Notwithstanding the proposed use of Cost-Utility Analysis (CUA) to inform health care priority setting in New Zealand, to date there has been no research into New Zealanders’ valuations of health-related quality of life. This paper reports the results of a study of the health state preferences...

The EuroQol measure of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) has many purposes other than the calculation of QALYs, but it is upon that particular use that this paper concentrates. For that purpose a simple generic measure yielding a single index score for each health state is required. The...

Most decisions in public health are based on imperfect information, and this is certainly the case for dental health. Relatively little is known about the cost-effectiveness of the various options available to improve dental status. It is, however, well recognised that regular exposure to...

This paper describes three approaches to estimating confidence intervals for willingness to pay measures, the delta, Krinsky and Robb and bootstrap methods. The accuracy of the various methods is compared using a number of simulated datasets. In the majority of the scenarios considered all three...

The election of the Labour government last year shifted the issue of inequality in health to the top of the policy agenda. In its White Paper on the “New NHS”, promises were made about reducing unacceptable variations in services and ensuring fair access. Publication of the Green Paper...

Joint finance is money allocated by the Department of Health to NHS authorities to promote policies of inter-agency collaboration which prevent people being admitted to hospital or facilitate earlier discharge from hospital or save on NHS resources generally. Worries have been expressed that...

Within a horizontally differentiation model, we analyse the relative effects of reference pricing and copayment reimbursement on firms pricing and quality strategies as well as on market coverage under different market structures: competitive market, local monopolies and exogenous full market...

Ethical issues must take first place in the evaluation of a prenatal screening programme. The economic issues are less weighty but will be important in the decision as to whether a particular programme is introduced. This paper presents a critique of the published economic studies of screening...

This Discussion Paper is concerned with the development of risk-sharing systems for health, in low- and middle-income countries. It questions whether insurance theory developed in wealthier economies, in particular the central ideas of adverse selection and moral hazard, has relevance in the...

Recently the English NHS has introduced an activity-based payment scheme for secondary care - the Payment by Results (PbR) policy. In this paper we discuss, from an economic perspective, the main intended and unintended incentives created by this policy. We also outline the role of different NHS...