We’ll have to decide what each life is worth

Once there was a time when we could believe governments would always pick up the tab for those holding the short sticks in life’s lottery.

Of all the questions we are faced with, it is the one that cuts to our core the quickest: how much is a single life worth?

The easy answer, and the one that we instinctively cling to most vehemently to avoid the awful chain of logic that is otherwise set in motion, is simply to answer that each life is essentially priceless.

But sadly, it is not. Not by a long way.

We make tradeoffs every day, though rarely do we acknowledge them.

As a simple example, if we reduced and strictly enforced a speed limit of 20 km/h on roads in Canada, we would save thousands of lives each year. That is a fact. That we choose not to do so essentially means we choose expediency over life.

It is not a difficult choice. The victims to come are unknown and therefore faceless. They are not our child, brother or neighbour.

They count so much less until you see the TV image of a 13-year-old girl on a ventilator.

Jahi McMath had a tonsillectomy in an Oakland, Calif., hospital last month to treat a sleep disorder, but she began bleeding heavily after surgery and went into cardiac arrest.

She’s now been judged braindead and is being kept alive on a ventilator as her family fights to stop the hospital pulling the plug.

The Children’s Hospital in Oakland has argued in court there’s no medical treatment they can give to the teenager because she’s “practically and legally” dead.

Her family says there’s still hope for recovery, and in the latest court battle, has managed to keep the young girl on a ventilator until Tuesday as the legal fight rolls along.

Yet there’s one issue no one talks about, but everyone understands. It is cost. How long does society pay to keep a brain-dead, 13-year-old alive? Or is there really hope for a recovery? And, if so, what sort of life would emerge from this?

It is brutal, nasty stuff, so the reticence to speak to the core issue is understandable. But sooner or later, society is going to have to deal with this in an honest manner. We are going to have to take our heads from the sand and admit that life does have a price.

Once there was a time when we could believe governments would always pick up the tab for those holding the short sticks in life’s lottery. If someone needed a few million dollars worth of drugs to prolong his life for a decade, then so be it. Or, more acutely, if we wanted to place our old folks into care homes, then those places should be lavish and overstaffed with happy, smiling angels of mercy. Oh, and the government should pay.

Well, with a growing aging population allied to an everincreasing range of drugs aimed at prolonging life, we are reaching a point where the government — or more accurately, taxpayers — cannot or will not pick up that tab.

The simple answer has been to pile on debt instead, but eventually, that hits a wall, as the countries lending the cash demand higher and higher interest payments for providing the money for such luxuries that so often are not available to their own citizens. We know it’s coming, but we’d rather not discuss it.

That’s human, but it is also cowardly. Pushing the discussion down the road will only make the eventual resolution more catastrophic in its effects on society’s bonds.

We have politicians who will press the public consultation button on the most mundane of issues, touring Alberta to hear mind-numbing bafflegab on the dubious merits of fixed versus variable deregulated power rates as though it were a matter of life and death.

Yet here, with matters of real life and death, we remain silent, hoping it will all just go away. It won’t.