I have to figure out the value of human life if payment for kidneys was legal..
ID: 1252850 • Letter: I
Question
I have to figure out the value of human life if payment for kidneys was legal.. The information I have is that cost of kidney transplant per person is $250,000 (currently 16000 people receive kidney transplants). If payment for kidneys was legal, 5000 additional people would be saved every year. The added cost for including payment of a kidneys would be $3.5 billion. Currently people are waiting for kidney transplant for 3-4 years. The cost of dialysis is $70,000 per year.Here is the question that I have to answer.
"How much must we value a human life for it to make economic sense to permit payments for kidneys? How much is that number reduced if each of the five thousand also ends up spending 18 months less on dialysis?
Explanation / Answer
This problem is mostly about bookkeeping. 16K x $250K = $4B Now, assuming selling kidneys is now legal, but wait times on dialysis remain unchanged (meaning there's no economic savings), the added cost of $3.5B divided by the number of people saved annually (5,000) means human life at a minimum must be valued at more than $700K to justify the expense. Now, assuming legal kidney sales reduces wait time and dialysis use by 18 months for each patient, it creates a total savings per patient of $105K (this is the reduction, and the answer), meaning the minimum value of human life must be more than at least $595K.