Resumen de Social value of health programs: Is the age a relevant factor?

Eva Rodríguez Míguez, José Luis Pinto Prades

• A QALY |quality{adjusted life year| is an output measure used in economic evaluations of health care programs. The QALY approach assumes that a QALY has equal social value to everybody irrespective of the patient's age. However, it is possible that the general public assigns di erent social values to a QALY according to who gets it, derived from intergenerational equity judgements. In this paper we discuss the possibility of weighting health bene ts by age in the QALY approach. In addition, we display the results of an experiment whose objective is to derive the age weights. The results of the experiment performed suggest that the patient's age is a relevant factor when the health gains are assessed. Moreover age weights are not constant, but they vary depending on gains considered.