Non-affiliates must pre-register to attend. Please see the registration link below.
Health and Well-Being: Some Complications
Health is in itself good for people, and it contributes to many good things, which are encompassed within well-being. If one supposes, as economists do, that preference satisfaction is a guide to well-being, one can then determine the value of health states by eliciting preferences. Yet measuring health by its contribution to well-being is problematic, because the contribution of health to well-being is not separable from the contributions of other goods, and individuals who have serious health deficits can sometimes restructure their lives so as to attain a level of well-being as high or higher than the level of well-being of many who have no health problems. Moreover, from a public perspective in a liberal state, the contribution that health makes to opportunity may be a better measure of the value of health than its contribution to well-being. Yet, it is questionable whether there is a feasible alternative to relying on preference elicitation to value health states.