US vet heads to Canada for free health care — is offered government-assisted death instead

Kirstin Logan and her husband, Donovan James, moved to Canada in hopes of avoiding the financial costs of the US healthcare system in the US. The couple said they wanted to get ahead of any potential financial difficulties and did not want to risk “ever going bankrupt” over medical expenses.

However, their plans changed after Logan was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in September 2023. According to a Fox News interview, Logan initially left Canada later that month to seek treatment in the US and returned to Canada. Her health deteriorated again in 2024 when she suffered a bowel obstruction, which resulted in another return to the US by the couple. They ultimately decided to leave Canada permanently in 2025.

The couple said one of the first options presented to Logan following her diagnosis was Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program, which allows participants to voluntarily end their lives.

“Canada has been slowly sliding into an entire dystopian situation. The way they’ve expanded the MAID system is frightening. It was never supposed to be used this way, to be offered so easily and so upfront when a person gets sick. I think it's evil,” James told Fox News.

“It was the most heartbreaking experience, to basically be set up to die. And if I wanted to live, I had to take my life into my own hands and leave the country. It's pretty dystopian to think about now, to get information about ways that I can end my life and what the end of my life looks like before I'd even gotten an oncology appointment,” Logan added.

Logan experienced multiple hospitalizations in Canada, including another bowel obstruction. James said medical providers told the family there were “no plan[s] to operate on her,” and a doctor advised Logan to “leave the country” if she could.

"Kristin was deteriorating really fast… Ultimately, we had to pull the plug and take her off the machines at the hospital and risk everything to put her in the car, drive all the way down Vancouver Island, sail across the ocean straight on a ferry, continue down over the border back into Seattle to get her immediate emergency surgery," James said. "The surgeon said had she waited another day, she would have gone septic and died in Canada.”

MAiD accounts for roughly one in 20 deaths in Canada. As an increasing number of reports have emerged of patients being informed about assisted death while seeking medical treatment, James argued that the program has become concerning and that Americans are unaware of how bad the Canadian healthcare system is.

“Americans don't get enough Canadian news to know just how much Canadian healthcare has declined over the last couple [of] decades. It's always had this problem, but now it's just so much more worse and dystopian with this M.A.I.D. program that they've introduced - and it was never supposed to be used this way,” James said.