Health Economic Assessment: Cost-Effectiveness Thresholds and Other Decision Criteria

Steven Simoens
Additional contact information
Steven Simoens: Research Centre for Pharmaceutical Care and Pharmaco-economics, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Onderwijs en Navorsing 2, P.O. Box 521, Herestraat 49, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

IJERPH, 2010, vol. 7, issue 4, 1-6

Abstract: An article published in this Journal argued that New Zealand does not apply a cost-effectiveness threshold because medicines are funded within a fixed budget and because cost-effectiveness is only one of nine criteria that inform decisions. This Comment has explained that, from a theoretical perspective, the cost-effectiveness threshold model is not inconsistent with these two arguments. The observed annual variation in incremental cost-effectiveness ratios in New Zealand may originate from yearly differences in new medicines that request reimbursement and in the budget size, and from the fact that decision makers take into account other decision criteria in addition to cost-effectiveness.

Keywords: health economics; economic evaluation; cost-effectiveness; cost-effectiveness threshold; opportunity cost; decision criteria; multi-criteria decision analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/4/1835/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/4/1835/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:7:y:2010:i:4:p:1835-1840:d:8005

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().