WHAT’S YOUR LIFE WORTH?
It’s worth $50,000, according to the international standard used most private and government-run health insurance plans to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure. More simply, insurance companies calculate that to make a treatment worth its cost, it must guarantee one year of "quality life" for $50,000 or less. New research, however, would argue that the figure is far too low. Stanford economists have demonstrated that the average value of a year of quality human life is closer to about $129,000.
(Time.com 5/20/08)