[danielweber]

Thank you.

The government probably has a worse QALY because it runs Medicare, but that's not the government's fault -- anyone who runs the medical care program for old people is going to have horrible numbers there.

(You are more likely to die if you are on Medicare than if you are uninsured. This isn't because Medicare is killing you, it's because old people are on Medicare.)

In addition, we'd have to examine marginal-QALY versus average-QALY. Depending on the question one or the other could be more important.

Americans freak out whenever anyone tries to do QALY measurements, so we don't know just how good (or bad) our various programs are, public or private.