Thus, regulator scholars claim that NICE’s rigorous, and arguably expensive, application of economic
analyses, the use of Quality Adjusted Live Years (QALYs) as
a benefit measure and a funding threshold, derive from the
necessity to make comparisons of the cost-effectiveness of
medicines across individual disease areas—for the purpose
of establishing whether or not public money is more effectively invested in the latest cancer treatment or the latest
diabetes treatment—or in other words, to ration healthcare
[9]. In such cases, the regulatory governance perspective
asserts the internal coherence of national approaches to
HTA, denying that one can set a so-called ‘benchmark’ for
any other system.