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.
End-of-life healthcare expenditure: testing economic explanations using a discrete choice experiment. Journal of Health Economics Published 7th June 2018
People incur a lot of health care costs at the end of life, despite the fact that – by definition – they aren’t going to get much value from it (so long as we’re using QALYs, anyway). In a 2007 paper, Gary Becker and colleagues put forward a theory for the high value of life and high expenditure on health care at the end of life. This article sets out to test a set of hypotheses derived from this theory, namely: i) higher willingness-to-pay (WTP) for health care with proximity to death, ii) higher WTP with greater chance of survival, iii) societal WTP exceeds individual WTP due to altruism, and iv) societal WTP may exceed individual WTP due to an aversion to restricting access to new end-of-life care. A further set of hypotheses relating to the ‘pain of risk-bearing’ is also tested. The authors conducted an online discrete choice experiment (DCE) with 1,529 Swiss residents, which asked respondents to suppose that they had terminal cancer and was designed to elicit WTP for a life-prolonging novel cancer drug. Attributes in the DCE included survival, quality of life, and ‘hope’ (chance of being cured). Individual WTP – using out-of-pocket costs – and societal WTP – based on social health insurance – were both estimated. The overall finding is that the hypotheses are on the whole true, at least in part. But the fact is that different people have different preferences – the authors note that “preferences with regard to end-of-life treatment are very heterogeneous”. The findings provide evidence to explain the prevailing high level of expenditure in end of life (cancer) care. But the questions remain of what we can or should do about it, if anything.
Valuation of preference-based measures: can existing preference data be used to generate better estimates? Health and Quality of Life Outcomes [PubMed] Published 5th June 2018
The EuroQol website lists EQ-5D-3L valuation studies for 27 countries. As the EQ-5D-5L comes into use, we’re going to see a lot of new valuation studies in the pipeline. But what if we could use data from one country’s valuation to inform another’s? The idea is that a valuation study in one country may be able to ‘borrow strength’ from another country’s valuation data. The author of this article has developed a Bayesian non-parametric model to achieve this and has previously applied it to UK and US EQ-5D valuations. But what about situations in which few data are available in the country of interest, and where the country’s cultural characteristics are substantially different. This study reports on an analysis to generate an SF-6D value set for Hong Kong, firstly using the Hong Kong values only, and secondly using the UK value set as a prior. As expected, the model which uses the UK data provided better predictions. And some of the differences in the valuation of health states are quite substantial (i.e. more than 0.1). Clearly, this could be a useful methodology, especially for small countries. But more research is needed into the implications of adopting the approach more widely.
Can a smoking ban save your heart? Health Economics [PubMed] Published 4th June 2018
Here we have another Swiss study, relating to the country’s public-place smoking bans. Exposure to tobacco smoke can have an acute and rapid impact on health to the extent that we would expect an immediate reduction in the risk of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) if a smoking ban reduces the number of people exposed. Studies have already looked at this effect, and found it to be large, but mostly with simple pre-/post- designs that don’t consider important confounding factors or prevailing trends. This study tests the hypothesis in a quasi-experimental setting, taking advantage of the fact that the 26 Swiss cantons implemented smoking bans at different times between 2007 and 2010. The authors analyse individual-level data from Swiss hospitals, estimating the impact of the smoking ban on AMI incidence, with area and time fixed effects, area-specific time trends, and unemployment. The findings show a large and robust effect of the smoking ban(s) for men, with a reduction in AMI incidence of about 11%. For women, the effect is weaker, with an average reduction of around 2%. The evidence also shows that men in low-education regions experienced the greatest benefit. What makes this an especially nice paper is that the authors bring in other data sources to help explain their findings. Panel survey data are used to demonstrate that non-smokers are likely to be the group benefitting most from smoking bans and that people working in public places and people with less education are most exposed to environmental tobacco smoke. These findings might not be generalisable to other settings. Other countries implemented more gradual policy changes and Switzerland had a particularly high baseline smoking rate. But the findings suggest that smoking bans are associated with population health benefits (and the associated cost savings) and could also help tackle health inequalities.
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