ABSTRACT
The discipline of health economics has progressed substantially. In the 1960s, it began with cost-benet analyses of public health programs, such as vaccination, and has evolved into a large discipline of formal health technology assessment (HTA). Cost-effectiveness analysis has become the centrepiece of HTA and is currently performed virtually for each new health care technology. The biopharmaceutical industry and health care payers increasingly rely on cost-effectiveness to assess the value of new technologies and to dene their pricing and coverage decision making.
