Worth

What It Covers

Three stories examine how societies assign dollar values to human life and nature. Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologists challenge a $30,000 cancer drug yielding 42 extra days; a Yemen drone strike raises questions about condolence payments; Chinese apple farmers replacing extinct bees reveal the limits of economic valuation of ecosystems.

Key Questions Answered

• •Drug pricing leverage: When Memorial Sloan Kettering publicly refused to prescribe Sanofi's Zaltrap — a $11,000/month colon cancer drug offering only 42 additional days of median survival — and published an op-ed in the New York Times, Sanofi cut the nationwide price by 50% within one month. Institutional collective action by major cancer centers can directly force pharmaceutical pricing corrections without legislation or regulatory intervention.
• •Healthcare cost threshold framework: The World Health Organization recommends countries spend one to three times GDP per capita to purchase one additional quality-adjusted life year. For the United States, that translates to roughly $50,000–$150,000 per year of healthy life. American cardiology societies have quietly begun adopting this benchmark to evaluate treatment value, though no public policy debate has formally established it as a binding standard.
• •Sovaldi pricing math: Gilead's hepatitis C drug Sovaldi, priced at $1,000 per pill for a 12-week cure ($84,000 total), achieved a 95% viral eradication rate in 70,000 U.S. patients in the first half of 2014 — generating roughly $5.88 billion in six months. States responded by rationing access, with Arizona approving only 180 patients statewide, illustrating how curative drugs can paradoxically trigger more severe access restrictions than chronic-care medications.
• •Military condolence payment structure: U.S. military condolence payments in Iraq and Afghanistan were capped informally at $2,500 per death, the same ceiling applied to property damage like vehicles. Payments required no legal obligation and excluded combat-related incidents under a longstanding exemption dating to General Pershing's World War I claims statute. The Yemen wedding drone strike victim received approximately $30,000 — still without acknowledgment of error or direct human accountability from the U.S. government.
• •Nature's economic valuation: Economist Robert Costanza's synthesis of global ecosystem service studies produced a figure of approximately $142.7 trillion per year in value provided by nature — exceeding the combined gross national products of all countries. A targeted study of bats over South Texas cotton farms attributed roughly $700,000 annually to bat-driven pest control across farms generating $4–5 million total, demonstrating measurable economic value in specific, localized biodiversity.
• •Limits of economic valuation of ecosystems: When Mao County, China farmers replaced extinct wild bees with hand pollination using chicken-feather brushes, apple yields rose 30% — temporarily making bees appear economically unnecessary. However, rising Chinese wages eventually made hand pollination unaffordable, and wild bees have not returned due to pesticide contamination. The case demonstrates that economic valuation of nature produces unstable, reversible conclusions while ecological losses remain permanent and irreversible.