How Much Is a Life Worth?

[n2doc]

By James Oliphant

To Ken Feinberg, if you lose both your legs, you’re as good as dead.

Here, in the world of the living, inspirational media stories after the Boston Marathon bombings featured survivors who persevered, grittily relearning to walk atop state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs, fighting for normalcy with each new step. But in Feinberg’s world, it made no difference whether a person could still live a rewarding life or never left the race’s finish line. That didn’t enter the equation—his equation. His choice. His rules. Whether you died at the scene or you lost both your legs, you received the same amount of money—$2.2 million—from the victim fund established in the wake of the attack. If you lost one limb, you received considerably less. If you were hospitalized but kept your limbs, then still less.

Feinberg is the nearly ubiquitous expert who has been called in to divvy up funds for the fallen and the injured in a stomach-churning sequence of tragedies, from the Sept. 11 attacks to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, from the Virginia Tech shootings to the Boston bombings. He’s Death’s accountant. When the stands collapsed at the Indiana State Fair in 2011, killing seven, they called Ken Feinberg. When a gunman murdered 27 children at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, they called Ken Feinberg. His is the grimmest of specialties.

“You’ll never make these people whole,” Feinberg says, sitting in his Washington law office as the city below baked in the summer’s heat. Befitting a career lived under klieg lights, one wall is dedicated to press clippings. But here, dread and devastation run though the framed articles, a sorrowful wall of fame. On the coffee table are we-couldn’t-have-done-it-without-you letters from Presidents Bush and Obama, along with a picture of Feinberg and family in the Oval Office. Opera, Feinberg’s passion, is piped into the room continuously.

And characteristic of a man who has waded repeatedly into tragedy’s wake, who has been praised and flayed, who has sent millions of dollars to some victims and told thousands of others they’ll see nothing, and who is viewed as the unparalleled expert in his field, Feinberg is alternately boastful and defensive, contemplative and bombastic. He’s done this so long now, he knows the questions before they come, addresses the criticisms before they’re raised, and stands by his record to the end. With this vocation, it seems, comes a nearly bottomless capacity for self-examination. Feinberg has written books and delivered commencement speeches on the principles of victim compensation, on the value of a life. He has a singular perspective on how our society chooses—or declines—to take care of its own. And it has left him troubled. “Bad things happen to good people each day in this country,” he says.

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http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/how-much-is-a-life-worth-20130801

[PoliticAverse]

1. "Whether you died at the scene or you lost both your legs, you received the same amount of money"

Dead people didn't actually receive anything, unless there's an afterlife with a mailing address...