The competition for limited health care resources is intensifying. We urgently need an acceptable method for deciding how they should be allocated. But the goods that health care produces are of very different kinds. Health care can extend the lives of children and of older people. It can make it possible for a person to walk, when without health care that person would be permanently bedridden; and it can reduce the pain and distress of people who are terminally ill. How can we possibly decide which of these - and many more - diverse achievements of health care are more deserving than others? We need a common unit by which we might be able to measure these very different goods. The Quality-Adjusted Life Year, or QALY, is the most developed proposal for such a unit of measure. In this book a distinguished team of ethicists and economists defend the core of the QALY proposal: that health care resources should be used so as to produce more years of life, of the highest possible quality. This leads to a discussion of such fundamental questions as whether all lives are of equal value, whether health care should be allocated on the basis of need and whether the QALY approach incorporates an adequate account of fairness or justice. The result is the most thorough account yet of the ethical issues raised by the use of the QALY as a basis for allocating health care resources.

The competition for limited health care resources is intensifying. We urgently need an acceptable method for deciding how they should be allocated. But the goods that health care produces are of very different kinds. Health care can extend the lives of children and of older people. It can make it possible for a person to walk, when without health care that person would be permanently bedridden; and it can reduce the pain and distress of people who are terminally ill. How can we possibly decide which of these - and many more - diverse achievements of health care are more deserving than others? We need a common unit by which we might be able to measure these very different goods. The Quality-Adjusted Life Year, or QALY, is the most developed proposal for such a unit of measure. In this book a distinguished team of ethicists and economists defend the core of the QALY proposal: that health care resources should be used so as to produce more years of life, of the highest possible quality. This leads to a discussion of such fundamental questions as whether all lives are of equal value, whether health care should be allocated on the basis of need and whether the QALY approach incorporates an adequate account of fairness or justice. The result is the most thorough account yet of the ethical issues raised by the use of the QALY as a basis for allocating health care resources.

There are pop stars, and then there is Prince. In this kaleidoscopic, freewheeling biography, John McKie examines the remarkable life and career of one of the most mysterious figures in music through the prism of the record most widely considered his masterpiece, 1987's Sign o' the Times.

Drawing on more than 200 interviews with friends, ex-girlfriends, bandmates, recording engineers, bodyguards, personal assistants, wardrobe designers and hairdressers, accomplished music writer John McKie examines the life of this musical polymath with the help of many of the people who knew him best.

Family members and friends discuss his childhood when he learned to master several instruments, there is new information on how he made the soundtrack to Purple Rain, the full story about why he decided to stop using his name, the now legendary Super Bowl half-time show and that guitar solo at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame which has been viewed on YouTube 100 million times.

McKie also dives into the personality of the man: what made him laugh, the way he hired and fired colleagues, what he was like to live with, how his relentless drive to make music led to him recording for hours without sleep, how he changed his car stereo to road test his new hits and even booked his guitar and album sleeves their own seats on flights.