Abstract
Which costs and benefits to consider in economic evaluations of healthcare interventions remains an area of much controversy. Unrelated medical costs in life-years gained is an important cost category that is normally ignored in economic evaluations, irrespective of the perspective chosen for the analysis. National guidelines for pharmacoeconomic research largely endorse this practice, either by explicitly requiring researchers to exclude these costs from the analysis or by leaving inclusion or exclusion up to the discretion of the analyst. However, the inclusion of unrelated medical costs in life-years gained appears to be gaining support in the literature.
This article provides an overview of the discussions to date. The inclusion of unrelated medical costs in life-years gained seems warranted, in terms of both optimality and internal and external consistency. We use an example of a smoking-cessation intervention to highlight the consequences of different practices of accounting for costs and effects in economic evaluations. Only inclusion of all costs and effects of unrelated medical care in life-years gained can be considered both internally and externally consistent. Including or excluding unrelated future medical costs may have important distributional consequences, especially for interventions that substantially increase length of life. Regarding practical objections against inclusion of future costs, it is important to note that it is becoming increasingly possible to accurately estimate unrelated medical costs in life-years gained. We therefore conclude that the inclusion of unrelated medical costs should become the new standard.
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Notes
However, it must be noted that the debate does continue.[20]
While we do not wish to fully address here which perspective is most appropriate, it is clear that some costs may be more relevant for healthcare decision makers than others.[22] On the other hand, simply and completely leaving certain costs out of an economic evaluation may still be considered a short-sighted strategy.
Those costs in normal life-years unrelated to the intervention are normally excluded from the analysis, since these costs are independent of changes in length and quality of life (QOL) due to the intervention under study. Therefore, these costs are generally the same for all treatment strategies and cancel out.
It should be noted that the cost categorization outlined here is common but certainly not perfect or complete. For example, during life-years gained, people may also require informal care, which would be something like ‘indirect direct non-medical costs’, etc. It appears to becoming more common to use less aggregate cost categories (e.g. productivity costs, informal care, travel costs, etc.) with more meaningful labels.
Note that Meltzer[18] extends the discussion by also arguing in favour of including all future non-medical costs, such as survivor consumption and survivor earnings.
The latter would normally result in more work and a less favourable ICER, which casts some doubt on whether researchers have incentives to include these costs when it is not a requirement.
The two other criteria are “Exclude the costs of those resources that produce utility that is not being measured in the denominator, even though the costs are causally associated with the intervention” and “Include the costs of those resources consumed that are causally related to the intervention, but that have no countervailing utility gains.”[11]
As was pointed out by one of the anonymous reviewers of our article, scarcity may also enter the equation via the use of utility functions including leisure.[18]
As mentioned previously (section 1), the issue of inclusion of unrelated medical costs is largely independent of the perspective adopted.
Note that the percentage of QALYs gained attributable to unrelated medical care depends on both the intervention and population.[13] Varying this percentage from 25% to 75% resulted in ratios ranging from €5 800 to €1 900 per QALY gained in scenario 1 and from €3 700 to €1 200 per QALY gained in scenario 2.
In the smoking-cessation example, discounting was applied according to the recommendations in the Dutch guidelines for pharmacoeconomic research;[14] costs were discounted at a rate of 4%, while effects — in terms of QALYs — were discounted at 1.5%.
This issue is part of a broader discussion about the welfare theoretic foundation of QALYs, i.e. whether QALYs can be interpreted as utilities.[36]
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Acknowledgements
This study was part of the project ‘Living longer in good health’, which was financially supported by Netspar. The opinions expressed in the paper are those of the authors.
The authors have no conflicts of interest that are directly relevant to the content of this article.
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Rappange, D.R., van Baal, P.H.M., van Exel, N.J.A. et al. Unrelated Medical Costs in Life-Years Gained. Pharmacoeconomics 26, 815–830 (2008). https://doi.org/10.2165/00019053-200826100-00003
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2165/00019053-200826100-00003