How much is a year of human life worth? Silly question, you say: Everyone knows you can’t put a price tag on a person’s life, whether a year or otherwise. And yet,

In reality, it’s worth $50,000.

That’s the international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure. More simply, insurance companies calculate that to make a treatment worth its cost, it must guarantee one year of “quality life” for $50,000 or less.

According to Stanford economists, however, that figure is much too low: They say a more appropriate threshold for deciding coverage is $129,000. But can we really put a price tag on a patient’s life? That’s the question helping to fuel debate over whether Medicare should use cost-effectiveness analysis to determine coverage.

Assigning a dollar figure to Medicare patients’ lives may sound crass, but such valuations are routine in Americans’ daily lives. Take, for example, the $500,000 death benefit the government pays families when a soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Or the cost calculations that for-profit health insurers make to determine how much coverage they’ll give customers. In fact, at least some Americans seem at ease with allowing money to play a prominent role in health care decisions. In a 2007 survey of New Yorkers, 75% of participants felt “somewhat” to “very” comfortable with allowing cost to inform Medicare treatment decisions, once they understood how the system worked. “Americans understand and are prepared to engage the issues that arise when setting priorities and limits for their public programs,” Marthe Gold, the City University of New York Medical School professor who conducted the study, wrote with colleagues this past fall in the journal Health Affairs.

But what if that means denying patients life-saving treatment? Is that cost worth it?