Measuring or Valuing Population Health: Some Conceptual Problems
Public Health Ethics 5 (3):229-239 (2012)
| Abstract | There is no way literally to measure health, because health is multi-dimensional, and there is no metric whereby one person who is healthier than a second with respect to one dimension but less healthy with respect to another counts as healthier, less healthy or equally healthy overall. Health analysts instead measure how good or bad health states are in some regard. If these values are measures of health states, then identical health states must have identical values. But in different circumstances, the same health state may have different values. It may be better or worse. Uniform values can nevertheless be assigned to kinds of health states, either as a weighted average of the values of their tokens or as the value of the performance in a standard environment of the capacity the health state constitutes. These uniform values are not well suited for some of the purposes for which summary measures of population health have been intended, and a set of non-evaluative indicators may be an attractive alternative | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,631 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesS. A. Schroeder (2013). Rethinking Health: Healthy or Healthier Than? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (1):131-159.
Peter A. Ubel (1999). The Challenge of Measuring Community Values in Ways Appropriate for Setting Health Care Priorities. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 9 (3):263-284.
M. Allen (2011). Is Liberty Bad for Your Health? Towards a Moderate View of the Robust Coequality of Liberty and Health. Public Health Ethics 4 (3):260-268.
Per-Anders Tengland (2007). A Two-Dimensional Theory of Health. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 28 (4):257-284.
O. F. Norheim (2010). Gini Impact Analysis: Measuring Pure Health Inequity Before and After Interventions. Public Health Ethics 3 (3):282-292.
Alan Cribb (2005). Health and the Good Society: Setting Healthcare Ethics in Social Context. Oxford University Press.
Meri Koivusalo (2006). The Impact of Economic Globalisation on Health. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27 (1):13-34.
Scott DeVito (2000). On the Value-Neutrality of the Concepts of Health and Disease: Unto the Breach Again. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 25 (5):539 – 567.
Nancy S. Jecker & Eric M. Meslin (1994). United States and Canadian Approaches to Justice in Health Care: A Comparative Analysis of Health Care Systems and Values. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 15 (2).
Robert M. Sade (1995). A Theory of Health and Disease: The Objectivist-Subjectivist Dichotomy. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 20 (5):513-525.
Dean Rickles (2011). Public Health. In Fred Gifford (ed.), Philosophy of Medicine. Elsevier.
Lorian E. Hardcastle, Katherine L. Record, Peter D. Jacobson & Lawrence O. Gostin (2011). Improving the Population's Health: The Affordable Care Act and the Importance of Integration. Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 39 (3):317-327.
Tom Miller (2012). Looking for Better Health in All the Wrong Places: The Road to “Equality” Hits a Dead End. Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40 (1):33-44.
C. A. Womack (2012). Public Health and Obesity: When a Pound of Prevention Really Is Worth an Ounce of Cure. Public Health Ethics 5 (3):222-228.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2012-07-07Total downloads8 ( #122,917 of 548,973 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,511 of 548,973 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
