Selling your life–or your life insurance policy, at least–to someone who’s betting on your quick demise seems as ghoulish as peddling a kidney. But are very unpleasant and very wrong necessarily the same thing? From James Vlahos’ New York Times Magazine article on the sensitive topic:

“Selling your life and selling a house have more in common than you’d think. The seller puts a listing on the market. Prospective buyers do research and get inspections; there are offers and counteroffers until the seller accepts a bid. The seller doesn’t literally peddle his own life, of course, but his life-insurance policy. The distinction is in many ways moot, however, as the sales value is inextricably linked to a cold-eyed estimation of how much longer the seller has to live. In the case of [Ruben] Robles’s policy, a life-settlement company in Georgia, Habersham Funding, expressed interest. Escobar shipped off six boxes’ worth of Robles’s medical records, thousands of pages in all, to Habersham. The firm, in turn, analyzed the records and also had them scrutinized by an external company specializing in life-expectancy analysis. Fiedler’s recollection is that the reports confirmed the grim prognosis and that Robles had less than two years left to live.”

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Animated life-settlement discussion: