Some problems with cost-benefit analysis in health care

...Arnold's article is very ambitious. He suggests rules that could be followed in order to decide whether health care should be rationed. He notes that explicit assessments of costs and benefits using the same monetary unit are rarely used. The main reason, it seems to me, is that the method of cost-benefit analysis is relatively difficult to apply in the context of health care. Arnold does not address the difficulties that are related to his approach. Thus, my impression is that the interest of his provocative article lies more in its ability to foster a useful debate than in the methodology itself. In this brief commentary, I will merely list some of the theoretical problems that occurred to me while reading this article....