Ética y Health Technology Assessment (HTA): sobre las dificultades de su integración

[Autom. eng. transl.] Ethics has always been considered an integral part of the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) processes, in the sense that the assessment of the ethical consequences related to the use of health technologies represents one of the fundamental objectives of this research sector , according to the criteria of the valuations on safety, effectiveness, economic, organizational, socio-cultural and legal impact. These statements of intent have not corresponded to effective action in practice: ethics has not had much space in the HTA and only rarely have ethical analyzes found a place in the reports. On the reasons for the difficulty of integrating ethics in the HTA a series of hypotheses has been presented. This article is intended to argue about the hypothesis, according to which, on the basis of the failure of the integration of ethics in the HTA, there is also and above all a problem of an epistemological nature.