The Cost of Life-Saving Interventions

There is still a lot of work to be done in evaluating the effectiveness of various programs. A 1995 Duke University study of more than 500 life-saving interventions in the United States put the median cost of saving a life at $2.2 million. In 2016, the US Environmental Protection Agency valued a generic American life at $10 million. The Federal Department of Transportation in 2015 set a figure of $9.4 million. On all of these figures, the interventions described above offer thousands of times better value.