Willingness to pay for publicly-provided goods. A possible measure of benefit?

The results presented in this paper arise from a U.K.-based study aimed at determining peoples' willingness to pay for two publicly-provided goods, namely continuing-care for elderly people in either hospital or National Health Service (NHS) nursing homes. Seventy-one per cent of respondents provided evaluations which could contribute to the analysis which showed that the group which preferred NHS nursing-home care could potentially compensate the group which preferred hospital care and still remain better off, thus rendering NHS nursing-home care the efficient option to undertake. No variable could be found which discriminated between those who could place a value on both types of care and those who could not. The willingness-to-pay methodology is very experimental in this context and should be investigated thoroughly before its widespread adoption in the evaluation of health care techniques.