At the end of June, the US Supreme court ruled that the EPA needs to consider the cost of implementing regulations to curb emissions from power plants.
The problem is that one side of the risk-benefit equation is far harder to define than the other – and it’s a difficulty shared by healthcare regulators throughout the world…
The US Supreme Court ruled that the cost of compliance with the EPA's regulation of hazardous pollutants from power plants should have been weighed up before deciding whether the regulation was “appropriate and necessary.”
It may be possible to fairly accurately estimate the cost to industry compliance but what about the cost of non-compliance?
As BP discovered in 2010, after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the cost of environmental damage can be exceptionally hard to estimate.
But measuring the cost of poor heath is perhaps even trickier.
Yet this is the challenge faced by bodies such as NICE (the UK National Institute for health and Care Excellence) every day. They need to accurately decide the value of a particular drug outcome in a fair and effective way.
Lost school or work days can be measured, cost of treatment can be estimated, but the value of prevention is often underestimated.
It’s hard to put a value on the absence of illness without resorting to crude measures like effect on productivity but unless we look beyond that, we are heading down a very dangerous road.
Read more [here]
|
|
 |
|
|
Share on LinkedIn |
Share via Email |
