Socialized Medicine’s Dangerous Solution To High Costs

In November 2022, Canadian native Allison Ducluzeau was rushed to the emergency room with severe abdominal pain. Subsequent tests revealed a rare, aggressive abdominal cancer: stage 4 peritoneal carcinomatosis. In consultations at the British Columbia Cancer Agency, oncologists informed Allison that she was not eligible for the surgery she needed, as chemotherapy to follow may not have been effective in treating her disease. With an estimated prognosis of two months to two years to live, her doctors suggested she talk to her family about “assisted dying.” Allison’s oncologists’ only treatment plan was death by assisted suicide.

Allison refused to succumb to their suggested plan. Within days of her assisted suicide referral, she was in contact with two American hospitals willing to treat her cancer. Allison traveled to Baltimore, Maryland, to see Dr. Armando Sardi at Mercy Medical Center, and by November 2023, she was on her honeymoon following a dream wedding — cancer-free. Maryland’s Mercy Medical Center treated Allison not only with excellent medical precision but with dignity despite her terminal diagnosis. The British Columbia Cancer Agency did neither.

That is socialized medicine: shortages, drug rationing, months-long wait times, and substandard care that pushes the sickest and most vulnerable patients to euthanasia or assisted suicide. Though wrapped in language like “compassion,” “choices,” and “death with dignity,” assisted suicide is nothing less than a systemic failure of socialized medicine and a coercive affront to human dignity.

The United States may be well on its way to the Canadian reality. We’ve already welcomed assisted suicide in 13 states and counting. Almost 15,000 Americans have died by assisted suicide since 1997, with annual figures increasing 1000% between 2014 and 2024. In California alone, 378 doctors prescribed 1,839 lethal drugs for assisted suicide in 2025, and 1,235 of those patients died. Ninety-three percent were over the age of 60, with a majority suffering from cancer.

Though less than half of states allow assisted suicide (13 states and the District of Columbia), 17 states are actively considering legislation to legalize it. If all of those states succeed, 31 U.S. jurisdictions will allow assisted suicide, with out-of-state patients allowed to seek assisted suicide in at least Oregon and Vermont. Add to this prevalence of assisted suicide the current push for drug pricing plans that would tie drug prices to places that support these types of undignified policies, like the Most Favored Nations (MFN) approach, and the ingredients for a Canadian-style socialized medicine-to-euthanasia pipeline loom large.

Why? Though marketed as a pricing solution, MFN opens the door for importing socialist drug rationing to the U.S. MFN matches U.S. drug prices to European nations whose drug pricing models use Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) to set prices. Each drug gets a QALY score measuring how likely the drug is to produce “perfect health” in a patient. Naturally, medicines designed to treat rare diseases, chronic illnesses, and terminal conditions score poorly and are not covered for patients. The MFN model would import QALYs and ration drugs away from the most vulnerable in the United States.

American families need relief from high drug costs. But tying U.S. prices to prices set by severely flawed foreign government-run health systems is not a morally neutral policy choice. It risks importing the anti-American assumptions and mechanisms those systems use: bureaucratic gatekeeping, delayed access, and quality-of-life judgments that reject the inherent dignity of all human life.

Another cautionary note: A Concerned Women for America poll found that over 54% “somewhat” or “strongly” oppose tying U.S. prescription drug prices to countries where the government controls drug prices by limiting access to treatments based on the government’s perceived value of a person’s life.

America was founded on a promise: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all, including the terminally ill, cancer patients, individuals with chronic or rare diseases, the elderly, the disabled, and everyone a Parisian bureaucrat might consider “not worth the investment.” We cannot cut costs by rationing life-saving drugs away from vulnerable Americans who need them most, leaving them with nothing but assisted suicide.

When assisted suicide is the norm and real care is an exception, death loses dignity and gains a dangerous price tag. In a global community, denying medicine to vulnerable people and euthanizing not only the terminally ill, but also the chronically ill, mentally ill, minors, the elderly, and the disabled is unethical and immoral.

The United States must renew its commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. Socialized medicine under the guise of “lower prices” is not the answer to high drug prices in the United States. Our nation must stop assisted suicide in its tracks and fight for opportunity and dignity for all.

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Hannah Lape is Legislative Strategist for Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization. On X: @CWforA

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