Getting good value for the money with scarce resources is a substantial moral issue for global health. This claim may be surprising to some, since conversations on the ethics of global health often focus on moral concerns about justice, fairness, and freedom.

In this essay, philosopher Toby Ord argues that cost-effectiveness is not only an important aspect to consider, but is in fact a moral imperative. Ord notes that the difference between the most and least cost effective interventions can produce as much as 15,000 times the benefit in disability-adjusted life years. From the moral perspective, this means that hundreds, thousands, or even millions of deaths are a direct result of our inability to allocate according to maximum health gain. When few, expensive interventions consume national health budgets, a huge chunk of the potential value of the funding can be lost.

Ord argues that the health gains obtained by reallocating within the same resource envelope can be equivalent to adding more money, an important message for a community that has focused mainly on fundraising and less on optimizing impact for dollars invested. At the Center for Global Development we have recommended strengthening national and international priority-setting processes as a mechanism for considering cost-effectiveness in national health policies, and for improving the impact of each dollar spent on health.

Read the source article at Center For Global Development