Valuing Health
Well-Being, Freedom, and Suffering
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:16th Apr '15
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In Valuing Health Daniel M. Hausman provides a philosophically sophisticated overview of generic health measurement that suggests improvements in standard methods and proposes a radical alternative. He shows how to avoid relying on surveys and instead evaluate health states directly. Hausman goes on to tackle the deep problems of evaluation, offering an account of fundamental evaluation that does not presuppose the assignment of values to the properties and consequences of alternatives. After discussing the purposes of generic health measurement, Hausman defends a naturalistic concept of health and its relations to measures such as quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). In examining current health-measurement systems, Valuing Health clarifies their value commitments and the objections to relying on preference surveys to assign values to health states. Relying on an interpretation of liberal political philosophy, Hausman argues that the public value of health states should be understood in terms of the activity limits and suffering that health states impose. Hausman also addresses the moral conundrums that arise when policy-makers attempt to employ the values of health states to estimate the health benefits of alternative policies and to adopt the most cost-effective. He concludes with a general discussion of the difficulties of combining consequentialist and non-consequentialist moral considerations in policy-making.
In an analysis unmatched for its comprehensiveness and care, Hausman challenges two dominant assumptions in health economics: that the value of health resides in its bearing on well-being, and that health economists should measure that value through the expressed preferences of patients or citizens. Hausman carves out his own highly original, different position on both the nature and measurement of health's value. Nuanced and philosophically acute, his view cannot be ignored. * Paul T. Menzel, Professor emeritus, Pacific Lutheran University *
Dan Hausman's Valuing Health: Well-Being, Freedom, and Suffering is a scholarly work of exceptional clarity and erudition. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, it is a remarkable achievement that caps a decade and a half of thinking and writing on these topics. While ostensibly a book about measuring and valuing health, it covers a much broader intellectual terrain, as Hausman navigates confidently between psychometrics, economics, and political philosophy. * Joshua Salomon, Harvard School of Public Health *
In this enjoyable and superbly readable book Hausman distinguishes between measuring health and measuring the value of health, and argues that the value of health should be judged by its contribution to well-being, suggesting ways in which current instruments can be refined in order to do so more accurately. A second vital distinction concerns the private value of health to an individual, and its public value, which should inform health-related resource allocation. Hausman's proposal draws on the theory of 'liberal facilitation' in which the state's main role in relation to health is to provide people with opportunities and to exercise compassion for their suffering. His sketch of a resource allocation mechanism devised on this basis will be a focus of debate for many years to come. This book cements Hausman's standing as one of the leading philosophers of health of our time. * Jonathan Wolff, University College London *
In Valuing Health, Daniel Hausman provides an in-depth review of the connection between overall health, values, and well-being. [...] Over the course of seventeen chapters, Hausman critically questions previous measures of health and considers important and relevant scholarly work and arguments for or against measurements of health and its connection to well-being. * Dori Beeler, Centre of Medical Humanities, Durham University *
ISBN: 9780190233181
Dimensions: 165mm x 236mm x 33mm
Weight: 499g
288 pages