Keynote II (Prof. Hausman)

"Preferences and the Measurement of Children’s Health"

Daniel Hausman, Center for Population–Level Bioethics (CPLB), Department of Health Behavior, Society and Policy at Rutgers University

To allocate health-related resources so as to improve health as much as possible, it is necessary to assign values to health states. Health measurement systems such as the EQ-5D accomplish this by eliciting preferences among health states from a representative sample of adults. Because values cannot be assigned to the health states of children by eliciting the preferences of children, health economists have elicited “surrogate preferences” among the health states of children of a representative sample of adults. Reliance on surrogate preferences is problematic and calls into question the general practice of assigning values by eliciting preferences. This talk offers a general account of the nature of preferences, a rationale for assigning values to the health states of adults by eliciting adult preferences, an explanation of what is wrong with assigning values to the health states of children by eliciting surrogate preferences, and a sketch of an alternative method of assigning values to health states, which is applicable both to adults and children.

Dr. Daniel M. Hausman is a Research Professor in the Center for Population–Level Bioethics (CPLB), Department of Health Behavior, Society and Policy at Rutgers University. He is also a faculty member within the Rutgers Department of Philosophy. Dr. Hausman was educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and Columbia Universities and taught at the University of Maryland, Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research addresses issues at the boundaries between economics and philosophy and currently focuses on the ethical appraisal of using cost-effectiveness information to guide health policy. Dr. Hausman is a co-founder of the journal Economics and Philosophy, and his most recent books are Valuing Health: Well-being, Freedom, and Suffering (2015), Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy (with Michael McPherson and Debra Satz, 3rd edition 2017), and How Health Care Can Be Cost-Effective and Fair (2023).