The Allocation of Health Care Resources: An Ethical Evaluation of the ‘QALY’ Approach

This work asks if society can place a monetary value on human life? Many people reject such an idea. How could society possibly arrive at any figure that would represent the value of a human life? And if it could, would that not be a crass attempt to convert to monetary values something that is beyond price? What would we think of a society that after spending a certain amount in attempting to save the lives of miners trapped after an underground mishap, said that it had reached the limit of the value of the miner’s lives, and left them to die rather than spend more on rescuing them. The author points out that our society allows people to die when it costs too much in areas like road safety, workplace safety, overseas aid and - the subject of the book - in health care. If we, as a community, find it unacceptable to allow our fellow citizens and their children - to die from diseases that could easily be cured by medical treatments available at modest cost to most members of society, we cannot avoid some community involvement in health care, and we must ask how much we, as a society, should depend on it.