Relentless Health Value

You know back in the olden days when a foot of measurement was actually the measure of your own foot? So, I might measure something and it’s, like, 19 feet. And then you measure the same exact thing and it’s 38 feet because you have tiny feet. This is the analogy that kept running through my mind as I was talking with Anna Kaltenboeck in this health care podcast about QALYs to measure the value of drugs. In this metaphor, QALYs are the ruler so that 1 foot of drug value is the same for everybody and all drugs. It’s very civilized as a concept if you think about it. QALY stands for quality-adjusted life year. The goal of a QALY is to figure out how much any given drug is worth to a society so that we, as a society, have a benchmark to evaluate the price of pharmaceutical products. QALYs are an apples to apples or a foot to foot way to compare the value of drugs for we the people. I mean, is this drug amazing and we should all pay a lot for it? Or is the drug more expensive than the current standard of treatmen