This book is meant for practicing health professionals, health administrators, and politicians as well as for academics working with cost-effectiveness analysis and QALYs. While it offers a simple explanation of the rationale and use of economics and QALYs in informing resource allocation decisions, it also gives a comprehensive critique and reinterpretation. In some parts it thus raises issues of considerable technical complexity.

The practically oriented reader will gain most by concentrating on Chapters 1–4, the section on “whom to ask” in Chapter 5, Chapter 6, and the example of cost-value analysis given in the Annex. The untrained reader may want to save the discussion of “the quantity-of-wellness interpretation and value interpretation of utility” in Chapter 5 for a later occasion.