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What dollar value would you consider good health to be worth?

These days you can put a dollar value on almost anything. I was just wondering if there was any studies on the dollar value of good health, and what the general thoughts were on this. Any value suggestions are good.

Public Comments

1. NHS = free of charge :)
2. You can't to put it simply
3. there is none
4. My opinion would be unlimited. If I was really ill, then to get back good health it would be worth every cent I had and could possibly afford. Good health is worth far more than material objects
5. Good health is priceless.
6. An economist would say that it the best alternative forgone - this is called opportunity cost. So, if a society had to choose between 1,000 nurses or 2 new tanks the cost would be 2 new tanks. In a dollar value you could compare the cost of basic health cover for private medical and what it would cost you to pay those expenses your self. You could also consider the impact that poor health has on labour (ot is resource) that we call human capital - without a healthy workforce we would have a reduced standard of living in our society.
7. Of course you could put a dollar value on it, and it's most definitely not infinite or priceless. That happens when people have to pay for health care. "Good health" is too unspecific though, there is no measurable transaction to gain "good health". But you could specify things and certainly measure the value of fixing a broken leg or getting a cancer removed or getting a heart bypass. The problem when it comes to placing a value on things is that societies always treat healthcare differently from other markets, so that we usually don't get a chance to price the market and see what happens. Either you get socialized medicine where health care is nominally "free", but the government makes the decisions about rationing, and so the government actively denies service and condemns the unlucky people to pain and death (which happens in ALL universal coverage scenarios, without exception). Or, you get an equally dysfunctional system like in the U.S. where the consumer is shielded by the cost if they are well covered by 3rd party insurance, but some people are not covered and the system is inefficient and distorting market signals. So the answer is that governments and insurance companies place a specific value on "good health" all the time, but it's not necessarily an accurate measure of that value, as value is usually discovered and measured for every other thing in the economy.
8. I agree it can't be valued in dollars. Or alternatively it can, and one's opinion is no more valid than any other. But it is a very provocative question. Don't forget that price and value are different concepts, and so are not always the same. I would say the sun is quite valuable for all of us. How much does that cost in dollars? You could say all the money on earth, because none of it would be here if the sun didn't exist. But that would mean we could print more money and the sun would become more valuable. Or you could say the value of all the natural resources. But humans are able to transform some resources into more valuable products. Anyway, some angles to look at are: the contribution to productivity in the economy, the welfare (or utility) one gains from living more healthily or longer, the income that is forgone when someone is sick and can not work, etc.