Capabilities as menus: A non-welfarist basis for QALY evaluation

Han Bleichrodt and John Quiggin

Journal of Health Economics, 2013, vol. 32, issue 1, 128-137

Abstract: Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) are the most widely used measure of health in economic evaluations of health care. Within a welfarist framework QALYs are consistent with people's preferences under stringent assumptions. Several authors have argued that QALYs are a valid measure of health within an extra-welfarist framework. This paper studies the applicability of QALYs within the best-known extra-welfarist framework, Sen's capability approach. We propose a procedure to value capability sets and provide a foundation for QALYs within Sen's capability approach. We show that, under appropriate conditions, the ranking of capabilities can be represented locally by a QALY measure and that a willingness to pay for QALYs can be defined. The validity of QALYs as a general measure of health requires the same stringent conditions as in a welfarist framework.

Keywords: Capability approach; QALYs; Menu-dependent choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D70 I14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629612001579
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Capabilities as Menus: A Non-Welfarist Basis for QALY Evaluation (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:32:y:2013:i:1:p:128-137

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2012.10.004

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().