An Issue in the Economic Evaluation of Preventive Technologies: The Case of Vaccines

Abstract

The techniques of economic evaluation -- cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis -- have in recent years become increasingly accepted as important tools of health technology assessment. These methods have frequently been applied to the evaluation of vaccines, whose importance as general public health interventions make them particularly apt candidates for such analyses. Economic evaluations in this area are at once sophisticated and burdened with methodological problems. This paper examines one such problem that has not been given much attention in economic evaluations of health care interventions, but which may substantially affect the findings of such studies. The issue is whether the estimated costs of a vaccine program should include the unrelated medical expenditures occasioned by longer life spans resulting from a life-extending vaccine. The economic evaluation literature on vaccines illustrates how sensitive findings can be to inclusion or exclusion of these expenditures.KeywordsEconomic EvaluationInfluenza VaccineInfluenza VaccinationHealth Technology AssessmentVaccination ProgramThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.