Background: The assessment of health states considered to be worse than dead is a controversial issue.<P>Objective: To investigate how health states are valued when they are close to dead. Differences between adjacent states are compared with the differences between the first positive|first...</p>

By polling individual responses to hypothetical scenarios, valuation studies estimate population preferences toward health on a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) scale. The scenarios typically involve trade‐offs in time (time trade‐off (TTO)), risk (standard gamble (SG)), or number of...