The Health Economics of High-Dose Chemotherapy

Abstract

The economic evaluation of health care has become very popular over the past decade. Many factors could explain the profusion of literature on health economics (HE) in the last few years, but the main reason is that for many diseases more than one clinically acceptable treatment option is available [1]. The different treatment options are, however, not equally affordable nor is there a guarantee of better clinical success proportional to the increase in cost per treatment selected. Therefore choices must be made based on the potential clinical benefit of new treatments balanced against the obtainable budget. HE aids in this evaluation by including in the analysis highly diverse variables such as cost and clinical outcome [2]. Governments today struggle with tight budget constraints, particularly in the loss-making social security sector that includes health care. Over the past decade the national authorities have been confronted with annual increases in total health care costs above the rate of inflation, which can partially be explained by variables like epidemiology, demography, the number of health care providers available on the market, and the number of people covered by compulsory insurance [3].