As healthcare resources become increasingly scarce due to growing demand and stagnating budgets, the need for effective priority setting and resource allocation will become ever more critical to providing sustainable care to patients. While societal values should certainly play a part in guiding these processes, the methodology used to capture these values need not necessarily be limited to mul...

Universal health coverage (UHC) is high on the global health agenda, and priority setting is fundamental to the fair and efficient pursuit of this goal. In a recent editorial, Rob Baltussen and colleagues point to the need to go beyond evidence on cost-effectiveness and call for evidence-informed deliberative processes when setting priorities for UHC. Such processes are crucial at every step on...

A bst ract A computational model of emotion must explain both the rapid dynamics of some emotional reactions as well as the slower responses that follow deliberation. This is often addressed by positing multiple levels of appraisal processes such as fast pattern directed vs. slower deliberative appraisals. In our view, this confuses appraisal with inference. Rather, we argue for a single and au...

This article reviews a diverse set of proposals for dual processing in higher cognition within largely disconnected literatures in cognitive and social psychology. All these theories have in common the distinction between cognitive processes that are fast, automatic, and unconscious and those that are slow, deliberative, and conscious. A number of authors have recently suggested that there may ...

The article examines longitudinal trends in expenditures by over 1,200 private firms, finding evidence of punctuated equilibrium—a pattern of change widely interpreted as evidence of stick-slip dynamics in decision-making processes. Levels of punctuation in the private sector closely resemble those observed in studies on public budgeting, suggesting that the private sector is not on average any...

In their recent article on evidence-informed deliberative processes (EDPs) for health benefit package decisions, Oortwijn et al examine how the different steps of EDP play out in eight countries with relatively mature institutions using technology assessment (HTA). This commentary examines addresses stakeholder involvement decision-making equitable progress towards universal coverage (UHC). It ...

March-April 2012 When assigned the task of describing and updating essential health benefits for qualified health plans in the Affordable Care Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services turned to the Institute of Medicine for advice. An IOM committee recommended that “structured public deliberative processes be established to identify the values and priorities of those citizens eligible to...