Putting Different Price Tags on the Same Health Condition: Re-evaluating the Well-Being Valuation Approach

Nattavudh Powdthavee and Bernard van den Berg

No 5493, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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 currently 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, while 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: compensation variations; monetary valuations; happiness; well-being; health; GHQ (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H8 I18 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2011-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-hea and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (79)

Published - published in: Journal of Health Economics, 2011, 30 (5), 1032 - 1043

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Journal Article: Putting different price tags on the same health condition: Re-evaluating the well-being valuation approach (2011)
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