Equity in health care prioritisation: an empirical inquiry into social value.

The value of QALY gains for different patients may be recalculated using equity weights, but it is unclear which interpretation of equity should be used: severity of illness, fair innings or proportional shortfall. We set up an experiment to analyze which of these equity concepts best reflects people's distributional preferences. Sixty respondents assigned a priority rank to the treatment of 10 conditions using the paired comparison technique.