Ethical Analysis Of QALYs

Concerning health policy and health care,people are interested not only in the length of life but also the quality of life.Given the scarcity of social resources and people's pursuit towards life quality,many researchers attempted to evaluate the quality of life in terms of quantitative standard, aiming to help weigh the cost and profit which diseases and death make on economy thus to help in establishing reasonable medical policies.QALYs(Quality-Adjusted Life Years),which is the most-frequently -used comprehensive means to evaluate life quality,is a weighing system using numbers between 0(death)-1(totally healthy)to signalize individual's life quality every year.While applied widely in many fields, the method also encounters some challenges.This paper aims to post the ethnical foundations of QALYs,to analyze its intrinsic ethnical limitations, thus to propose some corrective suggestions on QALYs.This paper expatiates the QALYs method and its applications, demonstrates its ethnical values.While other evaluating systems,with the singleness of life quality appraising index,take into account only the life quality or just the life quantity,QALYs break through this limitation by considering not only the life span but also the life quality, taking into concern the psychological and social factors,meanwhile, also showing the humanitarian concern towards life.The reason why QALYs bears such advantages lies in that the method has taken into consideration the ethnical dimensions of life quality evaluating methods.Based on the basic principles of Bioethics,QALYs is the concreteness of the principle of beneficence and the principle of justice. However,this is also the source where the limitations of QALYs comes.On the basis of evaluating the technical reasonableness of the QALYs,the paper poses the ethnical limitations of the QALYs,arguing that there are two kinds of intrinsic conflicts of QALYs,namely,those between the principle of beneficence and the principle of justice,between the principle of beneficence and the principle of respect for independence. The writer thinks that Balance Strategy of people like Tom Beauchamp must be introduced into the theory in order to solve these conflicts. Therefore,the new QALYs method melted with Concreteness Strategy and Balance Strategy will become a more ethnical evaluating method.