A Publicly Informed Objective Theory of Illness Severity

Abstract

When allocating scarce medical resources, we strive to do the best we can with the available resources. However, while we aspire to provide as “much health” as possible, we also care about who the beneficiaries are. Severity criteria are operative in Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, and the UK. These criteria, while differing in interesting ways, all dictate that we should be willing to accept a higher cost of helping those who are severely ill. But what does it mean to be severely ill? Severity is a thick and heterogeneous concept. It is, at least partly, a measure of health-related worse off-ness. Severity also seems to have a prescriptive aspect: we believe that we should do something when an illness is severe. The dissertation builds on and extends arguments from the four included papers, making the case for a fully aggregative objective theory of illness severity informed by popular views. In such a theory, some features of illness are subject-independent, while others are subject dependent.