Valuing the benefits and costs of health care programmes: where's the ‘extra’ in extra-welfarism?

The application of Sen's notion of capabilities to problems of the allocation of resources to health in the form of an extra-welfarist framework underlies the justification of quality adjusted life years (QALYs) as the method for valuing the benefits of health care. In this paper we critically appraise this application from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. We show that the alleged limitations of the welfarist approach are essentially …