 This view of disability is not merely inaccurate. Its use to assess the effectiveness of health care interventions has disturbing implications for the lives of people with disabilities. Effectiveness measures typically treat a disability as equivalent for assessment purposes to a shorter life-span. Health outcomes are measured by life-years saved or gained; life-years are “adjusted” by their quality, and their rated quality is substantially reduced if the intervention fails to correct, risks causing, or causes a disability. As a result, people who have, or will be left with, disabilities also have their future life-years adjusted downward in light of the presumed lower quality of those life-years. As a result, the priority of persons with disabilities for life-saving interventions is substantially reduced. Because it employed such discounting, the 1990 Oregon Health Care Plan to set priorities for Medicaid-funded procedures was found to discriminate against people with disabilities (Bodenheimer 1997). Several years later, the most comprehensive international effort to develop summary measures of population health proposed a more explicit and very sharp discounting of lives with disabilities in assessing the “Global Burden of Disease” and in setting priorities for its reduction (Murray 1996). Although some objectionable features of the discounting methodology have been modified (Saloman and Murray 2002), the Global Burden of Disease frameworks continue to adopt procedures that result in strikingly low quality-of-life estimates for many disabilities.