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.
Ethically acceptable compensation for living donations of organs, tissues, and cells: an unexploited potential? Applied Health Economics and Health Policy [PubMed] Published 25th August 2018
Around the world, there are shortages of organs for transplantation. In economics, the debate around the need to increase organ donation can be frustratingly ignorant of ethical and distributional concerns. So it’s refreshing to see this article attempting to square concerns about efficiency and equity. The authors do so by using a ‘spheres of justice’ framework. This is the idea that different social goods should be distributed according to different principles. So, while we might be happy for brocolli and iPhones to be distributed on the basis of free exchange, we might want health to be distributed on the basis of need. The argument can be extended to state that – for a just situation to prevail – certain exchanges between these spheres of justice (e.g. health for iPhones) should never take place. This idea might explain why – as the authors demonstrate with a review of European countries – policy tends not to allow monetary compensation for organ donation.
The paper cleverly sets out to taxonomise monetary and non-monetary reimbursement and compensation with reference to individuals’ incentives and the spheres of justice principles. From this, the authors reach two key conclusions. Firstly, that (monetary) reimbursement of donors’ expenses (e.g. travel costs or lost earnings) is ethically sound as this does not constitute an incentive to donate but rather removes existing disincentives. Secondly, that non-monetary compensation could be deemed ethical.
Three possible forms of non-monetary compensation are discussed: i) prioritisation, ii) free access, and iii) non-health care-related benefits. The first could involve being given priority for receiving organs, or it could extend to the jumping of other health care waiting lists. I think this is more problematic than the authors let on because it asserts that health care should – at least in part – be distributed according to desert rather than need. The second option – free access – could mean access to health care that people would otherwise have to pay for. The third option could involve access to other social goods such as education or housing.
This is an interesting article and an enjoyable read, but I don’t think it provides a complete solution. Maybe I’m just too much of a Marxist, but I think that this – as all other proposals – fails to distribute from each according to ability. That is, we’d still expect non-monetary compensation to incentivise poorer (and on average less healthy) people to donate organs, thus exacerbating health inequality. This is because i) poorer people are more likely to need the non-monetary benefits and ii) we live in a capitalist society in which there is almost nothing that money can’t by and which is strictly non-monetary. Show me a proposal that increases donation rates from those who can most afford to donate them (i.e. the rich and healthy).
Selecting bolt-on dimensions for the EQ-5D: examining their contribution to health-related quality of life. Value in Health Published 18th August 2018
Measures such as the EQ-5D are used to describe health-related quality of life as completely and generically as possible. But there is a trade-off between completeness and the length of the questionnaire. Necessarily, there are parts of the evaluative space that measures will not capture because they are a simplification. If the bit they’re missing is important to your patient group, that’s a problem. You might fancy a bolt-on. But how do we decide which areas of the evaluative space should be more completely included in the measure? Which bolt-ons should be used? This paper seeks to provide means of answering these questions.
The article builds on an earlier piece of work that was included in an earlier journal round-up. In the previous paper, the authors used factor analysis to identify candidate bolt-ons. The goal of this paper is to outline an approach for specifying which of these candidates ought to be used. Using data from the Multi-Instrument Comparison study, the authors fit linear regressions to see how well 37 candidate bolt-on items explain differences in health-related quality of life. The 37 items correspond to six different domains: energy/vitality, satisfaction, relationships, hearing, vision, and speech. In a second test, the authors explored whether the bolt-on candidates could explain differences in health-related quality of life associated with six chronic conditions. Health-related quality of life is defined according to a visual analogue scale, which notably does not correspond to that used in the EQ-5D but rather uses a broader measure of physical, mental, and social health.
The results suggest that items related to energy/vitality, relationships, and satisfaction explained a significant part of health-related quality of life on top of the existing EQ-5D dimensions. The implication is that these could be good candidates for bolt-ons. The analysis of the different conditions was less clear.
For me, there’s a fundamental problem with this study. It moves the goals posts. Bolt-ons are about improving the extent to which a measure can more accurately represent the evaluative space that it is designed to characterise. In this study, the authors use a broader definition of health-related quality of life that – as far as I can tell – the EQ-5D is not designed to capture. We’re not dealing with bolt-ons, we’re dealing with extensions to facilitate expansions to the evaluative space. Nevertheless, the method could prove useful if combined with a more thorough consideration of the evaluative space.
Sources of health financing and health outcomes: a panel data analysis. Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published 15th August 2018
There is a growing body of research looking at the impact that health (care) spending has on health outcomes. Usually, these studies don’t explicitly look at who is doing the spending. In this study, the author distinguishes between public and private spending and attempts to identify which type of spending (if either) results in greater health improvements.
The author uses data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators for 1995-2014. Life expectancy at birth is adopted as the primary health outcome and the key expenditure variables are health expenditure as a share of GDP and private health expenditure as a share of total health expenditure. Controlling for a variety of other variables, including some determinants of health such as income and access to an improved water source, a triple difference analysis is described. The triple difference estimator corresponds to the difference in health outcomes arising from i) differences in the private expenditure level, given ii) differences in total expenditure, over iii) time.
The key finding from the study is that, on average, private expenditure is more effective in increasing life expectancy at birth than public expenditure. The author also looks at government effectiveness, which proves crucial. The finding in favour of private expenditure entirely disappears when only countries with effective government are considered. There is some evidence that public expenditure is more effective in these countries, and this is something that future research should investigate further. For countries with ineffective governments, the implication is that policy should be directed towards increasing overall health care expenditure by increasing private expenditure.
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