REASSESSING POTENTIAL COST-SAVINGS FROM LEGALIZING PHYSICIAN-ASSISTED SUICIDE

The purpose of this thesis was to estimate the potential health care cost savings from legalizing a physician assisted suicide (PAS) policy on both a national and individual scale. Given the evolving legal context of PAS paired with the rapidly rising health care costs and aging population in the United States, we hypothesized that implementing a PAS policy on a federal scale would significantly lower healthcare costs. We conducted our analysis using 2 methods: one based on data from the Netherlands and one based on data from Oregon. Overall, we found that while cost savings on a national level are not significant enough to solely justify legalization of PAS, there is a compelling case that legalization of PAS would be a compassionate policy that significantly relieves the financial burden on individuals and their families.