As resources in health care are scarce, health authorities and other health organizations are charged with determining how best to spend limited resources. While a number of formal approaches to priority setting within health authorities have been used internationally, there has been limited...

ABSTRACT A major driver of cost growth in health care is the rapid increase in the utilisation of existing technology and not simply the adoption of new technology. Health economists and their health technology assessment colleagues have become obsessed by technology adoption questions and have...

ABSTRACT The elicitation of societal views about healthcare priority setting is an important, contemporary research area, and there are a number of studies that apply either qualitative techniques or quantitative preference elicitation methods. However, there are methodological challenges in...

This paper is concerned with the concept of process utility in health care. The paper begins by outlining the reasons why it might be important to include process utility in health care evaluation. Problems in defining process and outcome are then outlined, after which the discussion turns to...

The case against the use of willingness to pay (WTP) methods to value the benefits of publicly-provided health care is often made on the basis that WTP is associated with ability to pay. In this paper, it is demonstrated that this argument is not so straightforward, depending on two criteria:...

This paper presents the first attempt to use a discrete choice experiment to derive distributional weights for quality adjusted life years (QALYs), based on characteristics (age and severity) of the beneficiaries. A novel approach using the Hicksian compensating variation is applied. Advantages...

This paper addresses the question of how willingness to pay (WTP) values in health care evaluation can be used by policy makers. The way in which WTP values are used depends on from whom values are elicited and whether the good concerned is privately-financed or publicly-financed through...

Background: Financial protection from the risks of ill health has globally recognized importance as a principal performance goal of any health system. This type of financial protection involves minimizing catastrophic payments for healthcare and their associated impoverishing effects....

The appropriate technique for econometric analysis of WTP (willingness to pay) data is an issue which has not been addressed in many studies of WTP for health and health care. This paper argues that, whether an open-ended question or a payment scale approach is adopted, the way in which WTP is...