The Cost of a Human Life

I read an interesting opinion piece in the Boston Globe on Saturday ("The Cost of not enacting health care reform", by Linday Bilmes and Rosemarie Day 10/07/09)

The authors argue that we work under the erroneous assumption that we are saving money by not insuring more Americans. However, sick and dead people do not work and do not spend money. By insuring more Americans we both save and extend their lives giving us more workers to increase our productivity and more consumers to boost our economy.

It turns out that the government estimates the value of each human life in terms of its contribution to the overall economy to be 7 million dollars. This is important to the cost benefit analysis of government programs. For instance, if a government program costing 100 billion dollars were estimated to save only 100 lives, it would not be considered worth the expense.

The authors apply this cost benefit analysis to the current health care proposals assuming that it will save 40,000 lives a year:

US government agencies typically use a figure around $7 million to represent the lost economic output from each death. If we conservatively use only half the government figure, or $3.5 milllion, it suggest that the annual cost to the US economy of 40,000 deaths is about $140 billion. That adds up to a cost of more than a trillion dollars over a 10 year period - even taking future inflation into account - well above the cost of enacting a health care package.

I find this a compelling argument. But I wonder if these authors would consider applying the same calculus to abortion. If so, we would find that the cost to the economy of ending 1.5 million unborn lives annually is a staggering 5.25 trillion dollars. If we were to multiply that over the 36 years since the legalization of abortion in the US, we would have a sum requiring exponents to calculate. If the price of doing nothing to provide healthcare to the 40,000 people who would otherwise die without it is too high, what is the cost of allowing millions of unborn children never to see the light.