How Much Is Life Worth?
Multivitamins, drugs, gene therapies, human skin, heart, eyeballs, kidneys, entire dead bodies – everything comes with a price tag. Putting aside the moral questions of why and how come that the capitalist market priced even our body parts and health, we asked the question of how much is life worth: what is the maximum that you would/should pay for a life-saving drug? How high is too high a cost if a drug can save 200-300 babies a year from debilitating illness or death? And ultimately, does the pricing of new technologies, especially gene therapies, enable to fulfill their promise?
There’s a
price for everything: butterflies, pieces of moon land, organs
The world is a giant supermarket where you find price
tags connected to literally everything. A rare butterfly costs around $200 on eBay, an acre on the surface of the Moon is available for approximately $50 – although there’s no guarantee that you really
become the owner of that piece of Moon –, and your organs are also for sale.
Not only on the black market.
If you could harvest every organ and chemical in your body, you
could make a $45 million. But in reality, Medical Transcription estimates, the average price of a human dead body is more
likely to fetch around $550,000 (with a few key body parts driving up the
price). If you want to legally sell your heart in the U.S., it can be purchased
for about $1 million. Livers come in second, worth about $557,000 and kidneys cost
about $262,000 each. Not to sp...
Source: The Medical Futurist - Category: Information Technology Authors: nora Tags: Bioethics Biotechnology Future of Pharma Genomics cost daraprim drug drug price Gene gene therapy genetics insulin life medication pricing policy rare disease rare disorder Source Type: blogs
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