go to the facilities and the staff? (which mind you by law isn't mandated to consist of physicians)
Again:
Yes, it's "illegal" but it's effectively nulled if the means to it are made legal.
> Why does one have to pay an extraordinary amount for it then?
I don't know what you mean by "an extraordinary amount." It's about $10,000, which covers multiple consultations, medical assessments, interactions with the government, the nonprofit's operational costs, and so on.
Then I do wonder why no company has come knocking to the door of the hospital room where I'm sitting right this minute waiting for my terminally ill mother to die. Because since years she's member of EXIT, the well-known Swiss institution that is providing assisted suicide services, and it would still take several weeks for us to jump through all the required paper and legal hoops to get the ball rolling. And now she being already unconcious and therefore incapable, most ways are blocked already, as others pointed out, so I'm not sure we could accelerate the process at all.
Sorry, but your comment smells rather about peddling fakery, especially as you have provided heaps of reliable references.
It is surprisingly hard in NL; we have familiar Alzheimer and had some practice by now, but it is very easy (depressingly so) to arrange your assisted suicide for when you get Alzheimer a long time upfront and still not get it because you did something wrong in the procedures/paperwork and end up going through all the suffering you planned out not to go through. It is not 'oh then they just sit in a home without memories'; it is a devastating process definitely far worse than death.