Putting different price tags on the same health condition: re-evaluating the well-being valuation approach

Summary

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 no clear consensus on what the bestzndividual'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.