 Balancing health and financial protection in health benefit package designKatherine T. Lofgren, David A. Watkins, Solomon T. Memirie, Joshua A. Salomon and Stéphane Verguet Health Economics, 2021, vol. 30, issue 12, 3236-3247 Abstract: Policymakers face difficult choices over which health interventions to publicly finance. We developed an approach to health benefits package design that accommodates explicit tradeoffs between improvements in health and provision of financial risk protection (FRP). We designed a mathematical optimization model to balance gains in health and FRP across candidate interventions when publicly financed. The optimal subset of interventions selected for inclusion was determined with bi‐criterion integer programming conditional on a budget constraint. The optimal set of interventions to publicly finance in a health benefits package varied according to whether the objective for optimization was population health benefits or FRP. When both objectives were considered jointly, the resulting optimal essential benefits package depended on the weights placed on the two objectives. In the Sustainable Development Goals era, smart spending toward universal health coverage is essential. Mathematical optimization provides a quantitative framework for policymakers to design health policies and select interventions that jointly prioritize multiple objectives with explicit financial constraints. Date: 2021 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:30:y:2021:i:12:p:3236-3247 Access Statistics for this article Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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