How should we pay for the NHS?

How should we pay for the NHS?

The question of how much we should spend on the NHS, and by what means, seems to have reached new urgency. Over the past week the BBC’s NHS Health Check series of special reports has given graphic form to a rising tide of concern, as waiting lists lengthen, increasingly sick and elderly patients queue inside and outside emergency departments, and overburdened doctors and nurses speak openly abo...

How Should We Pay for Health Care?

NICE work: how NICE decides what we should pay for.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is responsible for providing guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health in the UK. Fundamental to the decision-making process is the need to make recommendations based on the best available evidence with input from all stakeholders in a transparent and collaborative manner. 1 Health tec...

Valuing Information Using Utility Functions: How Much Should We Pay for Forecasts of Returns?

This study investigates what is an appropriate level of investment management fees. We extend existing results and provide a several formula for the case of power utility and normal returns. Using the CRRA utility function with the range of the coe¢cient of the CRRA suggested by Mehra and Prescott (1985), we ...nd that the value of information added by linear factor models of Fama and French (1...

Noninvasive ventilation for acute lung injury: how often should we try, how often should we fail?

The selection of patients with acute lung injury/acute respiratory distress syndrome (ALI/ARDS) to receive noninvasive ventilation (NIV) is challenging, partly because there are few reliable selection criteria. The study by Rana and colleagues in the previous issue of Critical Care identifies metabolic acidosis and a lower oxygenation index as predictors of NIV failure, although it is unable to...