This is illogical reasoning. We should look at the cost/benefit tradeoff. Looking only at costs or only at benefits will not yield the best decision.
We need to draw a line somewhere between safety & cost. I'd argue it is always possible to make something safer if you are willing to accept higher cost. Expensive plane tickets have negative externalities, and for some, does cost lives (inability to get treatments for ex.).
I don't think that is a good example. If the treatment you need requires you to fly, that means it a very complicated diseases, or a rare disease that only a few centers treat. In any case, it is likely that the care is very resource intensive and is either expensive or heavily subsidized. In those cases, even if the airfare were doubled or tripled, it would not be the limiting factor in treatment.
Another example is family members overseas. Many have to choose between providing for their family vs. being with their family. Affordability of flights can have a huge impact on their quality of life and ability to take part in the moments that many of use take for-granted.
Anyway, I have this feeling that you could justify just about anything if you dig for nth-order effects, but it doesn't change the fundamental point: a race to the bottom sacrifices everything that can be sacrifices. Environment is usually the first victim, quality the second, but safety trade-offs are eventually made too. At some point in a product category's lifecycle, one starts to wonder whether it's so degraded that it would be better if it didn't exist anymore.
Which means we don't know how much these things actually cost in real terms. We also don't know how to quantify potential benefits.
(And if someone says 'Well, that's subjective' - so is nominal market value.)
There's conventional profit-loss accounting, and there's everything else. It seems the everything else can accumulate to ecosystem-threatening levels, and conventional accounting will continue to pretend this is financially irrelevant.
Example: I live in the Philippines. Its healthcare system is affected by two things: centralization and the fact that the country is an archipelago.
Most quality health care is happening in Metro Manila. What you find outside is generally very basic, and even in 2nd-tier cities like Cebu or Davao they may refer you to Manila for something you'd think they ought be able to do.
With travel by boat being … rather slow, with vacation time not exactly ample, and the average salary being low I'm quite certain that affordable flights ($25 Cebu - Manila) are making ample difference in terms of what kind of healthcare situations are being addressed.
(Oh yeah!) If the WTC was standing maybe oil would be cheaper.
(Oh no!) But, if oil were cheaper, we would be that much further away from adopting alternate energy sources like solar.
Reminds me of the quote (forget the source) -
Nothing is bad. Nothing is good. Everything just is.
But memories are short and greed is long, and those who “forget” that every safety reg was written in the blood of others can sleep easy beneath golden parachutes and very good lawyers.
Honestly, best thing Boeing could do now is rename it the “737 MAX Fight Club Pinto”, fill it with all the incels who didn’t get the joke, and fly the whole crapload off into the great unknown.
Risk tolerances are different, so why do we try to regulate to a given standard. It makes little sense to allow motorcycles yet have a regulation that requires the use of seatbelts in cars. Instead, I'd like to see regulations that enforce testing and information sharing. After that, let people decide which airline to take, which car to buy, and therefore where to draw that line.
My father has decent insurance as a retiree and still got billed for an ambulance ride after he had complications following a jaw surgery.
I've seen a bunch of anecdotal stories about how it's cheaper for someone on the west coast to fly to Korea, or down to Mexico, for non-critical surgeries, spend a week recovering, and then fly home.