Executive summary: Current health outcome measurements like QALYs have serious flaws that discriminate against chronically ill and disabled people, potentially incentivize harmful policies, and fail to capture the full impact of health interventions.
Key points:
QALYs allow negative values for “states worse than death,” which can make treatments appear cost-ineffective and potentially justify withholding care from severely ill patients.
The system relies on healthy people’s uninformed judgments about health states they haven’t experienced, which often drastically differ from actual patient experiences.
Current measurements perpetuate systemic inequalities by devaluing treatments for groups with shorter life expectancies, including disabled people and racial minorities.
The metrics fail to capture non-health benefits of treatments (like enabling someone to work and contribute to society) and spillover effects.
Proposed solutions include creating new metrics that eliminate negative values, incorporate patient experiences, and add weights for systemic issues.
Getting governments and policymakers to adopt alternative measures is crucial for improving healthcare resource allocation.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback
Executive summary: Current health outcome measurements like QALYs have serious flaws that discriminate against chronically ill and disabled people, potentially incentivize harmful policies, and fail to capture the full impact of health interventions.
Key points:
QALYs allow negative values for “states worse than death,” which can make treatments appear cost-ineffective and potentially justify withholding care from severely ill patients.
The system relies on healthy people’s uninformed judgments about health states they haven’t experienced, which often drastically differ from actual patient experiences.
Current measurements perpetuate systemic inequalities by devaluing treatments for groups with shorter life expectancies, including disabled people and racial minorities.
The metrics fail to capture non-health benefits of treatments (like enabling someone to work and contribute to society) and spillover effects.
Proposed solutions include creating new metrics that eliminate negative values, incorporate patient experiences, and add weights for systemic issues.
Getting governments and policymakers to adopt alternative measures is crucial for improving healthcare resource allocation.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback