Cost-utility analysis

In defining a collectively financed basic health care benefit package, can cost-utility analysis (CUA) serve as an instrument to measure the efficiency of all preventive and curative health care services in a uniform way? This question, answered affirmatively by the Scientific Council for Government Policy in its 1997 report ‘Public Health Care’, lies at the heart of this background study, which is written in support of the discussion in the Health Council Committee on Contours of the Basic Health Care Benefit Package. The study presents an inventory of the assumptions and choices in CUA methodology, and provides an overview of what has been written about them in the health economic, medical and medical ethics literature.