Preference elicitation approach for measuring the willingness to pay for liver cancer treatment in Korea

BACKGROUND/AIMS The Korean government has expanded the coverage of the national insurance scheme for four major diseases: cancers, cardiovascular diseases, cerebrovascular diseases, and rare diseases. This policy may have a detrimental effect on the budget of the national health insurance agency. Like taxes, national insurance premiums are levied on the basis of the income or wealth of the insured. METHODS Using a preference elicitation method, we attempted to estimate how much people are willing to pay for insurance premiums that would expand their coverage for liver cancer treatment. RESULTS We calculated the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) through the marginal rate of substitution between the two attributes of the insurance premium and the total annual treatment cost by adopting conditional logit and mixed logit models. CONCLUSIONS The effects of various other terms that could interact with socioeconomic status were also estimated, such as gender, income level, educational attainment, age, employment status, and marital status. The estimated MWTP values of the monthly insurance premium for liver cancer treatment range from 4,130 KRW to 9,090 KRW.