Human life is too costly and cheap.

Thinking about healthcare and the gripes we have with its expense, either in the form of increased tax rates, whereby we're paying for the healthcare of other people, or out of pocket and only for the healthcare of ourselves and a relative few, I got to wondering about how much we value life.

To my mind came these observations:

We think of human life as priceless, yet we complain when an expensive price must be payed for it to be healed; should we not be willing to pay any price to keep intact something so precious? But, on the other hand, we expect payment for the care of something sacred; a notion which is itself understandably offensive, for should it not be a privilege to mend the temple-human, and not a task for which we feel entitled to compensation?

What's perhaps the most telling about the true valuation we give to human life, is that the supposedly exorbitant price of its care becomes all the more reasonable when that same amount is to be spent on things we don't need.

We aren't piceless.