I'm looking for other studies considering this idea of "life years". Generally around where people's time is going, what is wasting it, or taking it away. Does anyone have any suggestions?
The determination of whether to proceed with medical intervention is usually done with a metric called quality adjusted life years (QALY: which is life years adjusted by quality of life), or rather they are never done if QALY is negative. And proceed to make a judgement call based on QALY/cost. As for studies, almost every cancer treatment study will use this metric as will _many_ other medical studies.