Member

The final area comes to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Markham, about the incentives that will be set up. My concern is that if we make this a taxpayer-funded service, integrated into the National Health Service, there will be pressure to look at a financial calculus for the services we deliver to patients. Finance people and those responsible for providing the NHS will look at the cost of providing assisted suicide compared to the cost of providing people with palliative care or other health treatments, and what is really concerning for disabled people and vulnerable people is that you will set up a world in which people start working out whether it is cheaper that you are dead and more expensive to keep you alive, and that pressure will then be exerted in that direction. That is the real risk, not the cost of the service but what other decisions it drives. That is what we need to guard against and that is the main benefit of keeping the funding and delivery of this service completely separate from the National Health Service. That way, health trusts do not have that explicit temptation to push assisted suicide because it is cheaper than providing people with proper healthcare.