The Business of Medical Assisted Suicide
by Lisa Blumberg, Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide
When New York was considering passage of a medical assisted suicide bill, Attorney Kaitlin Puccio wrote in the New York Law Journal that “New York’s financial incentive to keep its residents from using out-of-state services when they could be provided in-state may be enough to spark a sense of urgency to pass the…bill.”
In stressing the economic opportunities related to legalizing medical assisted suicide, Puccio was going off script. The usual line of organizations promoting its legalization is that the sole reason for such laws is to prevent “end of life” suffering. It will be an option regretfully offered and rarely used.
Puccio was prescient, though. Since the New York law became effective, there has been significant promotion of the availability of assisted suicide on social media. It’s a marketing campaign. A recent New York Times article [Sept. 3, 2026, https://bit.ly/4ykQM5p] describes a “start-up” that opened on the day assisted suicide became legal in New York. The tone of the article is casual, business oriented and chilling.
The enterprise is a “one-stop shop, … where people can get help meeting every legal and medical requirement for a death on their own terms. Patients get two medical evaluations and a mental health screening, as well as a prescription for the combination of drugs — sedatives, morphine, lethal doses of cardiac medication — that will kill them.”
As the article reports, the start-up is dealing with logistical issues other start-ups confront. How to obtain supplies, i.e. the lethal drugs? Can a client move up the scheduled date (for the ingestion)? What’s the price point? The owners decide on $12K for the whole package.
As with other businesses, there is chafing at modest regulation. The requirement that a request to die be videotaped is “silly.” They have “tremendous sympathy” for those who are ineligible under the law – like people with disabilities. Screening to rule out depression is “counterintuitive.”
One of the owners is confident that heaven is on the other side. Businesses like to have a feel-good image.
This is capitalism meeting medical assisted suicide, an inevitable and dangerous match. Let’s not let it happen in Connecticut.