Improving care through health economics analyses: Cost of illness and headache (general disease costing principles)

摘要

The term 'disease costing' applies to those economic appraisal methodologies that ascertain the cost borne by a community because of a disease. The general principles that gave rise to disease costing originated from an attempt by William Petty to ascertain the social cost determined by the plague that had struck London in the second half of the seventeenth century. The method he used is commonly known as the human capital approach and allows calculation of the economic contribution to productivity of an individual. In particular, the aim of this method of appraisal is to arrive at the explicit value to be attributed to human life and, therefore, the cost in terms of loss of productivity caused by death. In a book dating back to 1699, Petty attributed to human life a value that was equal to the capital amount that, invested at a given interest rate, would have yielded an income equal to the gross domestic product divided by the total number of inhabitants. According to this British statesman, in 1676 nearly 200,000 lives might have been saved-in the most optimistic hypothesis-thanks to the progress in medicine.Attributing a minimum value of 20 pounds to human life-this being the price of a slave on the London market-Petty estimated the advantage that could have been gained in England by the developments of medicine to 4 million pounds.