Profit doesn't need to have anything to do with it.
It doesn't make economic sense to spend, as an extreme example, $500M of public money to save one life. If we did whatever medical treatments we could, at whatever cost, we'd go broke as a society very quickly.
Utilitarian optimization places some upper bound on the amount of money we should be willing to spend to save a life. Making people pay for their own care approximates this bound but with more variance.
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Profit doesn't need to have anything to do with it.
It doesn't make economic sense to spend, as an extreme example, $500M of public money to save one life. If we did whatever medical treatments we could, at whatever cost, we'd go broke as a society very quickly.
Utilitarian optimization places some upper bound on the amount of money we should be willing to spend to save a life. Making people pay for their own care approximates this bound but with more variance.
It'd be nice if that upper limit was somewhat consistent.
We spend billions per American life saved on terrorism.
We regularly spend $50M / life on infrastructure; hundreds of millions on an overpass over a dangerous intersection to save a handful of lives.
We regularly force companies to spend well over $10M / life on health & safety regs.
Medicaid costs about $800K / life saved.