“QALY thresholds are inappropriate for the US health care system and ICER’s use of a QALY threshold is premature given the lack of debate in the US on society’s wiliness to pay for new treatment innovations.” – Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.
“Cost effectiveness (cost per QALY) analyses, upon which the ICER value assessment algorithm is founded, are not appropriate for assessing either vale or price of innovative medicines,” says Celgene Corp. “Value is a multi-dimensional concept and, therefore, a flexible, multi-criteria method for value assessment is required.”
“Whereas many international payers have adopted the QALY as a universal metric of health outcomes by which to analyze comparative net health benefits across different types of medical interventions, very few payers in the US use the QALY in a systematic way. In part this is because of methodological concerns about whether the QALY adequately reflects the preferences of patients for different types of health outcomes,” according to Eli Lilly & Co.
“From a methodology point of view, a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is only one measure of value and does not consider additional important aspects of a more holistic measure of value” – GlaxoSmithKline PLC
Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos. “is concerned about ICER’s unqualified embrace of the QALY concept as the metric for value assessment. … Even in countries where the QALY methodology is used by national governments for their socialized health care systems, such as the UK, Canada and Sweden, it has been recognized as having serious flaws, and those flaws may not be acceptable to the US public.”

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