Thinking about it: thoughts about health and valuing QALYs

When valuing health states (e.g., for use in the assessment of health technologies), health economists often ask respondents how many years of life in poor health they would be willing to trade-off in order to live in full health. Problems with preferences of this kind have led to calls for the use of more direct measures of the utility associated with experiencing a health state. The fact remains, however, that individuals are often willing to make large sacrifices in life expectancy to alleviate conditions for which there appears to be a considerable degree of hedonic adaptation. The purpose of this study is to investigate this important discrepancy in more detail. Data from 1173 internet and telephone surveys in the United States suggest that time trade-off responses are related to the frequency and intensity of negative thoughts about health in ways that may not be very well captured by any of the proposed valuation methods.