The residential care facility. Indications for placement.
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OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine the relationship between a range of potentially adverse psychosocial and demographic characteristics identified in the immediate postpartum period and child physical abuse potential at 7 months. METHOD: Data collected as part of a randomized controlled trial of a nurse home visiting programme for vulnerable families with newborns was used. Women (181) were recruited in the immediate postpartum period. At 7 months, 151 participants were available for evaluation. Potential for child physical abuse was assessed using the Child Abuse Potential (CAP) Inventory. RESULTS: Significant risk indicators identified by univariate analysis were financial stress, elevated Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) scores, education level less than 10 years, concern regarding the provision of housing, and domestic violence characterized by verbal and social abuse. There was no association between child abuse potential and sole parenthood, poverty, young maternal age, history of childhood abuse, or psychiatric history. Two variables were found to be of independent significance using a logistic regression model; elevated EPDS and perceived difficulty "making ends meet." CONCLUSIONS: The findings indicate that perceived stress relating to finances, accommodation and relationships in the immediate postpartum period are associated with heightened child physical abuse potential at 7 months. Elevated EPDS in the early postpartum period is also a risk indicator. The outcome of this study suggests that perinatal assessment of child abuse risk is possible and simple and is related to perceived stressors at the time surrounding delivery. This is independent of a range of demographic variables traditionally thought to predict high risk.
In the article by Tabata and Ohkusa, they show that the insurance system set out in Liljas [Liljas, B., 1998a. The demand for health with uncertainty and insurance. Journal of Health Economics 17, 153-170.] does not have an optimal solution, and propose a new formulation. It is argued here that even though the new model works mathematically, it has a less realistic economic foundation. Furthermore, generalizing the Grossman model by making the marginal utility of income variable over time is suggested to be more relevant in the case where there are imperfect financial markets, and a simple example is provided. Overall, there seems to be room for further theoretical extensions in the demand for health literature.
This paper proves the non-existence of an optimal solution under the Liljas [Liljas, B. (1998). The demand for health with uncertainty and insurance. J. Health Econ., 17, 153-170] type of insurance. The reason for the non-existence is that the insurance induces the individual to increase his time input, relative to medical expenditure in the household production of health investment. Hence, it distorts the balance of inputs in the production of health investment. Moreover, it also distorts the household production for consumption goods through time constraints. Therefore, this paper proposes an alternative insurance that covers the time loss due to illness and has an optimal solution.
Cost Utility Analysis (CUA) and Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) are methods to evaluate allocations of health care resources. Problems are raised for both methods when income taxes do not meet the first best optimum. This paper explores the implications of three ways that taxes may fall short of this ideal. First, taxes may be distortionary. Second, they may be designed and administered without reference to information that is used by providers of health care. Finally, the share of tax revenue that is devoted to health care may be suboptimal. The two methods are amended to account for these factors.
We conducted a field experiment comparing hypothetical and real purchase decisions for a pharmacist provided asthma management program among 172 subjects with asthma. Subjects received either a dichotomous choice contingent valuation question or were given the opportunity to actually enroll in the program. Three different prices were used: US$ 15, 40, and 80. In the hypothetical group, 38% of subjects said that they would purchase the good at the stated price, but only 12% of subjects in the real group purchased the good (p = 0.000). We cannot, however, reject the null hypothesis that "definitely sure" hypothetical yes responses, as identified in a follow-up question, correspond to real yes responses. We conclude that the dichotomous choice contingent valuation method overestimates willingness to pay, but that it may be possible to correct for this overestimation by sorting out "definitely sure" yes responses.
How does the release of health plan performance ratings influence employee health plan choice? A natural experiment at General Motors (GM) Corporation provides valuable evidence on this question. During the 1997 open enrollment period, GM disseminated a health plan report card for the first time. By comparing 1996 and 1997 enrollment patterns, our analysis estimates the impact of the report card information while accounting for fixed, unobserved plan traits. Results indicate that employees are less likely to enroll in plans requiring relatively high out-of-pocket contributions. Results with respect to report card ratings suggest that individuals avoid health plans with many below average ratings.
This paper shows that when quality adjustment factors for use in constructing QALY indices are established through answers to standard-gamble questions or similar methods, the assumptions that are made by respondents about the financial consequences of changing probabilities of illness and death are critically important for the use of QALYs in cost-utility analysis (CUA). It qualifies Meltzer's [Journal of Health Economics 16 (1997) 33] result that the cost per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) for life-saving medical interventions should include the future consumption of those who would otherwise not have survived, by showing that its validity depends on how the QALY index has been established. The paper also shows that, contrary to a widely held notion, allocation of a fixed health care budget through CUA does not generally result in a second-best efficient allocation. Another finding is that failure to specify carefully what respondents to standard-gamble questions are supposed to assume about the financial consequences of ill health may result in a bias against providing care to older individuals.
Willingness-to-pay studies are increasingly being used in the evaluation of health care programmes. However, there are methodological issues that need to be resolved before the potential of willingness-to-pay can be fully exploited as a tool for the economic evaluation of health care programmes. Of particular methodological interest are the consequences of varying the order in which willingness-to-pay questions are presented to respondents in contingent valuation studies. This paper examines the possibility of ordering effects in willingness-to-pay studies in health care. That is, when asking willingness-to-pay questions about three health care programmes within a single survey, does the order the programmes are presented have an impact on the reported willingness-to-pay? Ordering effects are observed in the ranking of the programmes, in the proportion of zero values reported and in the WTP for one of the programmes. The results suggest that the best explanation for the ordering effects is one of fading glow, whereby the first programme in any sequence captures much of the utility associated with giving.
Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a recognised as the economic evaluation technique that accords most with the underlying principles of standard welfare economic theory. However, due to problems associated with the technique, economists evaluating resources allocation decisions in health care have most often used cost-effective analysis (CEA), in which health benefits are expressed in non-monetary units. As a result, attempts have been made to build a welfare economic bridge between cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA). In this paper, we develops these attempts and finds that, while assumptions can be made to facilitate a constant willingness-to-pay per unit of health outcome, these restrictions are highly unrealistic. We develop an impossibility theorem that shows it is not possible to link CBA and CEA if: (i) the axioms of expected utility theory hold; (ii) the quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) model is valid in a welfare economic sense; and (iii) illness affects the ability to enjoy consumption. We conclude that, within a welfare economic framework, it would be unwise to rely on a link between CBA and CEA in economic evaluations.
Between 1970 and 1986, all Canadian provinces introduced some version of a prescription drug subsidy for those aged 65 years or over and since 1986, all the provinces have increased copayments or deductibles to some degree. Employing a first-order approximation to the welfare gains from a subsidy, we find evidence that these subsidies have been less redistributive than an absolute per household cash transfer but slightly more redistributive than a transfer that would increase each household's income by the same percentage. Such evidence may have relevance for predicting the redistributive effects of a potential national prescription drug plan for seniors in the US.
We describe a willingness to pay (WTP) survey in which values were elicited from the public for three disparate health care programmes. Previous applications of WTP in this context have revealed a high proportion of preference reversals between WTP values and ordinal ranking of the programmes. In view of the doubts these findings raise over the use of WTP in this context, our aim was to develop a method of eliciting WTP values which we considered would improve consistency between respondents' explicit ranking of the programmes and their WTP values. Compared to the standard approach, the structure of the new design (the marginal approach) reduced the number of possible preference reversals, thus encouraging a degree of consistency among respondents. Despite this, the marginal approach did not result in fewer preference reversal being observed in actuality, thus casting doubt on the application of WTP in this context.