Cost-Value Analysis in Health Care: Making Sense out of QALYS

Description

This book is a comprehensive and fully up-to-date account of what it means to try to quantify health in distributing resources for health care. It offers an elegant new approach to comparing the costs and benefits of medical interventions. Erik Nord questions Cost-Utility Analysis (CUA) and the feasibility of measuring patients' quality of life meaningfully in numerical terms. He presents an alternative approach called cost-value analysis in which representative samples of the general public express preferences among different health-care programs. This will be a book of particular interest to medical ethicists, health-care professionals and administrators, and economists specializing in health-care economics.

'Nord is at the forefront of thinking about the best way to allocate health care efficiently and equitably, and he has extensive knowledge of the empirical research being done in this area. Anyone interested in the ethical problems of heath care allocation - especially anyone interested in the fundamental question of what health care allocation should be trying to achieve - will benefit from reading this book.' John McKie, Bioethics