How much is your life worth? How much is someone else's life worth? Can we even put a price on our lives?
Is this only done by those in the dark underbelly of the present and past history? Is this a bias taken up death merchants, slavers and human traffickers alike?
A premium Slaves used to be purchased for $1,100 then, or $30,000 now. A less than optimal slave would be sold for less. Putting a price tag on a the life of another, treating them as property, is still something we need to overcome, despite having moved away from the former behavior in an overt obvious way.
This ties into my post earlier today on caring for individual suffering while being apathetic to larger horror. We identify more and value more a personal victim we can identify with than faceless masses that are being victimized. And it's not just in a subjective moral capacity to value others differently, we also assign differing monetary value to people.
Assessing Risk
This shows up in how we tax/steal from everyone "equally" and re-allocate the funds according to different valuations in society. Then we value what to pay people for their work, from road building to medical care. Depending on who is setting the prices, and who their friends are, the numbers can change from government to government. Rather than one price on any life, we have hundreds and thousands of prices for different people.
In this federal fund re-allocation, the government looks at the value of statistical life (VSL) to determine what life-saving interventions are worth spending money on. This is also called the value of preventative fatality. This reflects the attitude we have towards a risk of death.
Think of buying a car. There are features to calculate, like safety features. These cost extra. Is it worth it to buy these extra little safety features? Take this analogous model, and transpose it on the larger scale of governmental expenditures on our behalf. What are we willing to spend to prevent some illness, disease or infection?
eg: If we accept $7 each to prevent 1 in 1 million getting infected with salmonella, then VSL is $7 million. This costs justifies agencies actions, like the FDA, and how they go about managing this potential threat.
Insurance
The biggest life insurance policy was $201 million for a Silicon Valley tycoon. The price to defend and assure the life of a presidential candidate (not the president) is $40,000, per day! In British Columbia, Canada, 27 years spent unjustly locked in a cage, is worth $6 million. These are different ways we evaluate the life of an individual.
The government, by assessing the risks in a society, is acting as an insurance company. How do they determine how much to charge us? Based on our daily behavior, just like insurance companies try to do, except its for all people not just one individual.
Looking at the wages someone accepts for a risky job gives metrics on how to judge a cost for everyone. In the UK, they rely more on surveys and questionnaires to ask people what they would be willing to pay. Comparing the former Canadian VSL risk and wage assessment, to the latter questioning by the UK, VSL on average is 1/3 higher than the UK DFT approach.
This applies to many things, and we aren't even merging it with the healthcare system yet.
In the medical establishment, they work with insurance companies as well, to assess risk and costs. xxMore valuation of life in monetary terms, in a place that's supposed to value our lives equally, you would think?xx They look at how much quality of life you might get for certain monetary-cost treatments. This measure is called the QALY (quality-adjusted life year). Life is 1 and death is 0, with 4 years of struggling through life gives a QALY of 2. If a new drug comes out which can provide one extra QALY at the cost of $20,000, then it might fall into the overall budget.
Karl Caxton, a health economist at University of York, UK, says that the questions of cost are framed around: "What are the additional benefits, what are the additional costs, are they worthwhile?" If costs start going above $30,000, approval is less likely. A drug that costs $80,000 per QALY, would not make the cut, such as Avastin to extend 3 months to cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. The calculated cost was not worth it.
Committees, like NICE, do appraisals for cost/risk analysis. NICE chair Michael Rawlins even admits how the process works based not on empirical evidence, but on the "collective judgment of the health economists we have approached across the country". The process is stuck like this. Since 1999 attempts have been made to make it more based on research and evidence, but the process and prices remain fixed, even with inflation changes.
This is how governmental bodies function. All of the law works that way. Some guy, or some people, decide this law will be passed. They pass it, no matter how stupid, wrong or immoral it is. Then it just stays there. There is no yearly review. There is no decade review. It just stays there, even if it's an issue, until enough people choose to do something about it and get the stupid law changed. We get locked into ways of living base don laws, that aren't even sane or just, but we are coerced to live by them, right or wrong, at the threat of a gun or being put into a cage. That's the "freedom" we have. Those who want more freedom from masters and controllers, are anarchists. Those who want to keep government and coercive control, are statists.
Medicare is part of the law created by government. They also try to reduce costs, or maximize benefits is another way to look at it. Those who are less fortunate economically, may get Medicare benefits over those who can more afford it. Also, those who are sickest, are treated with higher priority and will get the Medicare treatments or drugs quicker and at a reduced cost.
Value in Death
Insurance payout for certain risky or life-threatening jobs need to be evaluated. The income someone has and their age also factors in to some payouts. A soldier can get $250,000 - $800,00 for their families at death. the US Dept. of Justice gives over $330,00 to police and firefighter families.
Outside of job deaths, there are unexpected deaths, which can end up in a wrongful death lawsuit, basing the payout on the lifetime earnings and any other costs related to the death. The lawsuit can have other payouts, like getting payout for grief or other emotional distress. Some juries are prevented from considering emotional appeals as part of their payout decisions, while other can. This means some child shot and killed in one type of situation has a family get $500,000, while another situation and social context gets $6,000,000.
The calculations for damages in lawsuits is based on damages while you are alive before you die, and the damages from a loss of income already mentioned. But note, there is no consideration for the life itself as having value. Only damages before and after death, but not for the life itself.
To demonstrate this, people wrongfully accused and imprisoned for a crime who are then released, can get compensation or not, depending on the country they are in. In the US or Canada, people can get millions. In the UK, sometimes they get nothing, or as little as 46 pounds for 17 years wrongfully imprisoned, although they have a cap of 500,000 pounds but are very strict about giving any out.
We even apply worth on certain age groups. In an experiment, volunteers making decisions about who gets a life saving organ, or who has a more tragic death, who is more valued to continue living, things like that. It turns out, most people value a young life that hasn't lived, over an older life that has already lives 50 years.
But, juxtaposed to this is the opposite that some value the knowledge gained and contribution that a person with knowledge can bring to humanity, which makes them highly valuable. As such, teenage life is highly valued since it has an investment of knowledge, but has yet to produce in society using it. Young adults and teenagers are those that are valued as most worth saving, due to the combination of youth no having lived, and also having knowledge that has yet to bear fruit.
Did you know you whole body itself, without considering the body parts themselves that can be reused, is worth $2450? Corneas, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, etc., all can be used in other people and have a value. Lungs go for over a million, as does the heart. Kidneys in the US are $300,000, while in China it's $62,000 and in the Philippines it's $6,310.
Black Market
There is also the nasty black market of immoral behavior like human trafficking. These scum of the universe value a life based on the risk involved in trafficking someone, transportation and labor costs, and the market valuation from buyers. A child sold for $200 can change many hands, accrue costs of forged papers, and end up being valued more after a few hops in the hands of evil men. Human life has no higher value to them. The human life is just another property and commodity to make money with. Kidnappers and people who demand ransom do the same. It's all about making money immorally.
Conclusion
From one region to the others, with varying politics and cultures, the value we place on human life seems to have a large range. In general, we tend to not want to think of the assignment of value in different contexts, but this just leaves us scrambling for numbers in an arbitrary way whenever a payout is made to someone.
If we took the time to rationally assign values to certain metrics and agreed upon them is arbitrary a first, just like referencing reality can be done by inventing any language. But, we would have a commonly agreed valuation for certain things, from health care, to death care, to wrongful death lawsuits, etc.
To demonstrate my point in closing this post, various agencies assign monetary value to people injured or killed in traffic accidents. This allows them to judge which safety measures and regulations to adopt in order to prevent those accidents. If someone is too rare, then it probably won't be covered, even though it can possibly be prevented.
eg: The US Department of Transportation assesses a value of $9,100,000 to a human life, while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on place $3,000,000 on our lives to asses what safety measure to put in place in nuclear power plants. Does that make sense?
Something much more dangerous than a car, that can leave an area of land uninhabitable for generations, has risks determining which safety protocols are "worth" installing to prevent the loss of valued human life. Yet, that risk-cost-value assessment is 1/3 the value of the Department of Transport. By low balling the overall cost of accidents from a low-balled human life valuation, the NRC is failing to implement worthwhile safety features. This worthiness wold change if they corrected their valuation to a more standard number. The nuclear industry opposes many changes because adding them would cost more money.
If you want to have some fun and see what some survey thinks your life is worth, I found a BuzzFeed "How Much Money Are You Actually Worth?" survey you can take. Another one is if you decided to sell yourself, what would you get, at Human For Sale website.
[References: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
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2016-11-26, 8am EST