County council politicians' choice of hospital payment scheme: a discrete choice study

Various hospital payment schemes exist, but none of the schemes fulfil all the objectives of a public payer simultaneously. This implies that trade-offs are involved in the choice of payment scheme. The purpose of this study is to elicit Danish politicians trade-offs in terms of the objectives involved using two elicitation techniques: simple ranking and discrete choice experiments. The implied rankings of the objectives according to the two techniques are compared and reveal discrepancies. The discrepancies may be due to the nature of the techniques and the transparency of the implied ranking to the respondent.