The Nearly Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Health Care
As the national debate about health care access, cost, and quality continues, the citizen-participant in democratic self-governance will continue to be bombarded by contradictory scientific discoveries about medical practices. This exacerbates the problems faced by government, health care providers, and individuals as they try to decide what medical procedures are worth the money spent on them. This article examines one approach that promises some solutions, Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA). Other forms of evaluation of medical outcomes are also being discussed, but CEA appears to be the most popular because it combines indications of results (effectiveness of a treatment, for example) with the cost of achieving the result. The more ardent advocates of this kind of analysis, or variations on it, think that its use may improve efficiency of resource allocation for health care not only of treatments for specific ailments, but across the totality of health programs [Torrance 1986, 51.