Assessing the benefits of health care: how far should we go?

Abstract

The application of the techniques of economic evaluation to health care is becoming increasingly commonplace.This is shown by the increasing number of published evaluations and is to be welcomed.Despite this progress, however, we believe that current economic evaluations of healthcare interventions may fail to take into account potentially important sources of benefit and disbenefit to individual patients.If this is the case then the evaluation of many healthcare technologies will be in- complete and interventions that are thought to be efficient may in fact be inefficient and vice versa.As we will show, empirical evidence is lacking in the economics literature to support or refute the arguments put forward in this paper (although some support can be found outside economics).In view of this, many of the issues we discuss are, to a large extent, conceptual, but this is not sufficient reason to dismiss them.In this paper we highlight the potential importance of considering a wider range of benefits in healthcare assessment to stimulate the empirical testing of the issues raised.To facilitate empirical testing we suggest two analytical techniques: willingness to pay and conjoint analysis.

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