From The Washington Examiner piece by Dan Hannan:
“You can’t put a value on human life.” It’s a statement of the obvious, a truism, a banality. But that doesn’t get you out of having to make hard choices.
Already, in every healthcare system, clinicians are forced to make a value judgment every time they decide whether or not someone should be resuscitated. Politicians, too, need to decide how to make use of finite resources. Although no one likes to dwell on it, their choices frequently affect the mortality rate.
Consider an extreme example. Every day, about a hundred people in the United States die in traffic accidents. If it were illegal to manufacture a car that could move at more than 10 miles per hour, that figure would fall to approximately zero. But the damage to the economy would be so vast that there would be an immediate and tangible decline in longevity — which, in every society, correlates with wealth.
Is that a ghoulish calculation? Perhaps. But governments make it all the time. They even have a formula to calculate “quality-adjusted life years." Again, it may appear distasteful to put a higher value on some lives than others, but most of us can appreciate the difference between the death of a healthy 5-year-old and the death of her bedridden 90-year-old great-grandmother."
Read the rest of the piece here.