The current Medicare operation—reimbursing medical goods and services to a growing number of people without basing the reimbursement benefit on the actual cost of the services—is unsustainable, but there are some possible remedies.
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 bioethicist argues that two journal articles about quality of life-adjusted years research oversimplifies the issue and do not take into consideration people's abilities to adapt to disability and disease.