Quality-of-life indices can rate a deaf life as worth less than a hearing one.

Evidence

Similar issues arise when deafness and other “handicaps” are considered illness or not-healthy. For example, “according to the HUI(3), the value of the health state of being deaf and having no other health deficiencies on a 0–1 scale is.465. According to the HUI(3), two years of life for someone who is deaf produces fewer QALYs [quality of life years] than one year of life for someone in full health. In contrast, many in the deaf community deny that deafness is a disability at all. This assertion is not sour grapes: many in the deaf community decline the partial restoration of hearing made possible by a cochlear implant, thereby showing an effective preference for deafness over partial hearing” (Hausman 2015, 90–91). — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 81

Categorization

• SHARE: This is for whoever works on disability or health measurement — the specific QALY arithmetic (.465, two years vs. one) is a genuinely nerdy tidbit only they’d care about.
• QUESTION: How do cost-effectiveness formulas handle a preference for the condition being scored? Worth chasing whether any index has since built in community self-valuation.
• SEED: Angle: “The Arithmetic of Whose Life Counts” — QALYs, cochlear implants, and what happens when the measured reject the measure.