Valuing a hypothetical cure for rheumatoid arthritis using the contingent valuation methodology: the patient perspective.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: A willingness-to-pay (WTP) survey measures the value of a given intervention in money terms. We examined the WTP of Canadian patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for a hypothetical cure for RA under private and public scenarios. The validity of the survey was explored by studying the association between WTP and variables thought to be associated with WTP and randomly-varied variables of the survey materials. METHODS: A telephone survey was carried out in a sample of 121 patients with RA from 5 rheumatologists affiliated with the McGill University Health Centre. In advance, patients had been sent a 4-page brochure providing a comprehensive description of the disease (including photos or no photos). The hypothetical cure for RA was presented through 2 scenarios: a private insurance implying an annual premium and a public coverage requiring additional income taxes. The survey included questions related to their WTP, socioeconomic status (ability to pay), general health, opinion about the performance of the healthcare system, and their opinion about the difficulty of the survey. For elicitation of WTP, patients were randomized to one of 3 payment cards. Mailed questionnaires concerning RA health status were also completed. A series of univariate comparisons and multivariate ordered logit regressions were carried out to examine the association of WTP and patient and study variables. RESULTS: Patients were willing to pay annually significantly more for the private program (mean 1190 Canadian dollars) than for the public program (mean 502 Canadian dollars). Annual WTP was associated with age, household income, site of care (private program), private health insurance, opinion about the performance of the public healthcare system (public program), and presence of brochure photos. The payment card did not affect WTP for either program. CONCLUSION: The WTP survey was well understood and accepted by the patients with RA. Although measures of RA-specific health status (e.g., Health Assessment Questionnaire) were not found to be associated with WTP, many variables thought to be associated with WTP were found to be related in the expected directions. Since WTP for the private program was higher than that for the public program, our study design did not fully capture altruistic valuations of RA patients. Thus, our estimates represent a lower bound on patients' WTP for an RA cure.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".