Cost Benefit Analysis - A Tool In The Hands of A Planned Economy

It should seem common sense that something is wrong with an economic order when it is plagued with inflation and blunts in innovation. Hayek writes in Use of Knowledge,

prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coordinate the parts of his plan

What is chiefly wrong with health care? To what shall we owe its sickening inflation and its frailty of innovation. When we perform cost benefit analysis we take macrostatistical values that may or may not apply to our population of interest. We then assess their impact on a subjective score of quality of life determine through surveys. Then we crunch those numbers through a simulator through which we input prices. Mind you we assume these prices will not fluctuate through our 10 year horizon. Then we finally discover that magical incremental cost effectiveness ratio. This number tells us that introduction of a medication, procedure or diagnostic test is worthy of its cost. We use these methods to allocate resources on behalf of the whole. We decide what medications are right for others given our estimation of their quality of life. This is none other than a planned economy.