Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
Return on investment of public health interventions: a systematic review. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health [PubMed] Published 29th March 2017
Cost-effectiveness analysis in the context of public health is tricky. Often the health benefits are small at the individual level and the returns to investment might be cross-sectoral. Lots of smart people believe that spending on public health is low in proportion to other health spending. Here we have a systematic review of studies reporting cost-benefit ratios (CBR) or return on investment (ROI) estimates for public health interventions. The stated aim of the paper is to demonstrate the false economy associated with cuts to public health spending. 52 titles were included from a search that identified 2957. The inclusion and exclusion criteria are not very clear, with some studies rejected on the basis of ‘poor generalisability to the UK’. There’s a bit too much subjectivity sneaking around in the methods for my liking. Results for CBR and ROI estimates are presented according to local or national level and grouped by ‘specialism’. From all studies, the median CBR was 8.3 and the median ROI was 14.3. As we might have suspected, public health interventions are cost-saving in a big way. National health protection and legislative interventions offered the greatest return on investment. While there is wide variation in the results, all specialism groupings showed a positive return on average. I don’t doubt the truth of the study’s message – that cuts to public health spending are foolish. But the review doesn’t really demonstrate what the authors want it to demonstrate. We don’t know what (if any) disinvestment is taking place with respect to the interventions identified in the review. The results presented in the study represent a useful reference point for discussion and further analysis, but they aren’t a sufficient basis for supporting general increases in public health spending. That said, the study adds to an already resounding call and may help bring more attention to the issue.
Acceptable health and priority weighting: discussing a reference-level approach using sufficientarian reasoning. Social Science & Medicine Published 27th March 2017
In some ways, the moral principle of sufficiency is very attractive. It acknowledges a desire for redistribution from the haves to the have-nots and may also make for a more manageable goal than all-out maximisation. It may also be particularly useful in specific situations, such as evaluating health care for the elderly, for whom ‘full health’ is never achievable and not a meaningful reference point. This paper presents a discussion of the normative issues at play, drawing insights from the distributive justice literature. We’re reminded of the fair innings argument as a familiar sufficientarian flavoured allocation principle. The sufficientarian approach is outlined in contrast to egalitarianism and prioritarianism. Strict sufficientarian value weighting is not a good idea. If we suppose a socially ‘acceptable’ health state value of 0.7, such an approach would – for example – value an improvement from 0.69 to 0.71 for one person as infinitely more valuable than an improvement from 0.2 to 0.6 for the whole population. The authors go on to outline some more relaxed sufficiency weightings, whereby improvements below the threshold are attributed a value greater than 0 (though still less than those achieving sufficiency). The sufficientarian approach alone is (forgive me) an insufficient framework for the allocation of health care resources and cannot represent the kind of societal preferences that have been observed in the literature. Thus, hybrids are proposed. In particular, a sufficientarian-prioritarian weighting function is presented and the authors suggest that this may be a useful basis for priority setting. One can imagine a very weak form of the sufficientarian approach that corresponds to a prioritarian weighting function that is (perhaps) concave below the threshold and convex above it. Still, we have the major problem of identifying a level of acceptable health that is not arbitrary. The real question you need to ask yourself is this: do you really want health economists to start arguing about another threshold?
Emotions and scope effects in the monetary valuation of health. The European Journal of Health Economics [PubMed] Published 24th March 2017
It seems obvious that emotions could affect the value people attach to goods and services, but little research has been conducted with respect to willingness to pay for health services. This study considers the relationship between a person’s self-reported fear of being operated on and their willingness to pay for risk-reducing drug-eluting stents. A sample of 1479 people in Spain made a series of choices between bare-metal stents at no cost and drug-eluting stents with some out-of-pocket cost, alongside a set of sociodemographic questions and a fear of surgery Likert scale. Each respondent provided 8 responses with 4 different risk reductions and 2 different willingness to pay ‘bids’. The authors outline what they call a ‘cognitive-emotional random utility model’ including an ’emotional shift effect’. Four different models are presented to demonstrate the predictive value of the emotion levels interacting with the risk reduction levels. The sample was split roughly in half according to whether people reported high emotion (8, 9 or 10 on the fear Likert) or low emotion (<8). People who reported more fear of being operated on were willing to pay more for risk reductions, which is the obvious result. More interesting is that the high emotion group exhibited a lower sensitivity to scope – that is, there wasn’t much difference in their valuation of the alternative magnitudes of risk reduction. This constitutes a problem for willingness to pay estimates in this group as it may prevent the elicitation of meaningful values, and it is perhaps another reason why we usually go for collective approaches to health state valuation. The authors conclude that emotional response is a bias that needs to be corrected. I don’t buy this interpretation and would tend to the view that the bias that needs correcting here is that of the economist. Emotions may be a justifiable reflection of personality traits that ought to determine preferences, at least at the individual level. But I do agree with the authors that this is an interesting field for further research if only to understand possible sources of heterogeneity in health state valuation.
Credits
Thank you for featuring our paper on ROI of PH interventions, I always enjoy reading this blog. Like you say, I think it would be good to look at the ROI for the spread of public health investments in England; the spend data for local authorities is available from DCLG and categorises it into drug and alcohol, smoking, health protection etc, so it may be possible to start to do this.
Ooh, that would indeed be good! If nobody has yet looked at these data over time and compared them with PHE’s key performance indicators then you have yourself a new project.