The Boston Globe We're extending our lives, but at what price?

"How much is an extra year of your life worth?

That blunt inquiry is at the heart of a Rand Corp. study to be published today, and the answers are sobering."

"For instance, the study found that new pacemakers could cost Medicare and other insurers $1.4 million for every extra year of life they add. In comparison, healthcare economists often use $100,000 per added year of life as the maximum of benefit worth paying by the government insurer. In another example, the study predicted the use of tumor-strangling drugs would mean $498,809 per additional life-year."

redux [03.26.04]
The New York Times Magazine The Human Factor
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"How much is your life worth to you? On the face of it, that's an idiotic question. No amount of money could compensate you for the loss of your life, for the simple reason that the money would be no good to you if you were dead. And you might feel, for different reasons, that the dollar value of the lives of your spouse or children -- or even a stranger living on the other side of the country -- is also infinite. No one should be knowingly sacrificed for a sum of money: that's what we mean when we say that human life is priceless.

But the government set a price for it four years ago: $6.1 million. "

redux [01.02.02]
Salon The impossible calculus of loss

"Is the life of an investment banker who died in the World Trade Center worth $1.65 million in taxpayer money? What about $3 million? Is the life of a firefighter worth more than that of the janitor he tried to save? How about the life of a woman who died in the Oklahoma City bombing?

These sound like rhetorical questions, the kinds of queries we hope never to have to answer. But they are the questions that the administrators of private charities and federal compensation funds must consider -- and answer to the satisfaction of an entire nation -- as they begin to divvy up and distribute enormous sums of money to the victims of the Sept. 11 disaster."

The New York Times: College Federal Plan for an Aid Formula Is Criticized
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"The Justice Department has provoked a sharp debate among lawyers by asking whether it should use formulas to help determine awards from the federal fund for victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks."

"A grid approach is essentially the opposite of the traditional case method of American courts, where individual determinations are made on issues like the value of a person's suffering. Proponents say a grid could calculate damages through formulas that would include factors like the age, earnings and number of children of each victim."

George Street Journal Economist Feldman takes different route toward assessing value of a life

"Although this economic model - willingness-to-pay measures - has been adopted by most economists, the courts use the human capital model to determine damages in cases of wrongful death. "This views people as a machine - a stream of income," said Feldman. "To make [the plaintiffs] whole, they look at what the deceased would have earned and passed on to them."

Feldman believes there is a certain logic to this when widows and children go before the courts to seek justice for a family member who has lost his or her life through another's negligence. But such an approach "implies that someone who is 65 years old or is retired is worth nothing," said Feldman. "A younger person's life is going to always be more valuable using this model.""

David Friedman WHAT IS 'FAIR COMPENSATION' FOR DEATH OR INJURY?

"Compensation for death or bodily injury involves two quite different problems. The first is the problem of how much' damage there is to make up for. The second is the problem of in what coin damages can be paid. One might imagine that someone would be willing to give his life in exchange for a sufficiently high price--five years of ecstasy, perhaps. Faust, after all, traded not merely life but eternal bliss for a finite payment. More mundanely, we observe that people are willing to enter dangerous professions (driving dynamite trucks, for example) in exchange for somewhat higher pay, thus in effect trading life--a small increase in the probability of getting killed--for income. Both examples suggest that the reason it is impossible to 'fully compensate' someone for the loss of his life is not that the value of his life to him is infinite--it is not--but that the value of compensation to a corpse is in most cases small."