(p. xi ) Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many people for their support, advice, and encouragement. Milton Weinstein has provided wise counsel and unfailingly good mentor-ship for over 15 years. He encouraged me to undertake this project in the first place and also read an early draft and provided many good suggestions.

Jeffrey House, of Oxford University Press, provided first-rate editorial advice from the very outset. The book is greatly improved for his input and the gracious manner in which it was delivered.

The Dean’s office at the Harvard School of Public Health granted a semester-long junior faculty sabbatical, which freed me from some day-today responsibilities and provided invaluable time to devote to this effort.

This book draws upon research I have conducted over the past seven years. I am grateful for support during that time from the National Science Foundation, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

I am also thankful for specific permission to draw upon my previously published material. Sections of Chapter 4 are drawn from “Paying the Piper for Pharmacoeconomic Studies,” in Medical Decision Making, 1998. Material in Chapter 6 stems from two previous papers in Health Affairs, “The FDA’s regulation of health economic information” (2000, with Karl Claxton and Milton Weinstein) and “Evidence-based and value-based formulary guidelines” (2004). Parts of Chapters 1 and 9 are drawn from my paper (with Sue Goldie and Milton Weinstein) “Preference-based measures for economic evaluation,” in the Annual Review of Public Health (2000). Chapters 8 and 10 contain excerpts from “Why Don’t Americans Use Cost-Effectiveness Analysis?” at the American Journal of Managed Care (2004).

An outstanding team of researchers have worked to assemble and analyze the registry of cost-effectiveness analyses (www.hsph.harvard.edu/ cearegistry) upon which some of this book is drawn. I have been privileged to work with Chaim Bell, Richard Chapman, Dan Greenberg, Peijung (p. xii ) Lin, Natalia Olchanski, Mandy Patrick, Allison Rosen, Eileen Sandberg, and Pat Stone.

Dan Greenberg and Nomita Divi read drafts of the entire manuscript and gave me a great deal of valuable feedback on matters large and small. I have also benefited from conversations with others at the Harvard School of Public Health, including Norman Daniels, David Hemenway, Michelle Mello, and David Studdert.

I have profited greatly from being around many wonderful colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis over the years, including John Graham, the former director, who brought me there in the first place, and numerous others: Josh Cohen, Sue Goldie, George Gray, Jim Hammitt, Karen Kuntz, David Ropeik, and scores of talented and energetic students.

My parents, brothers, and entire extended family have always been terrifically supportive, and I thank them heartily.

Finally, I am forever indebted to my wife, Hildy, and daughters, Ariel and Anna, to whom this book is dedicated, for their endless love and patience.