How much is your health worth -- $-wise?

Believe or not, some economists are trying to answer this specific question which can then be used by health insurance companies in deciding whether a particular drug or treatment is covered.

So what have the economists come up with?

One year of life = at least $100K (based on the fact that "Keeping a patient with kidney failure alive on dialysis costs about $70,000 per year."-New York Times)

Using a test called standard gamble in which people are asked to imagine having the symptoms of a certain disease (pain, loss of function and shortened life expectancy) and then asked if they would undergo an operation which, if successful, would cure them, and if not, would kill them, economists found the following:

• Faced with severe diabetes, including blindness, most in the study would undergo an operation even if there was only a 42% success rate.
• Those will sever stroke would undergo an operation with a lower success rate.
• Those with sleep apnea would undergo an operation only if the success rate was a minimum of 90%.

But overall, why are the economists even focusing on this?

Because "once they know how to rank the 'costs' of various diseases, economists can determine the worthiness of a particular treatment. To do so, they use the 'quality-adjusted life-year,' or QALY. ... QALYs offer a single figure that can measure value of every treatment, from drugs to surgeries to preventive care, like vaccines and cancer screenings."

Whether we agree or not with this (rather cold) manner of evaluating the "value" of a treatment, this is one way in which health insurances are determining whether to cover a drug or treatment.