In Health Technology Assessment (HTA), commonly used techniques apply piecewise comparisons of two or more alternatives, comparing costs and outcomes associated with each treatment. According to the definition by Robbins, who considers economics the study of ‘alternative uses’ of resources (Robbins, 1984, 1932), HTA can be considered a branch of health economics. However, we argue that this is only partly true. The definition of economics is also about ‘scarce resources’ and while HTA measures resources by their monetary value, it takes for granted that money is a measure of scarcity. It is, however, timely that (health) economics proposes other measures for the efficient allocation of scarce resources. In a time of climate change or fighting a pandemic, investment of (additional) resources is necessary and money is just a means to put resources to work.This research is about proposing a new metric for constraints faced by economies. The real constraint of monetary economies is inflation because it is an indicator of too much demand given resources (Kelton, 2020).Methods: This research builds a theoretical framework, grounded in economics, using both the self-fulfilling prophecies of growth (adapted to well-being) and the Grossman model to propose a new metric of efficient resource use, the Incremental Inflation Effectiveness-Ratio (IIER) (Evans et al., 1998; Grossman, 1972).Results: Results will describe the development of the new tool, IIER, from the self-fulfilling prophecy model.The IIER is a comparison of inflation given two alternatives, A and B, divided by the effect of the new intervention in terms of health given by βI. Discussion: In the context of health economics, this research allows us to consider the wider economic context and to bypass the commonly considered budget constraint when determining the value for money of new treatments
