Fair enough - but the conundrum is (and I should have clarified - apologies) we didn't know it was going to - I had failed to respond to the usual treatments and only an experimental treatment in which I wasn't merely the first survivor, but the first trial, saved my life. Had it failed I might have died in months and the treatment might have actually shortened my life. And, again, I absolutely understand the problem of cost-benefit but I also don't think that it can be an elegant, noncategorical analysis. Just my thoughts - keep writing the good stuff!
Michele, I don't disagree that economics cannot be discounted - such are the iron truths of our species. Rather, what I insist that that attempting to "balance" human life with economic cost is a false dialectic - life is existential - nothing, literally nothing, can be meaningfully compared as a value to it, with the small possibilities of beauty, art, and knowledge. That, I'd argue, is exactly why health care economics are likely to never result in satisfactory outcomes, at least for longer that a short period, at either the social or individual levels of analysis. Ugh.
A few years ago I was diagnosed with aplastic anemia that was idiopathic in its causes. I fell into a cross-convergence of sociological, genotypical, and phenotypical categories in which contracting the illness shouldn't have happened, but it did. Luckily I was blessed with a top-of-the-line insurance plan and health care providers who had helped me donate bone marrow in the not so distant past and were willing to work with me. As it was my diagnosis and treatment fell well past the seven figure mark to keep me alive if the expenses of all paying parties is combined. I don't know that I am remotely that valuable (certainly in econometric terms or earning potential - there is a reason professors have patches on their elbows) nor that I will be able to ever contribute value to society comparable to what was spent to keep me alive, but I am eternally grateful for it and, perhaps as important, I think my family and friends and students are as well. What I'm trying to get at here is that trying to weigh costs, benefits, and risk according to a wealth vs. life calculus is a false dialectic, Attempting to balance the two cannot, under any circumstance, yield results that inform our choices ethically or economically in any objective sense. Just my two cents.
Paranoia fail.