CAUSES FOR CONCERN: IS NICE FAILING TO UPHOLD ITS RESPONSIBILITIES TO ALL NHS PATIENTS?
探讨NICE在审批新医疗技术时，因利益相关者和政治压力而可能批准效益低于成本的技术，导致NHS患者承受隐性机会成本，质疑其是否履行了对所有患者的责任。
Organisations across diverse health care systems making decisions about the funding of new medical technologies face extensive stakeholder and political pressures. As a consequence, there is quite understandable pressure to take account of other attributes of benefit and to fund technologies, even when the opportunity costs are likely exceed the benefits they offer. Recent evidence suggests that NICE technology appraisal is already approving drugs where more health is likely to be lost than gained. Also, NICE recently proposed increasing the upper bound of the cost-effectiveness threshold to reflect other attributes of benefit but without a proper assessment of the type of benefits that are expected to be displaced. It appears that NICE has taken a direction of travel, which means that more harm than good is being, and will continue to be, done, but it is unidentified NHS patients who bear the real opportunity costs.