Community | May 27, 2008 | 0 comments

The Value of a Human Life: $129,000

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"That's the international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure. More simply, insurance companies calculate that to make a treatment worth its cost, it must guarantee one year of "quality life" for $50,000 or less. New research, however, would argue that that figure is far too low.

Stanford economists have demonstrated that the average value of a year of quality human life is actually closer to about $129,000. To get to that number, Stefanos Zenios and his colleagues at Stanford Graduate School of Business used kidney dialysis as a benchmark. Every year dialysis saves the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who would otherwise die of renal failure while waiting for an organ transplant."
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