We should look at the costs of healthcare in terms of what we think our lives are worth because what we are paying for is a chance to extend them.
The same thing applies to the costs of mediating global warming because if we don't do that we are wasting our money on healthcare. In order to be fair about it I have looked at how we value life in terms of compensation for its loss.
One might think that people would value their own lives highly but then how do we account for suicide or volunteering for military service or engaging in other sorts of high risk behavior. You would think that we would also value our childrens lives highly but that turns out not to be the case either.
What's a life worth if we are paying compensation to some villagers in Iraq
Recently, through a Freedom of Information Act request, the ACLU pried loose some of the requests for compensation payments submitted by Iraqis and Afghans (and the military's decisions on them, including denials of payment). They make grim reading. Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher offered this description: "What price (when we do pay) do we place on the life of a 9-year-old boy, shot by one of our soldiers who mistook his book bag for a bomb satchel? Would you believe $500? And when we shoot an Iraqi journalist on a bridge we shell out $2,500 to his widow -- but why not the measly $5,000 she had requested?"
Back in 2005, Iraqi payments already seemed to average about $2,500 for a wrongful death. That, for instance, is what the families of two dozen innocent Iraqis slaughtered in another Marines-run-amok moment at Haditha, also after an attack on a convoy of Humvees that wounded a Marine, received. ("They ranged from little babies to adult males and females," said Ryan Briones, a Marine witness to the event. "I'll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood.")
or Afghanistan,
U.S. Marines, who, in early March, went on a killing rampage near Jalalabad in Afghanistan. Sorry, in Pentagon parlance, this is referred to as "using excessive force." A platoon of elite Marine Special Operations troops in a convoy of Humvees were ambushed by a suicide bomber in a mini-van and one of them was wounded. Initially, it was reported that as "many as 10 people were killed and 34 wounded as the convoy made a frenzied escape, and injured Afghans said the Americans fired on civilian cars and pedestrians as they sped away." The Americans quickly blamed some of these casualties on "militant gunfire." ("Lt. Col. David Accetta, the top U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan, said gunmen may have fired on U.S. forces at multiple points during the escape.")
Later, it was admitted that the Marines had wielded that "excessive force" remarkably excessively and long after the ambush had ended, laying down a deadly field of fire at six spots, at least, along a ten-mile stretch of road. Their targets, according to a draft report of the U.S. military investigation of the incident (which the Washington Post got its hands on) were Afghans, on foot and in vehicles who were "exclusively civilian in nature" and had engaged in "no kind of provocative or threatening behavior."
In the process, the Marines were reported to have murdered "12 people -- including a 4-year-old girl, a 1-year-old boy and three elderly villagers" -- and wounded 34. According to a report by Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, a "16-year-old newly married girl was cut down while she was carrying a bundle of grass to her family's farmhouse.... A 75-year-old man walking to his shop was hit by so many bullets that his son did not recognize the body when he came to the scene." (U.S. troops at the time took the camera of an Afghan Associated Press photographer who happened to come upon the scene and "deleted" photographs from it, including ones "of a four-wheel drive vehicle where three Afghans had been shot to death inside.")
Last Tuesday, after much protest in Afghanistan, according to David S. Cloud of the New York Times, Col. John Nicholson, a brigade commander, met with the families of the (now) 19 Afghans who had been killed and the 50 who had been wounded by the Marines. He offered this official apology: "I stand before you today, deeply, deeply ashamed and terribly sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people." And then he paid approximately $2,000 per death to family members. The military calls these "condolence payments" and makes similar ones, for deaths judged wrongful, in Iraq.
or Bhopal Pakistan
New Delhi, July 20: The Supreme Court ordered the government on Monday to distribute millions of dollars in compensation still due to the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy which had been delayed due to legal wrangles, lawyers said.
In December 1984, tonnes of a toxic gas leaked from a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide in Bhopal, killing 3,800 people almost immediately. Thousands more were injured.
Environmental group Greenpeace says that, since then, over 20,000 people have died from exposure-related illnesses, and of the approximately 520,000 people exposed to the poisonous gas, some 120,000 people remain chronically ill.
Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemical Co, paid $470 million in compensation to residents in 1989, but only some of that amount has been distributed, say lawyers for the victims.
Whats a life worth in New York
When Ettie Pressman, just seven years old, died under a team of horses in 1893, while crossing New York's Ludlow Street with her nine year-old sister, a court granted her father $1,000 to compensate him for "his daughter's services and earnings."
or Louisiana
NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Katrina's victims have put a price tag on their suffering and it is staggering — including one plaintiff seeking the unlikely sum of $3 quadrillion.
The total number — $3,014,170,389,176,410 — is the dollar figure so far sought from some 489,000 claims filed against the federal government over damage from the failure of levees and flood walls following the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane.
Of the total number of claims, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it has received 247 for at least $1 billion apiece, including the one for $3 quadrillion.
Back in 1893 life in New York was as cheap as it is in war zones today. The question of what life is worth seems to depend on whose life it was and how much they would have earned or brought home to their family had they lived. I suppose when we are talking insurance you have to allow that where we have a company eventually paying $23,000 in compensation for a life that it first affected a quarter century ago, it has made the money back by now in interest on the float and thus is paying nothing.
Maybe you think a criminal taking a life is worse than a soldier taking a life or an accident taking a life or medical malpractice taking a life or our government taking a life as casually as it does the execution or incarceration for life of an innocent person, or that taking many lives is worse than taking one only, but that doesn't seem to be the way the compensation gets paid out.
What's a life worth if it was taken by some sort of gang violence.
Summary of 34 murder sentences for murders committed between 11/24/1990 and 4/25/1995 and sentenced under sentencing guidelines:
Average sentence: 200 months (16.6 years, 13.3 after "good time")
Minimum sentence: 66 months (5.5 years, 4.4 after "good time")
Maximum sentence: 388 months (32.3 years, 25.8 after "good time")
Number of sentences at or below minimum presumptive sentence: 7 (20%)
Number of prison terms (after "good time") 10 years or less: 14 (41%)
Number of sentences (after "good time") below Measure 11 minimum: 32 (94%)
Ten years or less in Oregon varies up to the death penalty in Texas and elsewhere in the south.
Whats a life worth if you are wrongfully convicted of a crime and imprisoned with people who are going to try to beat you, rape you or kill you every day for the rest of your life, and then exonerated?
California, for example, provides $26,500 for each year wrongfully spent behind bars. Ohio pays $40,330 for each lost year, plus attorney's fees and lost wages. Vermont, Hawaii, and Michigan pay a maximum of $50,000 for each year served, while Alabama's minimum is $50,000 per year. Tennessee, meanwhile, has a cap set at $1 million, regardless of how many years were wrongfully served.
In states like Missouri, on the other hand, compensation is not on a set scale but rather is determined by subjective factors at the discretion of the state. In the case of one inmate freed from his prison term on the strength of newly examined DNA evidence, the settlement from the state amounted to about $181,000, or around $50 a day.
What's a life worth if it was taken by medical malpractice
A 4 million dollar payout was given to a cerebral palsy victim that was caused by medical malpractice. The 4 million dollars would actually become $45 million dollars over the child's life, thereby giving him life time treatments
Whats a life worth if its taken by an accident resulting in personal injury or wrongful death
attorneys were responsible for securing a $3.5 million dollar structured settlement for the family of an elderly man who had traveled to Chicago for the wedding of a grandson and was run over by a sightseeing tour operator. The man suffered serious spine injuries and fractures that eventually led to his death. This settlement was obtained without going to trial.
What's your life worth, what would you sell it for?
What would you give it for? What's a family get compensated in a "
death benefit" for the loss of a husband son or daughter being put in harms way and killed or disabled in the service of their country?
What would you sell your baby for?
Recently, people auctioned parts of their bodies. To the highest bidder, a man was willing to tattoo the name of a business on his forehead. A woman in Dyersburg tried to legally change her name for the right price. She wanted to donate the proceeds to Hurricane Katrina victims. Now all of this seems completely wacky to me, but harmless. That unfortunately isn’t always the case.
EBay has sites all over the world. Each site has lists of things that can’t be auctioned, because of laws in the country. Naturally, people will try to get around the restrictions. Most of the time they’re caught and the auction ended. I’m glad that happened this time.
Eachnet, whose parent company is eBay, is China’s online marketplace. Sunday, an ad was placed offering babies for sale. Baby boys cost $3500 and girls went for $1500, emphasizing the importance of boys in China. Delivery was promised within 100 days of payment. Thankfully the ad shut down within hours of being placed. All information was turned over to the authorities, which are investigating.
China has a large blackmarket for babies, who are bought or kidnapped and sold to people who want a child. Although Chinese law allows the death penalty for the sale of infants, it didn’t serve as a determent in this case.