Another option for Mr. Cole: enroll him in Canada-Kare

Canadian Hospital to Catholic Priest With Hip Injury: Drop Dead

Robert Spencer:

Even after all these years of Obamacare, it’s still easy to find “experts” who will insist that government-run, single-payer healthcare, such as the system that is in place in Canada, is preferable to a system in which everyone pays for the medical attention he needs instead of paying the government for medical attention for everyone. And we’re likewise told that Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program is a truly compassionate solution for people who have nothing to look forward to but a life of pain and misery. But as is so often the case with programs that leftists favor, the reality is considerably uglier than the hype, as a 79-year-old Canadian Roman Catholic priest has just discovered.

The Daily Caller reported Saturday that Fr. Larry Holland “fractured his hip after falling in his bathroom on Christmas Day 2025.' That sort of thing is going to happen when you’re getting on in years, and so when Fr. Holland “subsequently went to Vancouver General Hospital to seek treatment for his injury,” he wasn’t expecting anything except routine medical procedures. Instead, he was in for an ugly surprise.

A physician at Vancouver General Hospital “raised the possibility of him taking his own life through Canada’s taxpayer-funded and government-run Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program in the event his injury worsened.” Now, it’s common enough for elderly people to fracture or break their hips, but doing so is generally not fatal. Was this doctor simply tired of setting fractured hips? Or is there some massive manpower shortage in Canada’s socialist healthcare system, such that doctors are recommending assisted suicide to people who are neither in tremendous pain nor suicidal, solely to relieve some of the pressure upon that system? Or is there an even more insidious reason involved here?

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….[The] callous doctor told Fr. Holland that MAiD is “something they have to discuss with someone who’s been given a terminal diagnosis.” Mind you, Fr. Holland had not been given a terminal diagnosis, and “had at the time known made his moral opposition to euthanasia — which Catholic doctrine explicitly forbids.”

And that wasn’t all. “After weeks passed, a nurse would also offer MAiD to Holland,” out of what he thought to be a “sense of ‘false compassion.’” And maybe it was. Nowadays Canada and the entire Western world is filled with people who think that helping someone commit suicide is compassionate, and that dismembering a baby in the womb is just part of “reproductive services,” and that forcing productive people to hand over money to enrich people who have not worked for it is justice.

Vancouver Coastal Health, the government agency that pours Canadian taxpayer money into Vancouver General Hospital to pay, among others, the people who told Fr. Holland to kill himself, readily owned up to the veracity of Fr. Holland’s account of events. Hospital staff, said a Vancouver Coastal Health official, “may consider bringing up MAiD based on their clinical judgment, provided they possess the necessary knowledge and skills to do so.”

See? There’s no problem. Only people who “possess the necessary knowledge and skills” will bring up the suicide option. Nothing to see here. Move along.

The Roman Catholic Church, however, is less than impressed with even the sharpest and most skillful practitioners of MAiD. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “intentional euthanasia, whatever its forms or motives, is murder. It is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God his Creator.”

Indeed. And it also shows up in vivid relief one of the fatal weaknesses of any government-run, single-payer healthcare system: Ultimately, if the government is paying, the government will be making the decisions. The Canadian government has already decreed that suicide is acceptable when done in a clinical environment with medical approval. It’s just a short step from there to the government deciding who will live and who will die, based on its own assessment of available resources and its own priorities.

That can’t happen in Canada, much less in the United States, right? Just watch.