How many times have you heard someone say that– “you can’t put a value on human life”. Yes, you can. Yes, we do. All the time.
We love to say it but we don’t mean it ourselves. If the government proposed raising our taxes by 50% to pay for a ream of new hospitals, clinics, emergency ward staff, helicopters, and defibrillators, they would be tossed out of office at the very next election. We don’t mean it.
We know that millions of people are starving to death at this moment in Darfur and Somalia. I don’t think a single person in Canada has proposed increasing our aid to those people since the economy went into the tank. How can you possibly put value on a life?
What we mean is, “you can’t put a limit on how much we want other people to pay for a human life that matters to us.”
The irony is that we often, in fact, end up putting less value on a human life when we have these knee-jerk responses to a crisis.
It is this kind of thinking that leads governments and individuals to spend huge sums of money on services and products that seem to protect life, when the same amount of money spent more wisely, on prevention, for example, would save far more human lives. It’s that same old human impulse. When a section of road is unsafe because it is too “expensive” to build a proper bridge or change the angle of the curve or widen the pavement, we panic and buy more ambulances and end up spending more money than it would have cost to fix the problem in the first place.
Case in point: a few years ago a child strangled to death playing on a jungle gym in a school play-ground in Toronto. “You can’t put a price on a- human life” said the Toronto school board. They removed all of the play ground equipment at all the schools in Toronto, eventually replacing them with better playground equipment that was deemed more safe. But the children who normally played in these school years went elsewhere to play while the equipment was on order, and more of them were killed in accidents than could possibly have died from strangulation on the old equipment.
Besides, the whole notion that you “can’t put a value on human life” cuts two ways. In the case of a lawsuit against a corporation whose negligence caused a wrongful death– might not a judge decide that it would be crass to aware a specific amount of money to a plaintiff, because, you can’t put a value on human life.
“I heard about it and I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ How can they possibly put a value on a life?’ ” said Debra Moran of Preston, who credits Life Star helicopter with helping to save her 16-year-old son last summer. He was critically injured in an ATV crash in Ledyard, 55 miles from Hartford and the nearest trauma center. “Would they say a respirator is too expensive and they are not going to have an I.C.U. anymore?” she said.