All rights reserved. We want to know whether an intervention will help people to live better, not just longer, and whether some treatments cause more trouble than they are worth.
New technologies promise wondrous benefits.
But when millions of people have no insured access to health care, and when many others face increasingly stringent limits on care, technologies' high costs require us to choose what we should do from the broader universe of what we can do. The challenges to measuring QL are formidable. Even high-quality QL research prompts debate when used to reduce spending on marginal benefits. These important issues have been the mainstay of QL discussions. But another challenge, equally significant yet far less recognized, is the focus of this article.