Abstract
BackgroundIt 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.MethodsA 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.ResultsThe 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.ConclusionsThe 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.
Highlights
It is unclear how the public would respond to changes in government decisions about how much to spend on medical research in total and on major disease areas such as cancer
We focused on cancer as a high profile disease area, research into which attracts substantial government and charity funding in the United Kingdom
Respondents were asked to guess: (1) how much the United Kingdom government currently spends on medical research each year, in millions of pounds; and (2) the percentage of total United Kingdom government spending on medical research each year that is on cancer research
Summary
It is unclear how the public would respond to changes in government decisions about how much to spend on medical research in total and 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. There is a substantial literature on the relationship, generally determined to be one of complementarity, between government and private industry funding of medical research (much of that literature has been previously summarised [1]). There is, little evidence about the relationship between government and charity funding of medical research. The United Kingdom has a large number of medical research charities, some of which have very large funds at their disposal.
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