Question

Quality of Life and Resource Allocation by Michael Lockwood deals with paying for health care costs. Lockwood explores the subject of putting metrics such as quality life improvements and efficacy on medical treatments and whether this should factor into how resources are allocated in healthcare budgets. This type of thinking is used in the United Kingdom, but is not without controversy. This is in contrast to the United States, where these kinds of metrics are not used.

Please feel free to write on anything that interests you from the reading.

Answer 1

Societies are facing medical resource scarcities, inter alia due to increased life expectancy and limited health budgets and also due to temporal or continuous physical shortages of resources like donor organs. This makes it challenging to meet the medical needs of all. Ethicists provide normative guidance for how to fairly allocate scarce medical resources, but legitimate decisions require additionally information regarding what the general public considers to be fair.

therefore the use of quality of life and resource allocation comes into play

A new word has recently entered the British medical vocabulary. QALY i.e quality adjusted life year. this term is not indicative of a disease. rather it can be thought as an intended cure for medicosociological disease. this means inappropriate allocation and missuse of the scarce medical resources can be stopped by using this approach.QALY calculations are currently being considered in the UK as a way of showing how the National Health Service (NHS) can do the most good with its resources.

other philosophers however are not completely in the favour of this approach.

for example ANNE HAYDOCK strongly condemns this approach in her article 'QALYs- a threat to our quality of life?'

according to her they are an inadequate measure of the good done by the NHS because they refer only to its effects on what will be defined as the 'patient community'. The benefit of the NHS to the wider community is best regarded as a public good—everyone benefits from the general belief that the NHS is there to provide care for those who fall into a state of medical need. QALY ideology threatens this belief because it gives efficiency a higher priority than caring in response to need. thus according to her sticking to the concept of quality of life and resource allocation threatens the greater good of the society by favouring efficiency of medical service than favouring the immediate needs of people.

i have provided you the explanations from either perspective. i hope this helps :)