The conventional quality-adjusted life years approach to resource allocation has greater societal value if it is distributed among many rather than concentrated on a few, assuming that severity of illness is the same.

A health economics professor believes more research is needed on quality of life-adjusted years to explore the way we describe health states, the elicitation of patient values, and how to develop methods for obtaining informed general population preferences.

Some clinicians and researchers believe that quality-of-life measurements are flawed, and using them in clinical decision making is dangerous.