The aim of cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) is to inform the allocation of scarce resources. CEA is routinely used in assessing the cost-effectiveness of specific health technologies by agencies such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in England and Wales. But...

A developing emphasis of health care reforms has been creating organisations with responsibilities for strategic commissioning of services for defined populations. Such organisations must set priorities in aiming to meet their populations’ needs subject to a budget constraint. This requires...

Over the last decade the British Labour Government has presided over unprecedented increases in levels of spending on the National Health Service (NHS). But Opposition parties now claim that this record growth in NHS expenditure has been misspent, and some commentators are already predicting...

This paper focuses on the contrast between describing the benefit of a healthcare intervention as gain in health (QALY-type ideas) or a disability reduction (DALY-type ideas). The background is an apparent convergence in practice of the work conducted under both traditions. In the light of these...

In intertemporal choice experiments people usually choose between smaller-sooner and larger-later amounts of money. That is, they make tradeoffs in terms of nominal amounts. Yet the factor governing intertemporal tradeoffs in the marketplace is usually the interest rate. In this study, we tested...