UK assessment: Killing by assisted suicide instead of offering treatment will save NHS money

An assessment carried out by the UK Department of Health and Social Care on the impact of proposed assisted suicide legislation found that legalizing assisted suicide could save the National Health Service (NHS) as much as £59.6 million ($79 million) annually. But the very fact that such an assessment was sought — evaluating whether a human being should live or die based on monetary cost of death versus treatment/life — fuels the concerns of those opposed to the legislation.

According to The Guardian, the number of people likely to opt for physician-assisted death in England and Wales is expected to increase from between 164 and 787 in the first year to as many as 4,559 in the 10th year, based on government estimates. As more people are pushed toward assisted death, the assessment claims the NHS could save an estimated £919,000 to £10.3m in the first year and an estimated £5.8m to £59.6m in year 10 — by paying doctors to kill people instead of treating them.

The assessment was ordered as Parliament prepares to vote on an assisted suicide bill on May 16. Coercion concerns surround the bill, which is sponsored by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater. Over 3,000 medical experts signed a letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressing their opposition to the bill. They warned that legalizing assisted suicide will lead to people being pressured into dying, particularly due to the current state of the NHS, which they described as “broken.”

The new assessment provides more weight to those concerns. Tanni Grey-Thompson, a Paralympian and member of the House of Lords, said, “This impact assessment highlights how assisted dying would put disabled and other vulnerable people at grave risk by providing financial incentives to an already overburdened and under-resourced NHS to offer assisted dying as a ‘treatment option’.”

READ: Assisted suicide is ‘very scary to disabled people’ in UK, says disability rights activist

Gordon Macdonald, chief executive of Care Not Killing, opposes the law and said the assessment “confirms that changing the law will save money … exactly as we have seen in other jurisdictions which have introduced state-assisted killing, placing pressure on vulnerable terminally ill people to end their lives.”

Evidence shows they are right. Doctors in Canada, where assisted suicide is legal, said in 2023 that they are facing at least subtle pressure from the government to use Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) to cut costs for its national healthcare system.

In 2020, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer publicly released a report stating that its MAiD program created a “net cost reduction” of $86.9 million per year for the government. It further said that the expansion of the categories of persons eligible for MAiD would create an additional net savings of $62 million per year.

In an article for The Spectator, author Yuan Yi Zhu wrote:

Health care, in particular for those suffering from chronic conditions, is expensive; but assisted suicide only costs the taxpayer $2,327 per ‘case.’

And, of course, those who have to rely wholly on government-provided Medicare pose a far greater burden on the exchequer than those who have savings or private insurance….

There is already talk of allowing ‘mature minors’ access to euthanasia too — just think of the lifetime savings.

Opponents to assisted suicide fear that the same will be true for disabled and vulnerable individuals in the UK if assisted suicide is legalized.