ABSTRACT
Cost-effectiveness analysis is the most important tool for assessing interventions and health care services. It works by comparing their costs and their benefits, where the benefits are usually expressed in QALYs or DALYs. In this chapter, we explained how cost-effectiveness analysis works and illustrated its use by several real-life examples. We also identified a number of ethical issues that arise when cost-effectiveness analysis is part of the allocation of health care resources. We presented equity weighting – a method for taking into account additional moral considerations in cost-effectiveness analysis and for expressing trade-offs between different values in a quantifiable form. We closed the chapter by a discussion of the controversy about discounting future costs and benefits.
