Economists have often treated the objective of health services as being the maximization of the QALYs gained, irrespective of how the gains are distributed. In a cross section of Australians such a policy of distributive neutrality received: (a) very little support when health benefits to young...

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The original fair innings argument is about claims on length of life. Alan Williams has suggested that the argument also should apply to quality of life. His 'generalised fair innings approach' on the one hand, and the severity approach on the other, are two ways of incorporating concerns for...

In societal priority setting between health programs for different patient groups, many people are reluctant to discriminate too strongly between those who can benefit much from treatment and those who can benefit moderately. We suggest that this view of distributive fairness has a counterpart...

The paper addresses some limitations of the QALY approach and outlines a valuation procedure that may overcome these limitations. In particular, we focus on the following issues: the distinction between assessing individual utility and assessing societal value of health care; the need to...

In order to avoid undue discrimination of disabled people, we have suggested that all life years gained by the disabled should count as 1 in QALY calculations as long as the health states in question are preferred to being dead by those concerned. Johannesson noted that such a convention could...

In an earlier article in Health Economics, Salomon and Murray argue that by applying maximum likelihood techniques to predetermined functional forms and to a data set where a number of health states are valued by means of four standard valuation techniques, underlying 'pure' valuations of health...