What is a reasonable price for society to pay to give a patient with cancer 1 extra year of life without tumor growth?
Certainly not $2.2 million. According to Almutairi and colleagues,1 this is how much it would cost to add 1 good year of progression-free survival to a patient’s life using talimogene laherparepvec plus ipilimumab. The authors make a valuable contribution by rigorously applying the tools of cost-effectiveness analysis to understand whether novel but expensive treatments are really worth pursuing. The analysis suggests 3 important conclusions.