In essence, CEA considers only health-related measures of benefit to be relevant. This has
led Kenkel (1997) to conclude, “when we accept the methodology of welfare economics,
we should use CBA, not CEA”. Nonetheless, this has not prevented economists from at-
tempting to link CEA with CBA. Such a link would be appealing to many economists since
the results from the ever-increasing number of CEAs could be interpreted within a standard
welfare economic framework. Johannesson (1995) has argued that where CEA counts all
societal costs and uses a cost-per-QALY threshold, it can be interpreted as a CBA since
the threshold value can be used to translate the non-monetary benefits in CEA into mon-
etary terms for CBA. To do this, there must be a constant Willingness-to-pay (WTP) per
QALY. There have been two main attempts to set out the conditions under which this will
hold.