Assessing the benefits of health care: how far should we go?

The application of the techniques of economic evaluation to health care is becoming increasingly commonplace. This is shown by the increasing number of published evaluations and is to be welcomed. Despite this progress, however, we believe that current economic evaluations of healthcare interventions may fail to take into account potentially important sources of benefit and disbenefit to individual patients. If this is the case then the evaluation of many healthcare technologies will be in- complete and interventions that are thought to be efficient may in fact be inefficient and vice versa.