Indeed! > And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause peop

Indeed! > And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely. Not only that, but even in first world countries (ie.: countries that have a good universal/public healthcare system), the dollar value of a statistical human life matters as well. There are waiting lists where you have to decide a priority rank of who gets the organ first, or who gets scheduled in on Monday for their surgery vs who has to wait, etc. Nobody likes that it has to be this way, and nobody wants to be the person that decides (in reality, it's often an ethics committee and there are rules and guidelines to follow), but that's how it has to be. The money used to save and extend lives has to be taken from somewhere, and it's taken from the money that represents a fraction of the population's labour one way or another (it's a bit more complicated than that, especially when you consider monetary policy, and non-labour sources of income, but the general idea stands). If you don't put a dollar value on it, then you're going to be making a lot of subjective decisions based on how you feel resources should be allocated: you're going to be taking from some people and giving to others, based on a gut feeling rather than a system. Your gut feeling might be the right one from time to time, but chances are it won't be self-consistent, and will be very biased.