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Can Health Be Measured?

This essay is concerned with conceptualizing the measurement of overall health. Its conclusion—that the measurement of health consists in assigning a value to health rather than in measuring some quantity or magnitude of health—challenges some of the claims made in the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study (Salomon et al. 2012). The arguments here are drawn from the author’s book, Valuing Health: Well-Being, Freedom, and Suffering (Hausman 2015) and in several cases are developed further there. After saying a few words about why health needs to be measured or valued, what health is, and what measurement requires, the chapter argues that health is not measurable, because the relation “is at least as healthy as” is massively incomplete. The author also argues that even though the value of health is measurable, health itself cannot be measured indirectly by its value.