This article in Slate by William Saletan tells of a council meeting he recently attended of the President's Council on Bioethics. The speaker was Herbert Hendin who is the medical director of the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention.

The administrators of assisted suicide in the Netherlands opened their doors and files to Hendin, expecting him to like what he saw. Oops! He didn't. He describes the Dutch system as a slippery-slope nightmare. Most Dutch doctors have suggested or feel free to suggest euthanasia to their patients. Some patients are pressured into it by the presentation of ugly alternatives. Most terminations aren't reported. Nobody can second-guess what the doctor did, because the other party to the alleged agreement is dead. Several thousand people are terminated by physicians each year without giving consent, says Hendin. He quotes a doctor who said he euthanized a patient because "it would have taken another week before she died, and I just needed this bed." You know doctors?they feel competent to decide anything. In the Netherlands, this now includes deciding when you should die.

Scary. Don't sneeze in the Netherlands! What about our own backyard assisted suicide playground, over in Oregon? Well, Hendin says this:

Oregon doesn't limit assisted suicide to patients who are suffering. All you need is a prognosis of six months or less to live. The reporting form has one line to attest that the patient is terminally ill and one more line to summarize the diagnosis. Nothing else has to be reported. Few patients who request assisted suicide are referred for psychiatric evaluations to screen out remediable depression. Few are referred for palliative care consultations to explain how their suffering might be relieved short of suicide. If your family doctor won't approve your request, supporters of assisted suicide know where to find a doctor who will. Oregon has done a good job of training nurses in palliative care, but few hospitals provide such care, and one study shows the percentage of inadequately treated pain cases has increased since legalization. Some experts think cuts in state reimbursement to doctors for palliative care have encouraged a bias toward assisted suicide.

If you ever needed a great reason of why you oppose euthanasia, here it is. What if it becomes more cost effective for you to die than for the medications to treat your pain or potentially prolong your life?

Think about all the once terminal diseases that are treatable now. Do you think the drug companies were motivated to spend millions of dollars just out of the goodness of their hearts to find cures or effective treatments to help prolong life? Or do you think they research these with the knowledge that they will charge a lot of money and recover more than enough to cover their expenses? What if these drug companies no longer had this motivation because they knew if you ever contracted this disease, the cost of their medication would make the doctor suggest death instead?

I know of children who take doses of medication on a weekly basis that costs thousands of dollars. Each dose allows them a little bit more time to live a normal life. If I were to run a cost benefit analysis of their life versus the cost of their medication?

Sorry but human life can not be easily formulated into a neat equation to determine monetary worth and euthanasia is justified by costs that just can't compare to the worth of life.