Putting different price tags on the same health condition: Re-evaluating the well-being valuation approach

Nattavudh Powdthavee and Bernard van den Berg

Journal of Health Economics, 2011, vol. 30, issue 5, 1032-1043

Abstract: Many recent writings in health policy have proposed that health be valued directly and in monetary terms using the new well-being valuation method. Yet there is no clear consensus on what the best measure of individual's experience may be for the evaluation process. To shed light on this issue, monetary values for a number of health problems are compared across different well-being measures within the same UK data set. We find that, whilst there is strong internal consistency of health impacts within each well-being measure, hugely different monetary valuations are obtained for the same health problem across different well-being measures. Our results, although should only viewed as illustrative, call for economists to rethink about which measure of well-being or experienced utility to be used in the well-being valuation method, should the approach ever be implemented in real policy contexts.

Keywords: Well-being; Compensation variations; Monetary valuations; Happiness; Health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H8 I18 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (75)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629611000713
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Putting Different Price Tags on the Same Health Condition: Re-evaluating the Well-Being Valuation Approach (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:30:y:2011:i:5:p:1032-1043

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2011.06.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().