QALYs are imperfect, as any measure of health benefit will be. For example, people who have never been on dialysis typically estimate that, if they were on dialysis, their health-related quality of life would be 39%, whereas people who actually are on dialysis on average rate their health-related quality of life at 56%. The same is true for other medical conditions: patients tend to regard their conditions as less bad than non-sufferers do. Is this because the general public doesn’t really understand what life with the medical condition is like and overestimates how bad it is?
