Communitarian claims and community capabilities: furthering priority setting?

Priority setting in health care is generally not done well. This paper draws on ideas from Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and adds some communitarian underpinnings to provide a way of improving on current uses of program budgeting and marginal analysis (PBMA) in priority setting. The paper suggests that shifting to a communitarian base for priority setting alters the distribution of property rights over health service decision making and increases the probability that recommendations from PBMA exercises will be implemented. The approach is built on a paradigm which departs from three tenets of welfarism as it is normally conceived: (i) individuals qua individuals seek to maximise their individual utility/well-being; (ii) individuals want to do this; and (iii) it is the values of individuals qua individuals that count. Some of the problems of PBMA, as it has been applied to date, are highlighted. It is argued that these are due largely to a lack of ‘credible commitment’. Bringing in the community and communitarian values to PBMA priority setting exercises can help to overcome some of the barriers to getting PBMA recommendations implemented. The approach has the merit of reflecting Senʹs concept of capabilities (but extending that to a community level). It avoids the often consequentialist base of a conventional welfarist framework, and it allows community values as opposed to individual values to come to the fore. How to elicit communitarian values is explored.