COMPARIZON OF EQUITY WEIGHTS OF LIFE YEAR GAINS: A DISCRETE CHOICE EXPERIMENT FOR JAPANESE AND KOREAN GENERAL PUBLIC

Purpose: Setting priorities with limited public resources has gained heated interests worldwide. Weighting health gains differently for different groups in the population is another manner to consider equity in cost-effectiveness analysis. However, there is only a few empirical analysis eliciting general public preference. This research is to compare equity weights of Japanese and Korean.

Method(s): We conducted a web-based survey in Mar 2013 including a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to elicit general publics' equity weight for life gains of those from different groups. We selected attributes and designed this experiment following manners used in Norman(2013).  Thus, we analyzed weights according to the difference of gender, smoking status, life style, caring status, income and age.

Result(s): 1,280 Japanese and 580 Koreans completed questionnaires and were eligible for analysis. Japanese put higher weight on male (p<0.001), non-smokers (p<0.001), those with lower income (p<0.001), carer (p<0.001) and those with an expected age of death less than 45 years (p<0.001). Korean have the same patterns of preference according to income  (p<0.001), caring  (p<0.001) and smoking status (p=0.026). However, they equally consider groups from different gender (p=0.331)and age groups . For both countries, respondents tend to prefer groups with same characteristics as them.

Conclusion(s): People from two Asian developed countries with universal health insurance shows different equity weights. These may reflect the variations of cultural backgrounds and coverage of health care services.