Health Opportunity Costs and Expert Elicitation: A Comment on Soares et al.

Soares et al. have published a valuable study on the use of expert elicitation techniques to identify elusive quantities in public policy. Their contribution may prove to be an important step in the development of robust methods to support evidence-based decision-making. The stated purpose of the structured elicitation is "to inform estimates of expected health opportunity costs in the UK NHS". The primary conclusion of the study is that the impact of expenditure in the NHS is likely to have been underestimated, such that the shadow price of a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) in the NHS is less than £12,936. In this commentary, we dispute the authors' conclusion. We outline three reasons why the findings are unlikely to provide valid inputs to a revised estimate of the opportunity cost of health care expenditures