People Paying for Tests

Study seeks to determine what people will pay for predictive tests of non-preventable conditions.
The Wall Street Journal (1/6, Hobson, subscription required) "Health Blog" discussed a study published in the journal Health Economics in which researchers from Tufts Medical Center presented a hypothetical question to 1,463 people in which they were asked if they would pay to take a blood test to find out if they were going to develop a disease that would not be possible to prevent, such as Alzheimer's, breast or prostate cancer, or arthritis. While most of the respondents said they would want to be tested and were willing to pay anywhere from $320 to $622, others did not want to be tested at all, even for free. They just did not want to find out they had a disease hanging over their head that they could not prevent.