In Canada, if your doctor refers you to a specialist, you’ll likely have to wait 15 weeks to get an appointment. Then another 13 weeks to get treated. Just getting an MRI will take 4 1/2 months, on average. But if you want to kill yourself? You can get a same-day appointment. 

Welcome to the healthcare system that Bernie Sanders and his socialist pals want to import into the U.S.

A decade ago, Canada legalized “Medical Assistance in Dying,” or MAID. At first it was limited to those whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable,” such as end-stage terminal cancer patients. Five years later, it was expanded to those whose “death is not reasonably foreseeable.” People with a disability or non-terminal illnesses could get a doctor to snuff them out. Lawmakers expanded it again to include those suffering solely from a mental illness, which the government expects to implement next year.

MAID is already big business in Canada. Nearly 100,000 Canadians have availed themselves of this form of “healthcare,” and it now accounts for more than 5% of all deaths in the country. 

And the government seems to be doing everything it can to make it a runaway hit. Lawmakers waived the 10-day waiting period for those whose deaths “are reasonably foreseeable,” and the rest have to wait only 90 days. 

The result is that same-day or next-day killings are common, which one member of the MAID Death Review Committee said “reveals remarkable fast‐tracking of euthanasia.”

“One elderly woman declined MAID and preferred palliative care,” he wrote. “When a hospice placement request was rejected, her husband, who had been assessed as struggling with ‘caregiver burnout’ asked for an urgent MAID assessment. She was euthanized that day.”

Nor does the state appear to care much about enforcing its own rules. 

The Toronto Globe and Mail this week reported on a case involving a 45-year-old who suffered from Crohn’s disease, whose doctor approved him for death at a meeting in a coffee shop, and then followed up with dozens of text messages encouraging him to go through with the euthanasia, including one bashing family members who opposed him committing suicide. The doctor even drove him to the facility to administer the fatal drug cocktail. 

The same doctor had also declared a patient dead only to have her start breathing again, requiring him to return to finish the job. 

A professional review board concluded that the doctor “displayed a lack of judgment, dealt with patients in a way that risked looking like coercion, and kept inadequate records.”

His punishment? He was issued “a caution,” which doesn’t even count as a disciplinary action.

One of the 45-year-old’s family members told the Globe and Mail: “I am horrified that the college has not stopped him from practicing. What does it take?”

People trying to get actual medical care in Canada, meanwhile, are forced to wait in interminable lines. 

According to the Fraser Institute, which for years has been tracking wait times imposed by Canada’s nationalized health care system, patients in 2025 were waiting for more than a million procedures. In some provinces, the average wait time between referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist is more than a year. 

This isn’t unique to Canada. Every country that promises “free” healthcare makes people pay in time and suffering. It is the medical equivalent of the bread lines in the old Soviet Union. 

So it’s no wonder the Canadian government is eager to make death easy. It costs almost nothing to euthanize someone, the dead don’t rack up medical bills, and with them gone there are fewer people waiting for care. From a government beancounters perspective, the more suicides the better. 

Gruesome as this is, it is exactly what will happen here if people are foolish enough to fall for the promise of “free” “universal” healthcare.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board