The competition for limited health care resources is intensifying. We urgently need an acceptable method for deciding how they should be allocated. The Quality-Adjusted Life Year, or QALY, is the most developed proposal for such allocation. In this book a distinguished team of ethicists and economists defend the core of the QALY proposal: that heal '...timely contribution to what is certain to continue to be a vigorous debate about the ethical future of cost-utility analysis.' Bioethics '...generating a much more readable and consistent text...thoughtful and thought-provoking...' Health Economics 'Whatever readers opinions on the QALY, this book offers a useful introduction to the subject as a whole, and to the ethical basis of QALYs in particular.' Bulletin of Medical Ethics