Choose your own adventure

Sometimes I feel like giving up. I was reading a BBC article this morning on assisted suicide.

Terry Pratchett one of my – sometimes – favorite authors is stepping up and setting up a public tribunal on assisted suicide. He wants the public in the UK to decide whether assisted suicide should be legal or not. Terry suffers with alzhiemers disease (maybe that’s why he writes so many books) but his disease isn’t far enough along right now to make him want to die just yet. I guess he is getting his ducks in a row in case he wants to end his life later on down the road. It is an iteresting way to use your celebrity to say the least.

Reading the article I just had one thought: what do life insurance companies think of assisted suicide?

Seriously the fact that life insurance does not get paid out if someone commmits suicide has kept me on the planet when things get bad for me – there is no way I am leaving my kids high and dry.

The article was of course all about making sure people are making the desicion themselves and not being pressured into an assisted death by family or friends who stand to gain either by not having to take care of thier “loved” one or stand to gain an inheritance.

So what about life insurance and assisted suicide? Seems to me that this would be a huge conflict that no insurer would be willing to touch. Then again you can buy insurance for almost anything so who knows.

If insurance does get paid out would it ever be possible to legalize assisted suicide? I would expect that people would be far more likely to want to die if they knew that a wind fall awaited their families once the funeral was over. Either by their own guilt or persuasion by the survivors it would be tough to tell the true motive of why someone chose this cause of death. If someone did persuade someone to die by assisted suicide would they be able to be prosecuted? Would the charge be murder one?

Insurance and murder. Probably not the can of worms Pratchett is looking to open.