What values do the public want their health care systems to use in evaluating technologies?

Excerpt

For most economists working in the field of health care, particularly those working on the economic evaluation of health technologies, the logic of being concerned about the relative effectiveness of competing interventions and the opportunity cost of the resources involved is instinctive. Difficult choices have to be made within the inevitably limited resources available to publicly funded (and indeed private insurance-based) health care provision. It is an easy step then to suggest one should maximise the utility of a population within the constraints of a predetermined budget or at politically acceptable future cost. For many economists, though not all, it requires only two small steps to move from utility maximisation, to health maximisation and then to operationalise that as QALY maximisation. And, some key reimbursement and/or coverage authorities have bought into that argument as a logical, operational definition of their mandate. …