| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w0612 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 0612 |
| The Choice of Health Policies with Heterogeneous Populations | |
| Richard J. Zeckhauser; Donald S. Shepard | |
| 发表日期 | 1980-12-01 |
| 出版年 | 1980 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Deciding whether to fund a given health program involves both statistical and ethical issues. Traditional statistical methods of measuring program effectiveness may give misleading results unless careful attention is paid to the question of population heterogeneity. Even within particular age and sex categories, members of a population typically differ in both their mortality rate and the extent to which they would benefit from a given medical intervention. It may or may not be possible to identify the risk factors (e. g., weight, smoking behavior) that explain these differences. If an intervention confers unequal benefit on different risk groups, it will change their mixture within the population over time. If those helped most are those at greatest risk, a "traditional assessment" will overstate intervention benefits. Greater accuracy can be achieved through a "standardized assessment, " which calculates intervention benefits separately for each distinctive risk group of the population. For example, a traditional assessment of pneumococcal pneumonia vaccine probably overstates program benefits and underestimates costs. Failure to recognize population heterogeneity also creates pitfalls in interpreting the results of clinical trials of new drugs, as illustrated by the example of sulfinpyrazone. As more sophisticated statistical methods improve our understanding of differential program benefits, they will also raise ethical problems. Use of a standardized assessment, for instance, may make it clear that it is cost-effective to give an intervention to certain groups (e.g., nonsmokers, the elderly) but not others. Considering this problem from an "original position" may reveal an ethically acceptable basis for making such decisions on the basis of efficiency. We believe that if people were unaware of which risk group they themselves would fall into, they would elect to allocate resources according to the principle of cost-effectiveness. |
| 主题 | Public Economics ; Labor Economics |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w0612 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/557810 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Richard J. Zeckhauser,Donald S. Shepard. The Choice of Health Policies with Heterogeneous Populations. 1980. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w0612.pdf（818KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
除非特别说明，本系统中所有内容都受版权保护，并保留所有权利。
