Willingness to pay

Abstract

W orldwide, there is a healthcare crisis arising from infinite demand for, and finite supply of, healthcare resources. This clash between supply and demand is driving the need to prioritise resource use. If the aim is to prioritise on the basis of maximising social welfare (termed allocative efficiency), then the decision makers need to be able to assign monetary values to the benefits of different therapeutic interventions. The use of willingness-to-pay studies to express health outcomes in monetary terms was the topic of a presentation by David Jones, Head of Health Economics for SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals, UK, at a recent IIR conference ^* [ London, UK; January 1997 ]