Something that could explain the public backlash is the large percentage of people who are so called ‘non-traders’ or ‘zero traders’ when asked to do time trade offs when weighting QALYs. About 57% of respondents don’t trade off any length of life for quality increases. As you note the public revealed preferences show they will trade off quality for quantity but when asked to actual think about this a lot of people refuse to do this. Which explain why a large proportion of the public would view an argument for an improved quality of life vs reduced life poorly. This finding is the same when looking at QALY vs $ trade offs with a large proportion of people unwilling to trade off any amount of money against the value of a life.
Something that could explain the public backlash is the large percentage of people who are so called ‘non-traders’ or ‘zero traders’ when asked to do time trade offs when weighting QALYs. About 57% of respondents don’t trade off any length of life for quality increases. As you note the public revealed preferences show they will trade off quality for quantity but when asked to actual think about this a lot of people refuse to do this. Which explain why a large proportion of the public would view an argument for an improved quality of life vs reduced life poorly. This finding is the same when looking at QALY vs $ trade offs with a large proportion of people unwilling to trade off any amount of money against the value of a life.
Interesting and curious. I wonder if this is partly due to health only being one aspect of quality of life (happiness/life satisfaction).
Also I wonder whether the framing of the question is important. People have trouble thinking about this stuff clearly.
More understandable with $ trade-offs (people being funny about money).