When is it too expensive? Cost-effectiveness thresholds and health care decision-making

Abstract

Whilst being just one of the relevant academic disciplines to inform this debate, health economics has much to contribute to this important topic, for instance by highlighting the importance of displacement and opportunity costs, by demonstrating the full costs and benefits of new technologies, and by showing how decisions based on such information could be made and argued to be ‘just’ to some extent. In this editorial, we focus on the latter issue and especially on the question of how a line should be drawn beyond which a technology is considered to be too expensive, and therefore, should not be reimbursed.