I think you need to answer this question:
How much is a person's life worth? If you could use $5 of taxpayer (or people who pay for healthcare) money to do it, would you? $10? $1,000? $1M? $1B? $1T?
At what point is the drain on society as a whole too much to bear to save a single life?
never
But you are missing the point. With todays level of technology that sum is so marginal that it doesn't affect society more than random fluctuations in the market.
It truly is negligible.
Never? Really? So you would have taxpayers pay $1T to save someone's life? 100 lives later, and you've increase the national debt to 7 times what it is now, forever indebting your descendents to live a life of slavery in vain attempt to pay off said debt? And somehow, that is ok with you?
As I said before you are missing the point.
Individual instances do not add much, but unpaid healthcare costs as a whole are a huge burden on society. The general attitude seems to be that every life is priceless, and everyone should be forced, via taxes or increased healthcare costs, to pay these priceless prices, but I think that is an inappropriate way to look at it. There are other concerns at play, such as opportunity cost and quality of life. Some procedures or series of procedures or ongoing health care can cost millions of dollars. Most people won't make more than a million dollars (present value) in their lifetime. And how many lives could be saved in third-world countries with the money spent on one procedure here in the US? Is it appropriate for us to deem the lives of our countrymen that much more valuable than the lives of other people around the world?
Isn't that what countries are supposed to do? But for the sake of argument: Lets say we spend as much as threat everybody in Zimbabwe for Aids and Malaria. And which point do you think the production methods would be efficient enough that costs per person are down one order of magnitude, two, three or four orders?
Why should that efficiency be lost for western patients for which the treatment costs would be negligible?
If government is forcing us to "help" people in the way that they deem appropriate, then we have less funds available to help people the way we see fit, which, in some cases, might include saving a hundred lives of people in a third world country instead of one life in the US. Why does the government get to make such a judgement call on an issue of morality like this?
There are enough resources available to do it. The only reason why the current system isn't able to provide a good live for everybody is that it is inefficient. Heck if we switch to Thorium power every man woman and child could live a very high energy lifestyle, we could make the Sahara into an oasis, and there would still be enough time and resources to colonize motherfuckin space.
