Government and charity funding of cancer research: public preferences and choices

Health Research Policy and Systems

Karla Hernandez-Villafuerte¹  Jon Sussex¹  Koonal Kirit Shah¹ 

[1] Office of Health Economics, Southside 7th floor, 105 Victoria Street, London SW1E 6QT, UK

关键词: Tax;    Stated preferences;    Medical research;    Donor behaviour;    Crowding;    Charitable giving;    Cancer;   

Others  :  1228719
DOI  :  10.1186/s12961-015-0027-6

 received in 2015-02-09, accepted in 2015-08-21,  发布年份 2015

【 摘 要 】

Background

It is unclear how the public would respond to changes in government decisions about how much to spend on medical research in total and specifically on major disease areas such as cancer. Our aim was to elicit the views of the general public in the United Kingdom about how a change in government spending on cancer research might affect their willingness to donate, or to hypothecate a portion of their income tax payments, to cancer research charities.

Methods

A web-based stated preference survey was conducted in 2013. Respondents considered hypothetical scenarios regarding changes in the levels of government funding for medical research. In each scenario, respondents were asked to imagine that they could allocate £100 of the income tax they paid this year to one or more medical research charities. They were asked how they wished to allocate the £100 between cancer research charities and medical research charities concerned with diseases other than cancer. After having been given the opportunity to allocate £100 in this way, respondents were then asked if they would want to reduce or increase any personal out-of-pocket donations that they already make to cancer research and non-cancer medical research charities. Descriptive analyses and random effects modelling were used to examine patterns in the response data.

Results

The general tendency of respondents was to act to offset hypothetical changes in government spending. When asked to imagine that the government had reduced (or increased) its spending on cancer research, the general tendency of respondents was to state that they would give a larger (or smaller) allocation of their income tax to cancer research charities, and to increase (or reduce) their personal out-of-pocket donations to cancer research charities. However, most respondents’ preferred allocation splits and changes in personal donations did not vary much from scenario to scenario. Many of the differences between scenarios were small and non-significant.

Conclusions

The public’s decisions about how much to donate to cancer research or other medical research charities are not greatly affected by (hypothetical) changes to government plans about the amount of public funding of cancer or other medical research.

【 授权许可】

   
2015 Shah et al.

【 图 表 】

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