In the 1 Feb 2011 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine,an ACP committee offers up a entry entitled
High-Value, Cost Conscious Health Care: Concepts for clinicians to Evaluation, and Costs of Medical Intervention" with Douglass K. Owens, the lead author.
They begin with their definition of value which is " an assessment of the benefit of a intervention relative to expenditures." So balancing benefit and cost is considered value.
As a possible counterpoint I quote the following from the blog, "Politics & Prosperity" :
The Annals authors then make what they believe to be critical distinction -the distinction between cost and value. So that a high cost item may or may not provide high value and low cost may have little benefit , therefore low value.The price ( or cost?) of things in micro-economic theory results from the subjective valuation of things by people.
The authors then redefine rationing (or in the authors words " more appropriately define) to mean "restricting the use of effective, high-value care". So that if an intervention that is "determined" to be low value is restricted this would not be considered rationing. One can see what power this puts in the hands of those who determine what is high and low value.We will not have rationing-in the ACP definition- if we only eliminate those interventions that some one ( government? an ACP committee, United health Group ?) has determined to be low value. You think the power to define the words we use and the power to control the narrative is not important.
If a treatment is both better and cheaper than an alternative there is no problem in deciding between the two. More complexity emerges when an alternative provides more benefits but also costs more. What to do here gets to the core issue. How much is health worth.?In the authors terms- what is the choice of the " cost effectiveness threshold".
Owens et al in regard to determining how much health care is worth say that we need cost effective analysis which they say requires "specialized expertise and training" attributes that just happen to be apparently possessed by the authors themselves. Note we are moving from comparative effectiveness analysis to cost effectiveness analysis which is an entirely different matter. The authors tell us that such analysis is expensive and is "typically performed by investigators". In this way the value of competing interventions to patients and to society can be determined. Determining the "value to society"-no hubris there.
But here is the money quote in which he authors admit the obvious.
"The choice of a cost effectiveness threshold is itself a value judgment and depends on several factors, including who the decision maker is."
After all of the gathering of various costs and developing estimates of the quality adjusted life years (QALY) and the aggregation of costs and aggregation of estimated benefits and using various analytic tools , a value judgment has to be made. Ultimately it is a human value judgment- not simply the objective analysis or simply solving a set of equations. The big question question is who will decide; whose judgment will settle the issue..Seemingly, the authors have assumed or gratuitous announced they ( or similar experts with special training and expertise) should be the ones whose subjective evaluation is determinative.
High-Value, Cost Conscious Health Care: Concepts for clinicians to Evaluation, and Costs of Medical Intervention" with Douglass K. Owens, the lead author.
They begin with their definition of value which is " an assessment of the benefit of a intervention relative to expenditures." So balancing benefit and cost is considered value.
As a possible counterpoint I quote the following from the blog, "Politics & Prosperity" :
The theory of subjective value, which is a cornerstone of microeconomics, says that
value is not inherent in things. There may be objective proxy-measures of value—like market value—but these depend primarily on the subjectivity of the individuals who make the choices. The prices of things, in other words, result from people’s subjective valuations of things.The often quoted,Harvard Business School professor, M.E. Porter defines as: Value =outcome/cost. See here for my earlier comments on Porter,value and its determination.
The Annals authors then make what they believe to be critical distinction -the distinction between cost and value. So that a high cost item may or may not provide high value and low cost may have little benefit , therefore low value.The price ( or cost?) of things in micro-economic theory results from the subjective valuation of things by people.
The authors then redefine rationing (or in the authors words " more appropriately define) to mean "restricting the use of effective, high-value care". So that if an intervention that is "determined" to be low value is restricted this would not be considered rationing. One can see what power this puts in the hands of those who determine what is high and low value.We will not have rationing-in the ACP definition- if we only eliminate those interventions that some one ( government? an ACP committee, United health Group ?) has determined to be low value. You think the power to define the words we use and the power to control the narrative is not important.
If a treatment is both better and cheaper than an alternative there is no problem in deciding between the two. More complexity emerges when an alternative provides more benefits but also costs more. What to do here gets to the core issue. How much is health worth.?In the authors terms- what is the choice of the " cost effectiveness threshold".
Owens et al in regard to determining how much health care is worth say that we need cost effective analysis which they say requires "specialized expertise and training" attributes that just happen to be apparently possessed by the authors themselves. Note we are moving from comparative effectiveness analysis to cost effectiveness analysis which is an entirely different matter. The authors tell us that such analysis is expensive and is "typically performed by investigators". In this way the value of competing interventions to patients and to society can be determined. Determining the "value to society"-no hubris there.
But here is the money quote in which he authors admit the obvious.
"The choice of a cost effectiveness threshold is itself a value judgment and depends on several factors, including who the decision maker is."
After all of the gathering of various costs and developing estimates of the quality adjusted life years (QALY) and the aggregation of costs and aggregation of estimated benefits and using various analytic tools , a value judgment has to be made. Ultimately it is a human value judgment- not simply the objective analysis or simply solving a set of equations. The big question question is who will decide; whose judgment will settle the issue..Seemingly, the authors have assumed or gratuitous announced they ( or similar experts with special training and expertise) should be the ones whose subjective evaluation is determinative.
I am not speaking against comparative effectiveness research (CER). It is important that we be able to say, for example, if carotid stenting gives better results that carotid endarterectomy and in what groups of patients.Presuming to be able to determine which is the better value if the higher price intervention gives superior results than the less costly alternative is another matter altogether and in my opinion falls into what I call type 2 hubris.See here for the woefully under utilized Gaulte classification of hubris in which type 2 is the type that some self defined exceptional persons never outgrow their sense of hypertrophied self worth and instead enlarges to know what is best for everyone .
The authors of the article clearly admit the exercise ultimately is a value judgment. The authors modestly admit that folks with their skillful use of utilitarian statistics of the aggregate are best able to make those judgments.
Econ 101 courses often talk about economics as involving the allocation of scarce resources to competing ends and scarcity leading to trade offs. People in their everyday lives make trade offs that involve some type of formal or more likely informal balancing of costs and benefits. Mark Pennington in his book "Robust Political Economy" said :
"Utilitarianism,however,extends the principle of making trade-offs within a person's life to the trade-offs between lives, and thus fails to respect the discreteness of individual lives."
John Rawls criticized utilitarianism as being inattentive to the separateness of persons and being guilty of treating people as means for the achievement of various social ends. The utilitarianism of cost effectiveness based decisions regarding health care is in opposition to both the egalitarianism of Rawls and the libertarian views of Nozick but dovetails nicely with the notion of physician as steward of society's medical resources and the medical progressives' overarching principle that medicine is too important and complicated to be left to the individual patient with his individual separate life and his physician.
(Note: I have written before on the Owens article discussing in why that approach will deliver much less than they claim and have also commented on the bogus nature of the concept of Quality adjusted life year (QALY) which was actually recognized by the father of utilitarianism and other questionable assumptions involved in cost benefit analysis.)
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