How much can you spend to save one human life? It occurred to me that the price of a human life may be very high these days.
The recent spending bill passed by Congress and signed into law was more than $2 trillion. If it saves a million lives, then each life was worth $2 million. If it saved 10 million lives, each life saved was $200,000.
Looking at it a different way, for 350 million people, the government has just spent nearly $6k for each person in the USA. That's regardless of whether everyone was at risk of death or not.
If it costs no more than that, that's pretty expensive insurance. If the death rate was 10 percent, the insurance company would make a killing so to speak. Would you be willing to fork over that much to keep from getting an illness that could potentially kill you? If the death rate was 1 per cent, then it would be obscene. I've seen death rates much lower than that.
What I've seen of the data, using a layman's method, which could be wrong, is somewhere between 1 percent and below.
Somebody's making out like a bandit here. We may not be done yet, and this is only one aspect of the cost.
Perhaps it is better to avoid a catastrophe, but the human race has survived much worse than what this might have been. I've seen this compared to a common cold. Maybe it is much worse than that, but is it as bad as the kinds of things that have happened in the past?
Perhaps this was the best that could have been done. It wouldn't hurt to examine what was done here and try to do better the next time. Next time???? One more of these, and we may die of something else.
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