Ethics and Health Technology Assessment (HTA): concerning difficulties for their integration

Ethics have always been considered an integral part of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) processes, because the assessment of ethical consequences related to the use of health technologies represents one of the fundamental objectives of this research sector, according to the criterion for assessments of safety and efficacy, as well as economic, organizational, socio-cultural and legal impact. These statements of intent have not corresponded to an effective performance in practice: ethics has not had much space in HTA and only rarely have ethical analyses found a place in these reports. A number of hypotheses have been presented, defining the reasons for the difficulty of integrating ethics into HTA. This article intends to argue about the hypothesis, according to which, besides the basic failure of integrating ethics into the HTA, there also exists, above all, an epistemological type problem