To be or not to be: Future lives in economic evaluation
区分了“必要”与“潜在”未来生命，主张在健康技术评估中只纳入前者，以解决当前指南的悖论，并改变若干干预措施的成本效果。
Sometimes healthcare will affect the health of people living in the future, or their chance of coming into existence. Should such outcomes be valued in health-economic evaluation? Guidelines implicitly recommend their inclusion but this rule has counterintuitive implications and is not consistently applied in practice. We suggest making a distinction between "necessary" and "potential" future lives in Health Technology Assessment. Necessary lives will exist independent of our healthcare choices and should be included. Potential lives are choice-dependent and should be excluded. This rule offers intuitive solutions within the HTA framework, and it changes the cost-effectiveness of several interventions where necessary future lives are affected.