There’s been an interesting discussion happening within the health care realm that has piqued the interest of many within the past few weeks. What is your life worth? What is a stranger’s life worth? If you had to put a monetary amount on life, on the months you might have left to live, what would that amount be? Is $100,000 for six months reasonable? How about $1 million for six months?
Let me ask you, what if your first child was to be born within the next two months? How much would your life be worth then? And if a complete stranger’s child was in the same situation? What would their life be worth?
There was an interesting piece in the New York Times this morning regarding just this topic. They call it rationing health care. But, in the piece, everything in our capitalistic economy is rationed based upon profit and ROI. One of the examples given in the article was the price of putting seatbelts into school buses. Personally, I think it’s long overdue, especially when you see those newscasts of little kids flying all over the tumbling school bus. But from a rationing standpoint, paying $40 million to install something that might save one child a year is not good ROI.
That may sound like a crappy way to put it, but we already ration everything, and health care is no different. In reality, it’s already rationed. Of course, the rations put on health care these days are either set by your own doctor, your own health insurance, or your own financial limits. The rationing of health care and spending limits are not predefined by the government. 
So what’s the formula?
As a first take, we might say that the good achieved by health care is the number of lives saved. But that is too crude. The death of a teenager is a greater tragedy than the death of an 85-year-old, and this should be reflected in our priorities. We can accommodate that difference by calculating the number of life-years saved, rather than simply the number of lives saved. If a teenager can be expected to live another 70 years, saving her life counts as a gain of 70 life-years, whereas if a person of 85 can be expected to live another 5 years, then saving the 85-year-old will count as a gain of only 5 life-years. That suggests that saving one teenager is equivalent to saving 14 85-year-olds. These are, of course, generic teenagers and generic 85-year-olds. It’s easy to say, “What if the teenager is a violent criminal and the 85-year-old is still working productively?” But just as emergency rooms should leave criminal justice to the courts and treat assailants and victims alike, so decisions about the allocation of health care resources should be kept separate from judgments about the moral character or social value of individuals.—NYTimes
In reality, there shouldn’t be a formula. If an expensive drug will allow a father to see his first son born, to kiss him on the forehead, and we have to pay for it, then maybe so be it. From a philosophical standpoint, if that child knows that his father stayed alive long enough to see his birth, he might grow to be stronger man because of it.
What if, in a person’s final days, he finishes the formula to cure cancer. But what if those last days were taken away from him because we chose not to pay for it? Is that moral?
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