Talk:Cost-effectiveness analysis

Regardless of the true value of human life, I question whether the following statement is even meaningful:

In health economics a figure of US$50000 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is often suggested as the upper limit of an acceptable ICER.

The ICER is a ratio of cost to benefit. As such, it is a unitless measure. US$50000, on the other hand has the units that you would normally expect in a cost or a benefit.

I think the author intended to say this:

Decisions regarding whether to do something vs. not do that thing depend on the ICER of doing it. If the ICER is less than one, then it makes sense to do it, but not otherwise. If the benefit is very large, then the ICER may still be less than one even if the cost is also large. For this reason, a proponent of a particular course of action might be motivated to frabricate an excessively large benefit in order to justify high costs and still end up with an ICER less than one. To prevent execessive valuation of benefits, it is reasonable to suggest upper limits to the dollar value of benefits that are hard to quantify. In health economics a figure of US$50000 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is often suggested as an acceptable upper limit of the benefit of human life for use in calculating ICER.

As you can see from my efforts to correct the statement, the whole thing got quickly out of hand. One reasonable way to handle this is to simply blow away all the incendiary comments about human life, which are not particularly relevant to a generic discussion of cost-benefit ratios. But that would leave this stub pretty much devoid of content. Another approach would be to invent another example; one a little more mundane, perhaps, but one that would serve as a better illustration of the topic.

Thoughts, anyone?
--GraemeMcRae 22:22, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

It's a ratio of monetary cost to health effects, so it has units of 'currency per effect' (for comparison, velocity is a ratio of distance to time, and has units of metres per second). So the quoted statement is meaningful. Wikid 14:06, 21 June 2006 (UTC)