[wyager]

Profit doesn't need to have anything to do with it.

It doesn't make economic sense to spend, as an extreme example, $500M of public money to save one life. If we did whatever medical treatments we could, at whatever cost, we'd go broke as a society very quickly.

Utilitarian optimization places some upper bound on the amount of money we should be willing to spend to save a life. Making people pay for their own care approximates this bound but with more variance.

[bryanlarsen]

It'd be nice if that upper limit was somewhat consistent.

We spend billions per American life saved on terrorism.

We regularly spend $50M / life on infrastructure; hundreds of millions on an overpass over a dangerous intersection to save a handful of lives.

We regularly force companies to spend well over $10M / life on health & safety regs.

Medicaid costs about $800K / life saved.