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Rita Faria’s journal round-up for 26th August 2019

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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.

Vaccine hesitancy and (fake) news: quasi‐experimental evidence from Italy. Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published 20th August 2019

Has fake news led to fewer children being vaccinated? At least in Italy, the answer seems to be yes.

It’s shocking to read that the WHO has included the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate as one of the 10 threats to global health today. And many of us are asking: why has this happened and what can we do to address it? Vincenzo Carrieri, Leonardo Madio and Francesco Principe help answer this first question. They looked at how fake news affects the take-up of vaccines, assuming that exposure to fake news is proxied by access to broadband and within a difference-in-differences framework. They found that a 10% increase in broadband coverage is associated with a 1.2-1.6% reduction in vaccination rates.

The differences-in-differences method hinges on a court ruling in 2012 that accepted that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Following the ruling, fake news about vaccines spread across the internet. In parallel, broadband coverage increased over time due to a government programme, but it varied by region, depending on the existing infrastructure and geographical conditions. Broadband coverage, by itself, cannot lead to lower vaccination rates. So it makes sense to assume that broadband coverage leads to greater exposure to fake news about vaccines, which in turn leads to lower vaccination rates.

On the other hand, it may be that greater broadband coverage and lower vaccination rates are both caused by something else. The authors wrote a good introduction to justify the model assumptions and show a few robustness checks. Had they had more space, I would have like to read a bit more about the uncertainties around the model assumptions. This is a fantastic paper and good food for thought on the consequences of fake news. Great read!

The cost-effectiveness of one-time birth cohort screening for hepatitis C as part of the National Health Service Health Check programme in England. Value in Health Published 19th August 2019

Jack Williams and colleagues looked at the cost-effectiveness of one-time birth cohort screening for hepatitis C. As hepatitis C is usually asymptomatic before reaching its more advanced stages, people may not be aware that they are infected. Therefore, they may not get tested and treated, even though treatment is effective and cost-effective.

At the level of the individual eligible for testing, the ICERs were between £8k-£31k/QALY, with lower ICERs for younger birth cohorts. The ICERs also depended on the transition probabilities for the progression of the disease, with lower ICERs if progression is faster. Extensive sensitivity and value of information analyses indicate that the key cost-effectiveness drivers are the transition probabilities, probabilities of referral and of treatment post-referral, and the quality of life benefits of being cured.

This is a great example of a good quality applied cost-effectiveness analysis. The model is well justified, the results are thoroughly tested, and the discussion is meticulous. Well done!

NICE, in confidence: an assessment of redaction to obscure confidential information in Single Technology Appraisals by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. PharmacoEconomics [PubMed] Published 27th June 2019

NICE walks a fine line between making decisions transparent and protecting confidential information. Confidential information includes commercially sensitive information (e.g. discounts to the price paid by the NHS) and academic-in-confidence information, such as unpublished results of clinical trials. The problem is that the redacted information may preclude readers from understanding NICE decisions.

Ash Bullement and colleagues reviewed NICE appraisals of technologies with an approved price discount. Their goal was to understand the extent of redactions and their consequences on the transparency of NICE decisions. Of the 171 NICE appraisals, 118 had an approved commercial arrangement and 110 had a simple price discount. The type of redacted information varied. Some did not present the ICER, others presented ICERs but not the components of the ICERs, and others did not even present the estimates of life expectancy from the model. Remarkably, the confidential discount could be back-calculated in seven NICE appraisals! The authors also looked at the academic-in-confidence redactions. They found that 68 out of 86 appraisals published before 2018 still had academic-in-confidence information redacted. This made me wonder if NICE has a process to review these redactions and disclose them once the information is in the public domain.

As Ash and colleagues rightly conclude, this review shows that there does not seem to be a consistent process for redaction and disclosure. This is a compelling paper on the practicalities of the NICE process, and with useful reflections for HTA agencies around the world. The message for NICE is that it may be time to review the process to handle sensitive information.

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Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 19th August 2019

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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.

Paying for kidneys? A randomized survey and choice experiment. American Economic Review [RePEc] Published August 2019

This paper starts with a quote from Alvin Roth about ‘repugnant transactions’, of which markets for organs provide a prime example. This idea of ‘repugnant transactions’ has been hijacked by some pop economists to represent the stupid opinions of non-economists. If you ask me, markets for organs aren’t repugnant, they just seem like a very bad idea in terms of both efficiency and equity. But it doesn’t matter what I think; it matters what the people of the United States think.

The authors of this study conducted an online survey with a representative sample of 2,666 Americans. Each respondent was randomised to evaluate one of eight systems compared with the current system. The eight systems differed with respect to i) cash or non-cash compensation of ii) different sizes ($30,000 or $100,000), iii) paid by either a public agency or the organ recipient. Participants made five binary choices that differed according to the gain – in transplants generated – associated with the new system. Half of the participants were also asked to express moral judgements.

Both the system features (e.g. who pays) and the outcomes of the new system influenced people’s choices. Broadly speaking, the results suggest that people aren’t opposed to donors being paid, but are opposed to patients paying. (Remember, we’re talking about the US here!). Around 21% of respondents opposed payment no matter what, 46% were in favour no matter what, and 18% were sensitive to the gain in the number of transplants. A 10% point increase in transplants resulted in a 2.6% point increase in support. Unsurprisingly, individuals’ moral judgements were predictive of the attitudes they expressed, particularly with respect to fairness. The authors describe their results as exhibiting ‘strong polarisation’, which is surely inevitable for questions that involve moral judgement.

Being in AER, this is a long meandering paper with extensive analyses and thoroughly reported results. There’s lots of information and findings that I can’t share here. It’s a valuable study with plenty of food for thought, but I can’t help but think that it is, methodologically, a bit weak. If we want to understand the different views in society, surely some Q methodology would be more useful than a basic online survey. And if we want to elicit stated preferences, surely a discrete choice experiment with a well-thought-out efficient design would give us more meaningful results.

Estimating local need for mental healthcare to inform fair resource allocation in the NHS in England: cross-sectional analysis of national administrative data linked at person level. The British Journal of Psychiatry [PubMed] Published 8th August 2019

The need to fairly (and efficiently) allocate NHS resources across the country played an important part in the birth of health economics in the UK, and resulted in resource allocation formulas. Since 1996 there has been a separate formula for mental health services, which is periodically updated. This study describes the work undertaken for the latest update.

The model is based on predicting service use and total mental health care costs observed in 2015 from predictors in the years 2013-2014, to inform allocations in 2019-2024. Various individual-level data sources available to the NHS were used for 43.7 million people registered with a GP practice and over the age of 20. The cost per patient who used mental health services ranged from £94 to over one million, averaging around £2,000. The predictor variables included individual indicators such as age, sex, ethnicity, physical diagnoses, and household type (e.g. number of adults and kids). The model also used variables observed at the local or GP practice level, such as the proportion of people receiving out-of-work benefits and the distance from the mental health trust. All of this got plugged into a good old OLS regression. From individual-level predictions, the researchers created aggregated indices of need for each clinical commission group (CCG).

A lot went into the model, which explained 99% of the variation in costs between CCGs. A key way in which this model differs from previous versions is that it relies on individual-level indicators rather than those observed at the level of GP practice or CCG. There was a lot of variation in the CCG need indices, ranging from 0.65 for Surrey Heath to 1.62 for Southwark, where 1.00 is the average. You’ll need to check the online appendices for your own CCG’s level of need (Lewisham: 1.52). As one might expect, the researchers observed a strong correlation between a CCG’s need index and the CCG’s area’s level of deprivation. Compared with previous models, this new model indicates a greater allocation of resources to more deprived and older populations.

Measuring, valuing and including forgone childhood education and leisure time costs in economic evaluation: methods, challenges and the way forward. Social Science & Medicine [PubMed] Published 7th August 2019

I’m a ‘societal perspective’ sceptic, not because I don’t care about non-health outcomes (though I do care less) but because I think it’s impossible to capture everything that is of value to society, and that capturing just a few things will introduce a lot of bias and noise. I would also deny that time has any intrinsic value. But I do think we need to do a better job of evaluating interventions for children. So I expected this paper to provide me with a good mix of satisfaction and exasperation.

Health care often involves a loss of leisure or work time, which can constitute an opportunity cost and is regularly included in economic evaluations – usually proxied by wages – for adults. The authors outline the rationale for considering ‘time-related’ opportunity costs in economic evaluations and describe the nature of lost time for children. For adults, the distinction is generally between paid or unpaid work and leisure time. Arguably, this distinction is not applicable to children. Two literature reviews are described. One looked at economic evaluations in the context of children’s health, to see how researchers have valued lost time. The other sought to identify ideas about the value of lost time for children from a broader literature.

The authors do a nice job of outlining how difficult it is to capture non-health-related costs and outcomes in the context of childhood. There is a handful of economic evaluations that have tried to measure and value children’s foregone time. The valuations generally focussed on the costs of childcare rather than the costs to the child, though one looked at the rate of return to education. There wasn’t a lot to go off in the non-health literature, which mostly relates to adults. From what there is, the recommendation is to capture absence from formal education and foregone leisure time. Of course, consideration needs to be given to the importance of lost time and thus the value of capturing it in research. We also need to think about the risk of double counting. When it comes to measurement, we can probably use similar methods as we would for adults, such as diaries. But we need very different approaches to valuation. On this, the authors found very little in the way of good examples to follow. More research needed.

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Brendan Collins’s journal round-up for 22nd July 2019

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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.

Making hard choices in local public health spending with a cost-benefit analysis approach. Frontiers in Public Health Published 29th June 2019

In this round-up I have chosen three papers which look broadly at public health economics.

While NHS healthcare funding has been relatively preserved in the UK (in financial terms at least, though not keeping up with demographic change), funding for local government public health departments has been cut. These departments commission early years services, smoking cessation, drug and alcohol treatment, sexual health, and lots of other services. A recent working paper suggests that marginal changes in Public Health funding produce a more favourable ICER than changes in NHS funding.

This is a neat paper looking at the cost-benefit for a subset of £14 million investment in public health programmes in Dorset, a county on the south coast of England, whose population is slightly older and more affluent than the England average. I try to go to Dorset every year, it has beautiful beaches with traditional Punch and Judy shows, and nice old towns where you can get out on a mackerel fishing trip.

This paper looks at the potential financial savings for each public health programme across different sectors of the economy. One of the big issues with public health as opposed to clinical interventions is the cross sector flow problem – you spend money on drug and alcohol treatment, but the majority of benefits are through prevented crime; or you prevent teenage pregnancy, and a lot of the benefits are to the welfare system (because women delay pregnancy until they are more likely to be in a stable relationship and working). This makes it hard when local councillors might say, ‘what’s in it for us?’

Figure 2 in this paper shows the cross sector flow issue clearly – the spend comes from local authority public health, but 94% of the financial benefits are in the NHS.

I think this study has a good blueprint that other local authorities could follow. The study applies an optimism bias reduction, so it is not just assuming that programmes will be as effective as the research evidence suggests. This is important as there may be a big drop off in effectiveness when something is implemented locally. Of course, sometimes local implementation might be more effective. But it would be nice to see this kind of study carried out with more real-world data. Although the optimism bias reduction makes it less likely to overestimate the cost-benefit, it doesn’t necessarily make the estimate any more precise. National outcomes data collection for public health programmes is weak or absent; better data collection might mean more evidence that prevention interventions provide value for money.

Impact of sugar‐sweetened beverage taxes on purchases and dietary intake: systematic review and meta‐analysis. Obesity Reviews [PubMed] Published 19th June 2019

A lot of health economics focuses on healthcare interventions. But, upstream, structural policy interventions have the capacity to be a lot more cost effective in preventing ill health. Sugary drinks (sugar sweetened beverages – SSBs) are a source of excess empty calories and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and early death. One of the first pieces of work I did as a grown-up academic was looking at a sugary drinks tax, which resulted in me getting up early one day and seeing this. At the time I thought it had roughly zero chance of being implemented. But the sugary drinks industry levy (SDIL) was implemented in the UK in April last year, and had a huge effect in terms of motivating the industry to reformulate below the thresholds of 5g and 8g of sugar per 100ml. Milk-based drinks like Frijj and Yazoo are exempt and still often have nearly 10g sugar per 100ml so there has been talk of extending the tax to these drinks. But Boris Johnson, the likely next UK Prime Minister, has come out against these ‘nanny state’ ‘sin taxes’ and said he will review them, seemingly despite there being a large scale evaluation of the SDIL, and a growing evidence base. There is a good twitter thread on this by Adam Briggs here.

Policies like the SDIL rely on price elasticity of demand (PED). But this PED varies depending, for instance, on how addictive something is and the availability of substitutes. For tobacco, because it is addictive, a 10% price increase might only produce a 5% reduction in demand.

This systematic review and meta-analysis looked at data from 17 studies in 6 jurisdictions and found that, on average, sugar consumption is unit elastic – a 10% price increase produces a 10% reduction in purchases. However, there was considerable variation between studies. The authors designed a bespoke risk of bias tool for this, as the traditional tools used for health interventions did not include all of the potential biases for an SSB tax evaluation; this checklist may be useful for future analyses of similar policies.

If the SSB duty produced a unit elastic response in the UK, it means that people aren’t spending more on SSBs, they are merely buying less of something that they don’t need and which damages their health. And maybe a few people, over many years, consume a bit less sugar, don’t get type 2 diabetes, don’t have to give up work, and are actually better off and can provide for their families for a bit longer. Of course, in the UK the picture is complex because of the different tiers of the duty, but reformulation has meant that people are consuming less sugar even if they don’t reduce their sugary drink consumption. Also, the revenue from the SDIL is spent on healthier schools, so it could be argued that the policy is a win-win.

The cost of not breastfeeding: global results from a new tool. Health Policy & Planning [PubMed] Published 24th June 2019

This study looks at the potential worldwide cost savings if breastfeeding rates were improved. Breastfeeding prevents cases of diarrhoea, obesity, maternal cancer, and other diseases and adverse outcomes. Low breastfeeding rates are a big problem in developing countries where formula costs a huge proportion of income (nearly 20% of average household income in India and Pakistan according to this paper) and water supplies may be contaminated. This study includes healthcare costs, and economic losses from early deaths and reduced IQ through sub-optimal breastfeeding, which total $341 billion per year worldwide.

The authors have said there is also going to be an online, and Excel-based, results tool.

I love reading such ambitious studies that cover the whole world. Producing worldwide estimates for costs is a difficult exercise and can have a danger of losing meaning. For instance, in developing countries, medical costs may be very low if health coverage is very sparse. If a country doesn’t spend anything on healthcare and you measure public health interventions in healthcare cost savings, then it looks like these public health interventions are not worth doing. That is why it is sometimes better to focus on DALYs (and potentially put a financial value on them, although this can be controversial) rather than financial costs. The study found the biggest absolute costs of not breastfeeding were in North America ($115bn), while biggest costs as a proportion of gross national income (GNI) were for sub-Saharan Africa, where not breastfeeding cost 2.6% of GNI.

It looks like two out of the three authors are men. Is there a problem with men being pro-breastfeeding? Why should a man tell women what to do with their bodies? Women shouldn’t feel stigmatised about their infant feeding choices. But for me it is not about telling women what to do. It is making sure the structures and social norms are there to support breastfeeding and that formula companies are regulated in how they market themselves and their products. Maybe men not caring enough about breastfeeding is what has got us to where we are now. 

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