The Quality Adjusted Life Year: A Total-Utility Perspective
Given that a properly formed utilitarian response to healthcare distribution issues should evaluate cost effectiveness against the total utility increase, it follows that any utilitarian cost-effectiveness metric should be sensitive to increases in both individual and social utility afforded by a gi...
Main Author: | |
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Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
Journals Online & Print: | |
Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
Published: |
2018
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In: |
Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics
Year: 2018, Volume: 27, Issue: 2, Pages: 284-294 |
Further subjects: | B
Health economics
B healthcare ethics B social and political theory B social utility B healthcare distribution B Utilitarianism B IALY B QALY B welfare distribution B glee factor |
Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
Summary: | Given that a properly formed utilitarian response to healthcare distribution issues should evaluate cost effectiveness against the total utility increase, it follows that any utilitarian cost-effectiveness metric should be sensitive to increases in both individual and social utility afforded by a given intervention. Quality adjusted life year (QALY) based decisionmaking in healthcare cannot track increases in social utility, and as a result, the QALY cannot be considered a strict utilitarian response to issues of healthcare distribution. This article considers arguments against, and a possible defence of, the QALY as a utilitarian concept; in response, the article offers a similar — but properly formed — utilitarian metric called the (IALY). This article also advances a tool called the ‘glee factor’ (GF) on which the IALY may lean in a similar way to which the QALY leans on the Rosser Index. |
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ISSN: | 1469-2147 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0963180117000615 |