ORIGINAL ARTICLE Well-Being and Health Greg Bognar Published online: 15 November 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007 Abstract One way of evaluating health is in terms of its impact on well-being. It has been shown, however, that evaluating health this way runs into difficulties, since health and other aspects of well-being are not separable. At the same time, the practical implications of the inseparability problem remain unclear. This paper assesses these implications by considering the relations between theories, compo- nents, and indicators of well-being. Keywords Well-being  Health  Indicators  Inseparability  Preferences The Inseparability of Health and Well-Being In order to make medical resource allocation and prioritization decisions, we need to be able to evaluate health. By ‘‘evaluating health,’’ I mean measuring the value of health. On the view I shall be concerned with, this is understood as measuring how good (or bad) a person’s health state is for that person—that is, how a person’s health contributes to that person’s well-being. Measuring the value of health is different from measuring the amount of health. The objective of the latter is to assess health without its impact on functioning, ability, or quality of life, taken in a broad sense. It is concerned with disease and impairment. While it seems uncontroversial to say that a person is healthier without a disease than with it, such comparisons cannot be taken far. It seems arbitrary to say, for example, that a person is less healthy (has less health) if she has poor eyesight than if she is hard of hearing, unless we mean that having good eyesight is more valuable than having good hearing. In order to compare health states, we inevitably have to appeal to their value. G. Bognar (&) Program in Ethics & Health, Harvard University, 641 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115, USA e-mail: greg_bognar@hms.harvard.edu 123 Health Care Anal (2008) 16:97–113 DOI 10.1007/s10728-007-0066-4