I live in Alberta, where we are on the doorstep of a gargantuan economic issue where we are expected to continue to provide our current level of healthcare (superb) to a massive portion of our aging population. What are the most cost effect methods by which The Grim Reaper could dispatch our again population? How might a provident government invest in such an endeavor?
This really should have occurred to your government prior to deciding superb healthcare is some sort of right to which everyone is entitled…no worries, though; we in the US will be joining you shortly.
There is no upper limit, as you are finding out, to how much can be spent on superb care. Literally no upper limit. All your country makes and all it can borrow is not enough. The healthcare system has not even started to spend what will eventually be spent. And of course much of that is spent while the Grim Reaper is just as superbly making sure you eventually croak. It is very expensive to die during superb care.
I’m not sure of your exact question, though. Are you asking what the cheapest way to die is? The answer to that is sudden death, which is most typically cardiac but can occasionally be neurologic or non-cardiac vascular events such as burst abdominal aortic aneurysm. The only cost is the emergency call and some sort of brief but futile effort at resuscitation in the ED.
Are you asking about public policy to encourage sudden deaths? A program to encourage cigarette smoking might be your friend here. They are voluntary, nicely addicting, can be taxed to defray their associated health costs, and render substantial net savings in two ways: the smoker dies earlier (saving all sorts of pension costs) and very often dies suddenly, since a major effect of smoking is cardiovascular disease. As a side bonus, smokers may be more productive workers until such time as Grimmy calls.
Given the OP’s location, I suggest the cheapest form of death would be to take a walk in February sans heavy clothing. Fairly comfortable for the soon-to-be-deceased, easy for the authorities to clean up the scene, little doubt about the cause.
Best of all, it’s so Canadian®
Gas chambers seem to have a proven track record for this kind of thing.
Try an injection of air into the vascular system. Then again having elevators that open to empty air can be cheep too.
Now I have this clip running through my head of Norm from Cheers when he was his company’s “dispatcher.” 
I believe that the plastic bag over the head is relatively quick and painless. Just start giving out suicide bags.
Godwin count: 4
Not bad.
The movie Soylent Green offers one solution.
Popular in fiction, not nearly so sure in real life. Most common outcomes range from no effect, to many weeks in an ICU. Quick, quiet death? Not so likely.
I’m going to move this out of General Questions. I’m not quite sure where to put it. I’m going to try Great Debates for now.
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
How about starvation? That doesn’t cost shit.
Doesn’t produce a lot of it, either.
Hurrah! we’ve baffled a moderator!
Lastday, Capricorn 29’s. Year of the City: 2274. Carousel begins.
Throw them off of a cliff. Or drown them. It doesn’t get any cheaper than that.
If you wanted to be more humane you could put them in a vacuum sealed oxygen tent and slowly reduce the flow of oxygen over the course of a week so that eventually they’ll just stop breathing.
Well, if you’re asking the quickest way to exterminate people, I’d think at this point the trick might be to find some way of doing it that would actually turn some amount of profit; perhaps by cooking people/bodies down into synthetic gasoline (such as with the Thermal Conversion process used on turkey offal), or for use as some kind of fertilizer, or animal (or perhaps human) feed?
On the other hand, if the question isn’t so much on how to kill people, but on how to find a method facilitate or encourage people getting themselves killed, the question becomes a bit more complex, though more interesting—and perhaps more importantly, potentially legal.
Perhaps by encouraging a religious or social movement that’s impractical to the point of being incompatible with human life (I dunno…some form of neo-Jainist fruitarianism?), or perhaps some kind of social or memetic engineering that spurs a rash of suicidal behavior (maybe a good cover of Gloomy Sunday could be of use)?
I think the cheapest way to do it would be to cancel that current level of superb health care. You’ll save all that money, and the dying will take care of itself!
For added savings, cancel all other forms of public support, like welfare and social security and the like. And if that doesn’t impoverish then, then you can start taxing them exorbantly. Eventually, they’ll run out of savings and food and die quite reliably.
Offer recreational drugs for people willing to take early hospice?