Health Economics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Health Economics - Essay Example But the thing is quite different in healthcare sector of any economy. In healthcare sector, policymakers are quite reluctant to put a value on life due to a lot of ethical reasons. Until recently there has been huge disagreement on the method of measuring life. Over the years, researchers have tried to measure returns on different heath care interventions or programs using economic analysis framework. In last few decades several indicators have been developed for making economic evaluation of different healthcare interventions. Among those indicators, the two most important and widely used indicators are quality adjusted life years (QALY) and disability adjusted life years (DALY). These two composite indicators are being increasingly used by researchers and policymakers of health care sectors of most of the countries across the world. The paper makes an attempt to critically evaluate each of these composite indicators which are helping policymakers in the healthcare sector to decide which intervention should be made available to the patients. The paper will first discuss the definitions and underlying concepts of each of these two indicators along with their uses, then it will move on to discussing the method of calculation for each of them and examine advantages and disadvantages of them, and finally look into their applications. (Prasad et al. 2009; Morrow and Bryant, 1995; Harron, Burnside and Beauchamp, 1983) QALY – One of the most important composite indicators used for assessing the effectiveness of healthcare interventions QALY was devised during the period of 1980s (Hirskyi, 2007) by economists, healthcare researchers and psychologists for conducting cost effectiveness analysis. QALY offers the policymakers of the healthcare sector an economical framework through which they become able to make an efficient allocation of scare health care resources. The QALY is actually based