CCHE

CCHE Seminar: Tony Culyer, University of York

Let’s Get the Threshold Right, and Stop the Killing

The idea of a critical cost-effectiveness ratio for selecting health care interventions for inclusion in a national health plan has proved controversial. It has a long history. There is also a long history of error – both in getting the idea of the willingness to pay threshold wrong and applying it to the detriment of population health. The problem is worst in low and middle income countries, with the World Health Organization (WHO) a main mischief maker, with majority (I suspect) of WHO public health specialists in global health aiding and abetting these issues. The first step to stopping the killing is to get our ideas straight.

Tony Culyer is emeritus professor of economics at Univerity of York (England); Senior Fellow at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto; Chair, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) International Advisory Group; and Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He was the founding Organiser of the UK Health Economists’ Study Group and is the founding co-editor of Journal of Health Economics.