The British single-payer bureaucrats arrived at the price of an additional year of life in the same way they decide how much health care all British people will get, through a formula called "quality-adjusted life years."
That means that if you're sick in Great Britain, government bureaucrats literally decide if your life is worth living and, if so, how much longer and at what cost.
If it's more than $45,000, you're out of luck.
In the highest levels of the Obama Administration there is a theory of how to ration health care that is troublingly reminiscent of the British system of "quality-adjusted life years."
Dr. Ezekial Emanuel is a key health care advisor to President Obama and the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Earlier this year, Dr. Emanuel wrote an article that advocated what he called "the complete lives system" as a method for rationing health care. You can read it here -
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/la...137-9/fulltext
The system advocated by Dr. Emanuel would allocate health care based on the government's perception of the societal worth of the patients. Accordingly, the very young and the very old would receive less care since the former have received less societal investment and the latter have less left to contribute.
"The Complete Lives System" would also consider the prognosis of the individual.
Quoting Dr. Emanuel: "A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognosis."
When fully implemented, Dr. Emanuel's system, in his words, "produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated."
"Chances that are attenuated" is a nice way of saying the young and the old are considered less worthy of health care and, under this system, will get less.