The Value of Health and the Rights of Patients

Since 2007, Germany is in the process of implementing some form of cost-effectiveness analysis as a criterion for reimbursement decisions within its statutory health insurance. Neither utilitarian ethics nor health-maximizing economic approaches to health care evaluation developed in this tradition are, however, recognized as constituting as such an adequate basis for fair decisions. Notably, it is generally acknowledged that an acceptable method of evaluation must be compatible with legal non-discrimination rules or, generally, with the claim of every insured person “to be treated as an equal”.