Attributes of health; measurement of health; value of health;
value of life; value of avoiding risk of ill-health; utility measures of health-related quality of life; stated and revealed preference methods of measuring willingness to pay; conjoint analysis.
It is a contentious issue in philosophy whether an omission can be the cause of an event. At the very least it seems we should consider causation by omission differently from ‘ordinary’ causation. Consider Sarah McGrath’s example. Billy promised Alice to… Read More »Are we estimating the effects of health care expenditure correctly?
Social scientists, especially economists, are concerned with causal inference: understanding whether and how an event causes a certain effect. Typically, we subscribe to the view that causal relations are reducible to sets of counterfactuals, and we use ever more sophisticated… Read More »Transformative treatments: a big methodological challenge for health economics
As alluded to in yesterday’s journal round-up, on reading a recent article by Versteegh and Brouwer, I have had some thoughts about the way we think about the the debate between the use of either patient or public preferences for… Read More »Public or patient preferences: ex ante, ex post… extraneous?
The poor state of public economics communication has been decried in many fora. The consensus of economists regarding issues such as the impacts of austerity, leaving the European Union, and other major policy choices, is in general poorly communicated to the public. With… Read More »PrEP: A story in desperate need of health economics communication
In the last journal round up, we featured a paper that found that gains to life were valued higher than gains to consumption under standard assumptions about preferences. This sounds like one of those common sense things that are touted… Read More »Three arguments in favour of a negative social discount rate
I stand accused. Not of a particularly heinous crime, but of something that has given me pause for thought recently. During a discussion about a piece of work involving patient outcomes, I was accused of ‘thinking like an economist’. Had… Read More »Do economists care about patients?
The next #HEJC discussion will take place Friday 24th October, at 1pm London time on Twitter. To see what this means for your time zone visit Time.is or join the Facebook event. For more information about the Health Economics Journal… Read More »#HEJC for 24/10/2014
Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life Hardcover, 256 pages, ISBN: 9780241003107, published 28 August 2014 Amazon / Google Books / Allen Lane Many economists balk at the mention of happiness research. I consider myself a sceptic. But people… Read More »Review: Happiness by Design (Paul Dolan)
The use of labour market outcomes in the Value Based Pricing scheme is inconsistent with the concept of value This year, the Department of Health in the UK will begin using a new system of ‘value based pricing’ (VBP) to… Read More »The ‘value’ in value based pricing
Everybody’s talking about screening again, with good reason. Research seems to suggest that screening for breast cancer, using mammography, is not effective (let alone cost-effective). Here I present a view on the value of screening; the validity of which I… Read More »A comment on the value of screening