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.
Spatial competition and quality: evidence from the English family doctor market. Journal of Health Economics [RePEc] Published 17th October 2019
Researchers will never stop asking questions about the role of competition in health care. There’s a substantial body of literature now suggesting that greater competition in the context of regulated prices may bring some quality benefits. But with weak indicators of quality and limited generalisability, it isn’t a closed case. One context in which evidence has been lacking is in health care beyond the hospital. In the NHS, an individual’s choice of GP practice is perhaps the context in which quality can be observed and choice most readily (and meaningfully) exercised. That’s where this study comes in. Aside from the horrible format of a ‘proper economics’ paper (where we start with spoilers and climax with robustness tests), it’s a good read.
The study relies on a measure of competition based on the number of rival GPs within a 2km radius. Number of GPs, that is, rather than number of practices. This is important, as the number of GPs per practice has been increasing. About 75% of a practice’s revenues are linked to the number of patients registered, wherein lies the incentive to compete with other practices for patients. And, in this context, research has shown that patient choice is responsive to indicators of quality. The study uses data for 2005-2012 from all GP practices in England, making it an impressive data set.
The measures of quality come from the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) and the General Practice Patient Survey (GPPS) – the former providing indicators of clinical quality and the latter providing indicators of patient experience. A series of OLS regressions are run on the different outcome measures, with practice fixed effects and various characteristics of the population. The models show that all of the quality indicators are improved by greater competition, but the effect is very small. For example, an extra competing GP within a 2km radius results in 0.035% increase in the percentage of the population for whom the QOF indicators have been achieved. The effects are a little stronger for the patient satisfaction indicators.
The paper reports a bunch of important robustness checks. For instance, the authors try to test whether practices select their locations based on the patient casemix, finding no evidence that they do. The authors even go so far as to test the impact of a policy change, which resulted in an exogenous increase in the number of GPs in some areas but not others. The main findings seem to have withstood all the tests. They also try out a lagged model, which gives similar results.
The findings from this study slot in comfortably with the existing body of research on the role of competition in the NHS. More competition might help to achieve quality improvement, but it hardly seems worthy of dedicating much effort or, importantly, much expense to the cause.
Worth living or worth dying? The views of the general public about allowing disabled children to die. Journal of Medical Ethics [PhilPapers] [PubMed] Published 15th October 2019
Recent years have seen a series of cases in the UK where (usually very young) children have been so unwell and with such a severe prognosis that someone (usually a physician) has judged that continued treatment is not warranted and that the child should be allowed to die. These cases have generated debate and outrage in the media. But what do people actually think?
This study recruited members of the public in the UK (n=130) to an online panel and asked about the decisions that participants would support. The survey had three parts. The first part set out six scenarios of hospitalised infants, which varied in terms of the infants’ physical and sensory abilities, cognitive capacity, level of suffering, and future prospects. Some of the cases approximated real cases that have received media coverage, and the participants were asked whether they thought that withdrawing treatment was justified in each case. In the second part of the survey, participants were asked about the factors that they believed were important in making such decisions. In the third part, participants answered a few questions about themselves and answered the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale.
The authors set up the concept of a ‘life not worth living’, based on the idea that net future well-being is ‘negative’, and supposing the individual’s own judgement were they able to provide it. In the first part of the survey, 88% indicated that life would be worse than death in at least one of the cases. In such cases, 65% thought that treatment withdrawal was ethically obligatory, while 33% thought that either decision was acceptable. Pain was considered the most important factor in making such decisions, followed by the presence of pleasure. Perhaps predictably for health economists familiar with the literature, about 42% of people thought that resources should be considered in the decision, while 40% thought they shouldn’t.
The paper includes an extensive discussion, with plenty of food for thought. In particular, it discusses the ways in which the findings might inform the debate between the ‘zero line view’, whereby treatment should be withdrawn at the point where life has no benefit, and the ‘threshold view’, which establishes a grey zone of ethical uncertainty, in which either decision is ethically acceptable. To some extent, the findings of this study support the need for a threshold approach. Ethical questions are rarely black and white.
How is the trade-off between adverse selection and discrimination risk affected by genetic testing? Theory and experiment. Journal of Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published 1st October 2019
A lot of people are worried about how knowledge of their genetic information could be used against them. The most obvious scenario is one in which insurers increase premiums – or deny coverage altogether – on the basis of genetic risk factors. There are two key regulatory options in this context – disclosure duty, whereby individuals are obliged to tell insurers about the outcome of genetic tests, or consent law, whereby people can keep the findings to themselves. This study explores how people behave under each of these regulations.
The authors set up a theoretical model in which individuals can choose whether to purchase a genetic test that can identify them as being either high-risk or low-risk of developing some generic illness. The authors outline utility functions under disclosure duty and consent law. Under disclosure duty, individuals face a choice between the certainty of not knowing their risk and receiving pooled insurance premiums, or a lottery in which they have to disclose their level of risk and receive a higher or lower premium accordingly. Under consent law, individuals will only reveal their test results if they are at low risk, thus securing lower premiums and contributing to adverse selection. As a result, individuals will be more willing to take a test under consent law than under disclosure duty, all else equal.
After setting out their model (at great length), the authors go on to describe an experiment that they conducted with 67 economics students, to elicit preferences within and between the different regulatory settings. The experiment was set up in a very generic way, not related to health at all. Participants were presented with a series of tasks across which the parameters representing the price of the test and the pooled premium were varied. All of the authors’ hypotheses were supported by the experiment. More people took tests under consent law. Higher test prices reduce the number of people taking tests. If prices are high enough, people will prefer disclosure duty. The likelihood that people take tests under consent law is increasing with the level of adverse selection. And people are very sensitive to the level of discrimination risk under disclosure duty.
It’s an interesting study, but I’m not sure how much it can tell us about genetic testing. Framing the experiment as entirely unrelated to health seems especially unwise. People’s risk preferences may be very different in the domain of real health than in the hypothetical monetary domain. In the real world, there’s a lot more at stake.
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