Is waiting‐time prioritisation welfare improving?

Hugh Gravelle and Luigi Siciliani

Health Economics, 2008, vol. 17, issue 2, 167-184

Abstract: Rationing by waiting time is commonly used in health care systems with zero or low money prices. Some systems prioritise particular types of patient and offer them lower waiting times. We investigate whether prioritisation is welfare improving when the benefit from treatment is the sum of two components, one of which is not observed by providers. We show that positive prioritisation (shorter waits for patients with higher observable benefit) is welfare improving if the mean observable benefit of the patients who are indifferent about receiving the treatment is smaller than the mean observable benefit of the patients who receive the treatment. This is true (a) if the distribution of the unobservable benefit is uniform for any distribution of the observable benefit; or (b) if the distribution of the observable benefit is uniform and the distribution of the unobservable benefit is log‐concave. We also show that prioritisation is never welfare increasing if and only if the distribution of unobservable benefit is negative exponential. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.1262

Related works:
Working Paper: Is Waiting-time Prioritisation Welfare Improving? (2006)
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:wly:hlthec:v:17:y:2008:i:2:p:167-184

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.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().