The desirability of a condition versus the well being and worth of a person.

The desirability of a condition to people who are not in it themselves is only moderately correlated to the experienced well being of people with the condition and hardly correlated at all to the worth of those people. A single score for a health state, of the kind used in QALY calculations, cannot express all these three types of value. The history and current practice of health economics is highly problematic in this respect. Copyright 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.