Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Let’s say you have a new health care treatment. How much is someone willing to pay for it? One way to find out is with a first price sealed-bid auction. In this type of auction, you ask people how much they pay and if they have the highest bid, they get the item. In this…
Health Economists often use the cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) metric to answer this question. QALYs are used to measure not only the additional years of life from a treatment, but also the quality of life. For instance, you may prefer to live 1 year in perfect health to two years in a coma.…
Many health economists wonder how much individuals would be willing to pay for a treatment. Since most medical care is paid by third parties (i.e. private insurance companies or the government) we can not use revealed preference econometrics which has been used in other areas of economics. Instead, many economists ask individuals directly these valuation…
Health economists, policy makers, physicians and public health officials all want to maximize the well-being of society. These groups evaluate different medical treatments or public health interventions and then determine if the benefit is worth the cost. In an opinion piece by Dorte Gyrd-Hansen in Pharmacoeconomics (2005), two schools of thought are examined. Those who…