More practically, the additional wealth that accumulates as a result of economizing on life-saving expenditures does lead people to buy safer cars, to take less risky jobs, and so on. So it can be argued that we will save some number of other lives by investing less in direct life preservation for the elderly. We don’t know whether an increment of wealth saved will in fact rescue or preserve other human lives, but there is some chance that this might be the case. And this possibility lowers the value of spending a lot of money to extend a human life.
