A few years back, there seemed to be a desire to justify cigarette taxes with a "it costs the state money when you get cancer" rationale. Some of the analysis seemed to indicate opposite results. Lung cancer, for example, tends to kill more quickly than age related diseases, saving on nursing home costs and palliative care. Everyone dies of something after all, and death is expensive as is aging.
Either way, it seems kind of strange to place economic values on life itself. I mean isn't economic utility premised on life?
In any case, it seems trivially true that economic measures will always correlate with either population size working age population size, depending on the model.
I feel like these kinds of papers only exist to be cited in support of cheap rhetoric.