Actually, the 2008/9 cost to the UK economy of an "Un-natural" death was 1.2M, - (Home Office/NHS figures). I believe, but cannot confirm that the 2009/10 figure is closer to 1.4M.
At the risk of drifting the thread, and for that matter the forum, away from its true purpose may I ask why otherwise sentient adults unquestioningly accept and pass on as "fact" financial and statistical numbers without ever looking twice at them and saying to themselves, "That
cannot be right; let's see how they worked that out"?
The source of your numbers is the Home Office/NHS. Doesn't that tell you something? Who needs to show that billions of taxpayers funds are being fantastically well spent on emergency response, helicopters, A&E, the whole 9 yards?
Reflect for 10 seconds on the true
actual costs incurred with an accidental death. Emergency services involvement is usually fairly short-lived. There may be some hospitalisation costs, care and hotel charges, but by definition these are also short-lived. The state may bear some funeral costs, but usually not. An investigation may well consume a lot of manhours, probably to no great benefit. Are we up to £100K yet, in terms of manpower resources and equipment use? I doubt it.
So where does the £1,400,000 "cost" per accidental death come from?
From all sorts of imaginary and unquantifiable "economic costs", that's where. Any civil servant worth his inex-linked final salary pension can go on finding those until he has reached the figure he was told to reach.
I've done it myself in cost-benefit analyses designed for clients with schemes to promote, such as new airports. It's the assumptions that count, but they are buried out of sight. Such as "let us assume that a businessman's time is worth $257.48 per hour. Or, if necessary to massage the numbers a bit, $416.28 per hour". And so on.
Do you know something? I can produce, using precisely the same techniques with precisely the same basis in fact, figures which would show that the cost of the accident victim not dying are far higher than the costs of his/her death. So if you simply let him/her die, you not only save the cost of the emergency response, you save the huge costs that saving his/her life would incur, over his/her remaining lifespan.
Ridiculous, of course. It would be as absurd a piece of spin as saying that a death costs £1.4m. But that would not stop the manipulators using it, or the gullible believing it. After all, it says "Studies show....." at the beginning.