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.
Euthanasia, religiosity and the valuation of health states: results from an Irish EQ5D5L valuation study and their implications for anchor values. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes [PubMed] Published 31st July 2018
Do you support euthanasia? Do you think there are health states worse than death? Are you religious? Don’t worry – I am not commandeering this week’s AHE journal round-up just to bombard you with a series of difficult questions. These three questions form the foundation of the first article selected for this week’s round-up.
The paper is based upon the hypothesis that your religiosity (“adherence to religious beliefs”) is likely to impact your support for euthanasia and, subsequently, the likelihood of you valuing severe health states as worse than death. This seems like a logical hypothesis. Religions tend to be anti-euthanasia, and so it appears likely that religious people will have lower levels of support for euthanasia than non-religious people. Equally, if you don’t support the principle of euthanasia, it stands to reason that you are likely to be less willing to choose immediate death over living in a severe health state – something you would need to do for a health state to be considered as being worse than death in a time trade-off (TTO) study.
The authors test this hypothesis using a sub-sample of data (n=160) collected as part of the Irish EQ-5D-5L TTO valuation study. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the authors find evidence in support of the above hypotheses. Those that attend a religious service weekly were more likely to oppose euthanasia than those who attend a few times a year or less, and those who oppose euthanasia were less likely to give “worse than death” responses in the TTO than those that support it.
I found this paper really interesting, as it raises a number of challenging questions. If a society is made up of people with heterogeneous beliefs regarding religion, how should we balance these in the valuation of health? If a society is primarily non-religious is it fair to apply this valuation tariff to the lives of the religious, and vice versa? These certainly aren’t easy questions to answer, but may be worth reflecting on.
E-learning and health inequality aversion: A questionnaire experiment. Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published 22nd July 2018
Moving on from the cheery topic of euthanasia, what do you think about socioeconomic inequalities in health? In my home country, England, if you are from the poorest quintile of society, you can expect to experience 62 years in full health in your lifetime, whilst if you are from the richest quintile, you can expect to experience 74 years – a gap of 12 years.
In the second paper to be featured in this round-up, Cookson et al. explore the public’s willingness to sacrifice incremental population health gains in order to reduce these inequalities in health – their level of “health inequality aversion”. This is a potentially important area of research, as the vast majority of economic evaluation in health is distributionally-naïve and effectively assumes that members of the public aren’t at all concerned with inequalities in health.
The paper builds on prior work conducted by the authors in this area, in which they noted a high proportion of respondents in health inequality aversion elicitation studies appear to be so averse to inequalities that they violate monotonicity – they choose scenarios that reduce inequalities in health even if these scenarios reduce the health of the rich at no gain to the poor, or they reduce the health of the poor, or they may reduce the health of both groups. The authors hypothesise that these monotonicity violations may be due to incomplete thinking from participants, and suggest that the quality of their thinking could be improved by two e-learning educational interventions. The primary aim of the paper is to test the impact of these interventions in a sample of the UK public (n=60).
The first e-learning intervention was an animated video that described a range of potential positions that a respondent could take (e.g. health maximisation, or maximising the health of the worst off). The second was an interactive spreadsheet-based questionnaire that presented the consequences of the participant’s choices, prior to them confirming their selection. Both interventions are available online.
The authors found that the interactive tool significantly reduced the amount of extreme egalitarian (monotonicity-violating) responses, compared to a non-interactive, paper-based version of the study. Similarly, when the video was watched before completing the paper-based exercise, the number of extreme egalitarian responses reduced. However, when the video was watched before the interactive tool there was no further decrease in extreme egalitarianism. Despite this reduction in extreme egalitarianism, the median levels of inequality aversion remained high, with implied weights of 2.6 and 7.0 for QALY gains granted to someone from the poorest fifth of society, compared to the richest fifth of society for the interactive questionnaire and video groups respectively.
This is an interesting study that provides further evidence of inequality aversion, and raises further concern about the practical dominance of distributionally-naïve approaches to economic evaluation. The public does seem to care about distribution. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that participant responses to inequality aversion exercises are shaped by the information given to them, and the way that information is presented. I look forward to seeing more studies like this in the future.
A new method for valuing health: directly eliciting personal utility functions. The European Journal of Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published 20th July 2018
Last, but not least, for this round-up, is a paper by Devlin et al. on a new method for valuing health.
The relative valuation of health states is a pretty important topic for health economists. If we are to quantify the effectiveness, and subsequently cost-effectiveness, of an intervention, we need to understand which health states are better than others, and how much better they are. Traditionally, this is done by asking members of the public to choose between different health profiles featuring differing levels of fulfilment of a range of domains of health, in order to ‘uncover’ the relative importance the respondent places on these domains, and levels. These can then be used in order to generate social tariffs that assign a utility value to a given health state for use in economic evaluation.
The authors point out that, in the modern day, valuation studies can be conducted rapidly, and at scale, online, but at the potential cost of deliberation from participants, and the resultant risk of heuristic dominated decision making. In response to this, the authors propose a new method – direct elicitation of personal utility functions, and pilot its use for the valuation of EQ-5D in a sample of the English public (n=76).
The proposed approach differs from traditional approaches in three key ways. Firstly, instead of simply attempting to infer the relative importance that participants place on differing domains based upon choices between health profiles, the respondents are asked directly about the relative importance they place on differing domains of health, prior to validating these with profile choices. Secondly, the authors place a heavy emphasis on deliberation, and the construction, rather than uncovering, of preferences during the elicitation exercises. Thirdly, a “personal utility function” for each individual is constructed (in effect a personal EQ-5D tariff), and these individual utility functions are subsequently aggregated into a social utility function.
In the pilot, the authors find that the method appears feasible for wider use, albeit with some teething troubles associated with the computer-based tool developed to implement it, and the skills of the interviewers.
This direct method raises an interesting question for health economics – should we be inferring preferences based upon choices that differ in terms of certain attributes, or should we just ask directly about the attributes? This is a tricky question. It is possible that the preferences elicited via these different approaches could result in different preferences – if they do, on what grounds should we choose one or other? This requires a normative judgment, and at present, it appears both are (potentially) as legitimate as each other.
Whilst the authors apply this direct method to the valuation of health, I don’t see why similar approaches couldn’t be applied to any multi-attribute choice experiment. Keep your eyes out for future uses of it in valuation, and perhaps beyond? It will be interesting to see how it develops.
Credits
Hi Terry!
It is worth noting that the personal utility function approach does not rely on rating scales (or indeed any other specific technique), as we point out in the Discussion section of the paper. Similar work is ongoing in New Zealand to develop personal value sets based on a series of paired comparison choice tasks – perhaps this would be more to your liking: https://bit.ly/2OhOfTa
An enjoyable and punchy comment as always Terry, great to see you back on the health economics! Just a quick comment about the roundup more generally. I think it’s important to remember that the people doing the roundups aren’t necessarily experts in the specific methods of the papers they are covering (and thus their bibliographies) – it’s just papers they’ve seen published in the past few weeks that looked interesting. So do take it easy on those doing roundups – I certainly know the majority of papers I’ve covered aren’t my specific area of expertise and I wouldn’t be able to rate their bibliographies or the underlying literature…they’re usually just something I found interesting (whether it’s a finding, or an unusual context or its tangentially related to something I’m working on). The critique is very useful though and it’s great that you’ve got the expertise here and those comments are definitely worth feeding back to the authors of the paper.
TL;DR – good critique of papers is very welcome, AHEblog authors doing their best!
re worse than death discussion: better late than never (no I won’t excuse the pun)…I enjoy AHEBLOG, you do good work, I just dislike the bibliographies of many of the featured articles.
Plus direct elicitation of individual utility functions? Do we really have to go through the whole palava of showing why people + ratings = rubbish AGAIN?! Ratings were comprehensively discredited 2 decades ago.
https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/13308/the-slang-meaning-of-seven-七-in-cantonese for amusing example – I just googled, but I once had a far more academic rigorous link to show this kinda stuff…, far more serious endemic ones are out there aplenty. Even the happiness people have acknowledged that age determines how you use rating scales! FFS you don’t even have to look outside the HEALTH literature! PNAS.
Plus as someone with considerable Irish Catholic and Protestant ancestry the issue of worse than death is a complete “dur” issue and has been since my article a decade ago….co-authored by the guy who co-proposed random utility theory (acknowledged by McFadden in his Nobel lecture) and who went on to try to work to address the “two types of people” issue until he got bored of the infighting in this field.