The Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) is a newly-developed indicator of ill-health which provided the technical foundation for the World Bank's (1993) World Development Report: Investing in Health. In this paper we expose some of the value choices embodied in the DALY--those relating to disability weights, age-weighting, and discounting. We identify the equity consequences of using the efficiency criterion of aggregate DALY-minimization as a tool for health-sector planning.