Outskirts Press, INC.

The core of health care cost-effectiveness analysis is a set of decision rules by which a public health care agency can choose the most socially beneficial--that is, cost-effective—treatments to provide to or insure for its patient community. In this book the fundamental decision rules are derived algebraically from standard utilitarian welfare premises and two different models of the agency’s optimizing behavior. The rules are stated equivalently with incremental cost-effectiveness ratios and net benefits defined as decision variables, and statistical tests are proposed for making probabilistic assessments of the cost-effectiveness of new treatments.