Hello - it's your friendly neighborhood health economist (and I have worked on a topic adjacent to ECMO machines). ECMO is unambiguously cost effective (even a

Hello - it's your friendly neighborhood health economist (and I have worked on a topic adjacent to ECMO machines). ECMO is unambiguously cost effective (even at US prices!) for the infant. (I'm not defending US prices - needless to say if anything is cost effective at US prices it's passed the hardest cost effectiveness test.) It's also cost effective (even at US prices) for the older patient. Honestly the cited figure of $213,000 is nothing compared to the value of a statistical life (for the infant) or a bit under half of one (for the adult) There should be more of these machines and they should be in wider use. The possible impact on heart attack mortality alone is enough to justify wider investment and exploratory use more broadly, even if the precise effects end up being smaller than that's cited in the article. This is a great example of technological change pushing the boundaries of what's possible in health care. (And frankly... even though I am not defending US health care prices, a high price for this new technology is exactly the kind of signal you want to send to entrepreneurial types, several of whom appear in the article. If ECMO can be taken out of the ICU (by some future version of the machine) that seems highly likely to generate huge benefits.) Sure, there are some moral issues to be worked out. Those issues would be much better worked out while a bunch of patients who would otherwise died are plugged into ECMO machines...