Living Values

A healthcare rationing committee approves an elderly writer's death by arithmetic. Her grandson documents the system - then watches it turn on his own family. Daniel Mitchell sits in a room of kind faces and laminated credentials while a committee explains, with practiced compassion, why his grandmother Eleanor's life is no longer worth what it would cost to save. The math is sound. The tissues are within reach.
The decision was made before they walked in. Eleanor - eighty-two, the author of thirty books, still writing - accepts the verdict with a clarity that disturbs Daniel more than the verdict itself. The system isn't the problem, she tells him. It's just us, formalized. What follows is an investigation. Daniel writes Eleanor's death into a book and sells it for more than her estate was worth. He traces the economics of dying - the reinsurance structures that profit when treatment is denied, the foundations that help families cope, the compassionate counselors who never say no but always say unfortunately.
He finds no villain. He finds an ecosystem. Then his sister Caroline gets sick. Then Daniel himself is approved for a treatment that opens up suddenly, on a Tuesday, because someone else was re-evaluated. Living Values is a literary novel about healthcare rationing, family, and complicity - about what it costs to live in a system that decides, quietly and reasonably, whose life is worth saving. From Richard Warburg, author of Paying for Promises and the Red White & Blue Land series.
Available as both a novel and a companion verse play.