What's your QALY (Quality-Adjusted Life Year

According to H. R. 3200 "The Secretary shall establish within the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality a Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research…with respect to the outcomes, effectiveness, and appropriateness of health care services and procedures," (www.opencongress.org). The way this takes place is through QALY (Quality-Adjusted Life Year)which assigns a numerical value to each year of your life (http://heapol.oxfordjournals.org/cgi...tract/21/5/402). A year of perfect health gives a person a 1.0 while a year of sub-par health would be a number between 0 -1. If you are in a wheelchair, blind, or some disease (Parkinson's for example), then you automatically start with a lower score for that year. Age will also decrease the score.

What is the justification for this? According to Peter Singer, Princeton ethicist and Liberal icon, "Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another,"(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/ma...lthcare-t.html). So who will tell David Letterman (bad heart), Magic Johnson (HIV), and others that their QALY doesn't qualify? Well for them probably no-one, but for you and me, hmmmm!