Rights, responsibilities and NICE: a rejoinder to Harris

Claxton, Karl and Culyer, Anthony J. (2007) Rights, responsibilities and NICE: a rejoinder to Harris. Journal of Medical Ethics. -. ISSN 0306-6800

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Abstract

Harris' reply to our defence of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence's (NICE) current cost-effectiveness procedures contains two further errors. First, he wrongly draws a conclusion from the fact that NICE does not and cannot evaluate all possible uses of healthcare resources at any one time and generally cannot know which National Health Service (NHS) activities would be displaced or which groups of patients would have to forgo health benefits: the inference is that no estimate is or can be made by NICE of the benefits to be forgone. This is a non-sequitur. Second, he asserts that it is a flaw at the heart of the use of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) as an outcome measure that comparisons between people need to be made. Such comparisons do indeed have to be made, but this is not a consequence of the choice of any particular outcome measure, be it the QALY or anything else.

Item Type:	Article
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	This is an author produced version of a paper published in Journal of Medical Ethics. Openly available from February 2008 in accordance with the publisher's embargo.
Keywords:	cost-effectiveness, Harris, NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), QALY
Academic Units:	The University of York > Economics and Related Studies (York)
Depositing User:	Ms Diana Hilmer
Date Deposited:	09 Nov 2007 17:39
Last Modified:	19 Feb 2013 11:34
Published Version:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jme.2006.018903
Status:	Published
Refereed:	Yes
Related URLs:	http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/33/8...
URI:	http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/3412

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