Voting as a Life Valuation Exercise

I know that many ofyou policy wonks out there have been waiting for me to throw you a bone. Here's that bone. So, in Cost-Benefit Analysis, they try to figure out the value of someone's life. Yeah, seriously. For example, some people look out how much someone would be willing to receive per annum for an increase in risk. You know, someone decides to take a riskier job, so they demand more money. There are different methods of life valuation, but three independent studies have come up with that people generally value their lives in the single digit millions up until the possibility of risk gets too high and then the value jumps to infinite. So there is a point, say a 1/1000 chance that you'll end up dying that no monetary compensation would be worth the risk.

With this in mind, in one of my classes we looked at the implications of a health care policy in Arizona that did not include certain organ transplants in their state coverage for the poor. This decision was reached by determining that the limited state funds should be used for insuring the "notch group" which included low-income children from 6-13 and pregnant women. It cost something like $300 to insure each child while it would cost something like $180,000 per transplant. It was more cost-effective to extend benefits to more people for cheaper. After this was passed, someone who needed a liver transplant died because it was not possible for them to receive a transplant from the state. This prompted moral outrage. My thoughts on the matter: Why not provide both? The problem with providing both was that the state had limited funds. Why did the state have limited funds? That's the real question. At the time, Arizona had a very conservative legislature and governor who were not willing to raise taxes to fund additional health care programs. This is not an indictment of the legislature, this is merely stating the fact. As such, the money could only be used for one or the other. So, I began to think about the concept of how one values their life based on the assessment of risk and here's what I thought of....

Voting is a life valuation exercise. By determining who you vote for, you determine the type of policies that you would like to see enacted. If you dislike current policies, you vote out the legislature. In a case like health insurance, voters make the decision to vote in conservative legislators who will not raise taxes. As such, the voter is making a risk assessment: This assessment is that the probability of me losing insurance or having a life-threatening disease that will kill me is lower than the X amount of money that I will save by not being taxed. If this risk is too high, then you value your life as infinite and you vote for a legislator that will support taxes in the legislature. It depends on your risk assessment (whether this assessment is rational or not is besides the point). So, a risk averse population is more likely to vote for higher taxes while a more risky population will vote for lower taxes. The amount saved through taxes could be used to determine how they value their life. Interestingly, six years later, Arizona included transplants for the poor. Does this indicate that the citizens re-evaluated their risk and decided it was worth the extra taxes to ensure that if they did fall into this category that they would be covered? Anyway, I think this is an interesting way to think about voting and policy. Do you think that you have a minimal risk of losing all your money and living like a pauper with reduced extra life year if you manage your own Social Security account? Then vote accordingly. Does this mean that Westerners are greater risk-takers than Easterners because of the number of conservative legislators? No comment (I think so).

Of course, as with all economic perspectives, this totally ignores people voting for the interest of others, instead of themselves. Personally, I think it's difficult to make the case that because someone is poor they should be denied benefits available to the rich. The vast majority of the 46.6 uninsured Americans work. They just can't afford coverage because of rising costs. Who are we to play Moral Judge by saying, "I'm sorry, your life is less valuable than government employee making 70K. He has the opportunity to have a healthy lifestyle. You, on the other hand, who only make 35K with 4 kids, you shouldn't be allowed the same privelege"? I know, sometimes people get what they deserve based on awful choices...but it seems better to err on the side of niceness and not meanness, to put in 3rd grade terms. I'm off the soapbox. I think I'm going to argue for mandatory overtimeeque pay for shiftworkers in my next post.