The findings suggest that government funding of universal free lunches for children in infant school in England may be more productive – and more cost-effective – if spent on breakfasts clubs instead.
The report said it would be more cost-effective to spend money on needle exchange programs and preventing infections among newborns than developing tests to screen for tainted blood, which can be very expensive.
When many of these patients, predictably, become addicts, is it really cost-effective to spend millions of dollars prosecuting physicians like Stephen Schneider, who treat the Medicaid patients whom all the other doctors have turned away?
Despite the waiting lists for treatment, there are sound medical reasons for closing wards: many operations no longer require a stay in hospital and it is often more cost-effective to spend any money saved in GPs' surgeries.
One major topic for discussion should be whether it is cost-effective to spend the money to bury power lines underground, he said, and therefore avoid costly disasters later when wind-blown trees or ice bring down lines above ground.
If we assume a hypothetical VAP cost of £10,000, then with a VAP rate of 8% and an RRR of 45%, it is cost-effective to spend up to £360.
Furthermore, even for an ICU with a VAP rate of only 4% and an intervention that reduces VAP by just 25%, it is still cost-effective to spend up to £100 per 10 days of MV.
As people get richer and richer, it gets harder and harder to think of cost-effective ways of spending the marginal dollar on amusing yourself.
Donovan et al. [ 21] found no significant difference in recruitment rates between urology consultants and nurses for a prostate cancer RCT and calculated that nurses were more cost-effective recruiters, despite spending longer on average with each patient.
And if the goal is longer and healthier lives, is that the most cost-effective way to spend public money?
