I wanted to clarify some confusion about discounting health outcomes.
The rationale for discounting hotel outcomes is the same as discounting costs: As a society, we value (or “weight”) outcomes further in the future less than those closer to the present. Intuitively this may be a little harder to understand that the discounting of future financial flows. For example, if a bad health outcome was in your future and you had a choice to bring it closer to the present, you might opt to do so just to “get it over with.” However, you could make this desire to get it over with explicit by quantifying the loss of utility associated with the “dread”, in which case the rationale for suffering that bad health outcome sooner rather than later is perfectly rational and plain.
In any case, the strong consensus in the field is that both health outcomes and costs must be discounted, and discounted at the same rate.
The mechanics are the same as discounting costs.
See
the attached toy model for an example.