What is the price of a life?
For decades, the American healthcare system has grappled with this question to no end, but as of 2023, that answer appeared to settle at a staggering figure: roughly $14,500 per person. In total, U.S. healthcare spending reached $4.9 trillion, making the United States the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Although the coronavirus pandemic intensified rising costs, this trend long predates COVID-19, with healthcare spending hitting a steady climb right after the 2000s. In fact, America consistently lags behind our competing countries on key figures like life expectancy and preventable mortality rates (and, to some, we’ve become an international laughing stock for turning the healthcare system into a corporatized healthcare business).
But now, the question of what a life is “worth” has become even more urgent.
The emergence of breakthrough, high-tech treatments—such as CRISPR gene-editing therapies capable of replacing defective genes—has pushed healthcare costs into unprecedented territory. These innovations offer hope to thousands of patients once considered untreatable, but they also force society to confront an uncomfortable reality: our medical sciences are advancing much faster than the systems of paying for them itself. Insurance plans can no longer cover for life saving treatments, or worse, they just flat out refuse to. Jonathan Gruber, architect of the Affordable Care Act and chair of economics at MIT, likens this predicament to a “coming tsunami.” He explains that most American companies are “self-insured,” meaning that they pay their own medical bills. But when it becomes cheaper for a worker to die than it is to help them recover, Gruber says institutions face a difficult financial decision: “Do I cover this drug and potentially go bankrupt? Or do I not help my unlucky employee?”
What makes this moment so different from past decades is the fact that we actually have access to these technologies, around 300 high-cost genetic therapies to be exact. But unfortunately, the price of living can’t be reduced to the dollar amount without eroding the moral foundation healthcare sits on itself. When life-saving treatments exist but remain financially out of reach, Americans are compelled, once again, to reconsider an age-old question—what is the true price of a human life?
