Probably a better way to guesstimate the "value" of a life is to look at the wages that would have been earned if alive. The median income of a worker in the US earns $44k/year, and can probably expect to work another 30 years for retirement (median US age is 37). Multiply those numbers together, and the median death would have earned $1.2M. If you do more rigorous probability distributions, you could probably build a better estimation of what this number would be. Of course, you could also argue for more precise estimates of someone's value than their wages. But the magnitude of the number does appear to gel with regulatory thought: most regulatory agencies seem to do cost-benefit analysis of regulations assuming that saving a life is worth costing at most a few million. $100K per life does seem quite low.