how much money is a life worth?

Some mischief-makers wanting to de-rail Mr Obama's healthcare plan have made much of the fact that there is a tariff placed on healthcare by the UK's National Institute for Clinical Excellence - the ironically-named NICE. It's true that in deciding if a particular intervention is going to be cost-effective they value a year's reasonably healthy life at around £30,000.

[It's more nuanced than that. And their role is to set minimum standards, not to deny treatments to any particular patient. But I digress. Oh, I am still laughing about the epic fail of "Investor's Business Daily" suggesting that Prof. Stephen Hawking wouldn't be alive if he were in the tender care of the NHS - except that he is, and he is. :-) But I digress.]

That seems a particular disingenuous argument, because plainly American Insurance companies must make a similar calculation. They may have different numbers, and come out with a higher value, but given finite resources, they are bound to have a calculation. But I don't imagine that they announce the figure...

And every industry that deals with life-or-death issues must have a similar calculation. Whether they deal with dangerous industrial processes, or road safety, or railways, or aviation, every risk assessment needs a number. The curious thing is the wide difference in the numbers used in different sectors: the railways spent tens of millions retrofitting locks to prevent doors opening on high speed trains (when travelling at high speed) - an incident which consistently cost about eight lives per year. Investing a proportionately similar amount in road safety would have saved many more lives (or so I've been told).

Oxford is in the process of replacing an urban speed limit of 30mph with one of 20mph, on the grounds that doing so will save lives. Plainly, a speed limit of 10mph (or 5mph) would save more. But the latter is regarded as an absurd notion, citing perhaps a law of diminishing returns. But who is to decide how to balance cost and convenience with life-saving?

I struggle to find a spiritual principle to hang onto in this. But I'm pretty confident that one thing we must do is to avoid acting in such a way as to make the lives of the poor worth less than the lives of the rich. Universal health care is a part of that. Are there other examples?