The Review of the Selected Methods of Estimating Non-Market Costs of Human Health as a Base for Cost-Benefit Analysis of Specific Health Care Policy Measures

Economic activities in the public sector such as the construction of infrastructure facilities, undertaking comprehensive programs of measures aimed at improving human health, reducing environmental pollution, and so on-often have effects that are not only financial and commercial, but have a wide range of direct and indirect social consequences, both positive and negative, for the life of individuals and communities. These situations pose complex challenges for decision-makers who have the obligation to review, analyse, evaluate and compare all these effects, to make decisions that are optimal in terms of the best possible allocation of public resources and the achievement of the greatest benefits with the least cost. The paper presents some of the most important methods for measuring the non-market and/or non-financial effects of public investments and policies in the field of health. These methods are now widely accepted in theory, but also in the practice of a large number of countries in which very concrete decisions regarding the formulation of health policies, (e.g., the implementation of the vaccination of the widest population and alike) are made based on the application of these methods. These methods allow for remarkably diverse measures and decisions to be reduced to units of measure which ultimately could be expressed in the financial amounts, so that they can be analysed and directly compared. Monetization of the phenomenon in the field of healthcare has allowed their application to be expanded in the framework of the complex Cost Benefit Analysis cases.