Our lives, it turns out, are not priceless, as we are generally led to believe.

In fact, they are assigned a very real dollar value, which depends on a number of factors ranging from geographic location, to age, and so forth.

Generally speaking, the value of a human life is considered to be between $3 and $10 million — lower values are found in the poorer countries in the EU, for example, while the richer European countries and the United States skew higher.

There are a lot of economic ramifications of these figures — but we would prefer, math-averse as we writers tend to be, to focus on the moral ramifications of that concept.

To be clear: these numbers are most commonly used to estimate the cost-benefit of, for example, a transportation safety project. If putting in a traffic light could prevent a certain number of injuries or fatalities over time, that can be compared to the cost of the road work and that gives government officials a window to consider if the work is justified, instead of going off of instinct or reaction.

Here’s the thing.

Culturally, most Americans would agree that a human life is comprised of limitless value. You cannot put a dollar amount on the sum total of a person’s lifetime of memories and impacts — not really.

Again, this is speaking culturally, not economically.

Commonly-made jokes about Americans and violent past-times and blowing stuff up aside, as a people, we espouse peaceful aims. Whether we live up to those goals is a topic for another time.

But we profess peace, and we believe we value life and all it entails.

If life is considered priceless, though — how can that stand up to scrutiny in a business-focused society?

There’s been a lot of discussion lately in national wire about rural healthcare, and online discourse is filled with city folk who are celebrating the impending demise of the subsidies that prop up hospitals in the Republican-voting wildernesses — something about getting what they’ve voted for, or some such.

It’s no big secret that our healthcare system struggles to support rural citizens — and it has for years; a problem which spans presidencies and technologies and states.

Ultimately, rural healthcare is simply not profitable.

There’s too few people, they’re too spread out and they’re too poor to pay.

In 2009, a Standford professor and his team of research assistants calculated that, in terms of cost-effectiveness (in this case of kidney dialysis), one year of perfect health was worth $129,000.

We can’t speak for everyone in Clinton County, but nobody here can afford that price — certainly not for a prolonged period of time, or without losing your home and all of the heirlooms and memories you’ve built.

After all, a life is more than dollars. A life is history, and personal connection, and poetry and warm blankets and love and loss and all the rest.

We are, throughout it all, steadfast supporters of fiscal responsibility. But we cannot help but raise eyebrows whenever people suggest that priceless things be handled like a business, by businesspeople.

All that has happened, historically, by allowing businesspeople to assign dollar amounts to things which culturally cannot be assigned a dollar amount is needless suffering.

Some things shouldn’t need to be profitable. Their profits come in the form of things other than rows in an Excel spreadsheet — profits like the embrace of a grandparent or the freedom to live a good life burden-free.

We might not be sure just how America is supposed to get from here to there. But we are sure that it is worth trying, because if we continue to stubbornly insist that every critical service must turn a profit, rural America — and all the blood, sweat and stories that our ancestors have poured into these hills — is surely doomed.

Healthcare will never be affordable if there is money to be made, because it is the ultimate supply vs. demand: you only have one life, and that life is the most critical resource you have.

That isn’t politics. It’s just common sense.