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> game of assigning quantitative value to lives is almost never going to help you make better decisions Quality adjusted life years is part of the analytical b

• throwawaygh 6y ago
  Not really. National healthcare systems are maybe the one reason why I said "almost never" and not "never". When your problem is literally and directly, not indirectly, about assigning finite resources where lives are on the line, that's the cases where a model that relates the two is most likely to be useful. And even then most healthcare systems don't even try. When the effects of sacrificing lives are more disconnected, the model becomes less useful. In particular, I don't think these sorts of models are useful for making decisions about how to respond to COVID, which is what this article is about.
• andrewla 6y ago
  It doesn't change mine! This came into vogue in the early 70s when they wanted to cut funding as much as possible to make the operation more efficient while still providing a high level of care, according to these "metrics" like QLAY, which are fundamentally broken (as are and have been all attempts to reduce to metrics). It managed to operate without them with a great deal of satisfaction from both the providers and the patients until this came in, and then things got really shitty while improving along the metrics so it was nobody's fault because it was just "science".