By elderly people wo are already dying from natural causes and ask for a medically assisted death instead of unnecessarily prolonging their suffering. It is telling that so many people who suffer choose a dignified death once they are legally allowed to.

"Man bites dog" gets more clicks than "Dog bites man". Look at the actual statistics, not the headlines.

One could argue that number should be close to 100%, as people would live to old age where eventually the body is just too worn to continue a good life.

under your system, when should Stephen Hawking have pulled the plug?

when he wanted to.

Most of society doesn't live a purely intellectual life, and wouldn't want to.

On one hand it shows terrible inadequacies of Canadian health care. On the other would it be better to force people to suffer till the natural end of their lives that are terrible because of those inadequacies? Healthcare won't get significantly better soon enough for them anyways. It seems better to "discover" what percentage of people want to end their lives in current conditions and improve those conditions to improve that percentage. That might be a very powerful measure of how good we are doing with added benefit of not forcing suffering people to suffer longer.

Been thinking about this for years.

It's easy to think that any % > 0 is a sign of something having gone wrong. My default guess used to be that, too.

But imagine a perfect health system: when all other causes of death are removed, what else remains?

If by "terrible inadequacies of Canadian health care" you mean they've not yet solved aging, not yet cured all diseases, and not yet developed instant-response life-saving kits for all accidents up to and including total body disruption, then yes, any less than 100% is a sign of terrible inadequacies.

Some level above 0% is achievable target at our techlevel. But we could have easily have higher assisted suicide rate than this ideal non-zero level if we made our health services worse than they are. Same way I don't suppose they are administered perfectly right now so there's still long way to go before achieving lowest technologically possible level.

And even 0% is possible without going StarTrek, if for example full-time narcotic-induced bliss till the "natural" end of your life was an option. Then assisted suicide rate would just cease to be a good indicator of how good our health care and services are.