What Does it Mean to ‘Care’?

Driving into my office one December morning and growing weary of Christmas music, I channel surfed my way to an extraordinary conversation. In just 15 minutes, most of them spent in the McDonald’s drive-through line, I found myself reflecting on the questions of life, death, and the workings of Providence.

On one end of the conversation was Miles Sundeen, the husband of Jolene Van Alstine, a once-vibrant, young Canadian woman suffering desperately with a rare parathyroid disease. Jolene’s struggle has lasted more than eight years and has become so relentlessly painful that she finds herself contemplating the one service efficiently rendered by the Canadian health-care system: assisted suicide.

Jolene’s disease is potentially treatable, but not anywhere in Saskatchewan, where she and Miles live. Although Canada has a taxpayer-funded universal health system, it is up to each province to determine which services it considers medically necessary and eligible for coverage. 

Unfortunately for Jolene, no surgeon in Saskatchewan can provide the help she needs. To get care out-of-province, she must first get a referral from an endocrinologist in Saskatchewan, none of whom are reportedly accepting new patients. 

As her devoted husband Miles explained to American radio host Glenn Beck, Jolene has been lying curled up on a couch for the past eight years, increasingly isolated from friends, just waiting for each day to end. Jolene’s despair has led her to contemplate a process that goes under the deceptively benign acronym MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying. 

According to the Canadian government website, “Only medical practitioners are permitted to conduct assessments and to provide medical assistance in dying. This can be a physician or a nurse practitioner.” The site notes that as of March 2027, “persons suffering solely from a mental illness” will be eligible for MAID service. Talk about a “slippery slope”—assisted suicide is now the third-leading cause of death in Canada. 

As Miles and Jolene discovered, it is far easier to book an appointment with a MAID executioner in Saskatchewan than it is with an endocrinologist. George Carson, a MAID-approved doctor, assessed Jolene and determined that she met at least one of the eligibility requirements. No, not that the disease was “incurable,” but that her condition was “intolerable.” 

Rather than curing the disease, which is problematic, Canada offers a simpler solution. A physician or nurse practitioner will make Jolene’s condition more tolerable by killing her through lethal injection. For Canadian health, it is a problem solved, one fewer chronically ill patient to tax an overburdened system.

Although health systems everywhere profess to “care,” not a one of them is programmed to do just that. Certainly not in Canada, where the needs of the system trump the needs of the individual. In truth, only humans can care, and this is where Glenn Beck entered the equation. 

On my drive to work, I just chanced on this providential encounter, one that left me only slightly less choked up than Beck or Miles. “How do you let a person die?” Beck asked rhetorically. “How are the Canadians not standing up for themselves?” 

Moved by Jolene’s plight, Beck spontaneously volunteered to send his own plane to Saskatchewan and bring Jolene to a Tampa clinic that may be able to treat her condition. When Miles noted there was no way he and Jolene could pay for it, Beck said through his tears, “We will find a way to make this happen if it is at all possible. We pray for you. There are millions of people praying for you, and we will do everything we can.”

To no one’s surprise, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the CBC, took offense at Beck’s intervention. Its producers promptly recruited health-policy expert Tom McIntosh to put Beck in his place. 

“Whatever kind of foolish opportunism that Glenn Beck is demonstrating for his own purposes, we, I think, should try not to be distracted by that,” McIntosh told CBC. “There is still an issue here. There’s still a citizen of ours in real need.” If the deck needed more stacking, CBC identified Beck as the “owner of a far-right news site.” 

The one thing McIntosh did prove is that statism is a virtue-killer. He sees Jolene less as a human being with a soul than as a “citizen of ours.” Having put the interests of the state above that of the individual—“there’s still an issue here”—McIntosh and his enablers at CBC have lost the ability to feel genuine emotion. To them, compassion is a con, Beck a con man. 

As Beck knows, a strong, libertarian argument can be made to legalize assisted suicide. Eleven American states already have done so, and a 12th, Illinois, is weighing its options. Unlike in Canada, however, Americans still have the freedom to maneuver their way to a “Tampa” of their own.

Scarcity threatens that freedom. As resources here contract, Beck warns that assisted suicide will seem an increasingly attractive way for the state to ration health care and for families to preserve their inheritances. If Grandma seems to be frittering away her estate to prolong her life, one can easily imagine her heirs whispering in her ear about the wonders of a neat and speedy exit.

When I was a boy, my crippled grandmother came to live with us after her husband died. My parents gave up their bedroom and moved to a fold-out couch in the living room. Just two generations ago, this largesse was expected of grown children. Today, it seems almost saintly.

Thanks to a combination of affluence and increasing state intervention, we have grown comfortable farming out the most fundamental familial responsibilities, death included. The promoters of assisted suicide understand this devolution and exploit it. Glenn Beck rejects it. 

Sentimentalist that I am, I choose to side with Beck. I pray that Jolene will find her way back to life and that even the Grinches at CBC and MAID will celebrate this one small miracle in their midst.

PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2025