Preference and willingness to pay for long-term care services in Taiwan

Ageing is rapidly becoming a public issue for both developed and developing countries. Long-term-care insurance helps the financial needs of the aged. But only a small fraction of population can afford to purchase private long-term-care insurance. Public long-term-care insurance, which Taiwanese authorities are planning to launch in the near future, deems a comprehensive solution. It normally consists of in-kind (hospital or nursing home caring), cash benefits (subsidies to community or home caring) and any possible combinations of the two. Maximizing consumers' preference and willingness to pay is one of major objectives of public policies. Currently, long-term care services are composed by numbers of attributes but it is still very limited for understanding what consumers want from those services. Therefore, searching for a central tendency in long-term care services preferences and willingness to pay is a worthwhile prelude to relevant policy discussions. In this study, we adopt Choice-based Conjoint Analysis which includes all costs and effects associated with consumers' preference and willingness to pay to: (i)identifies important attributes in a long-term care services decision, (ii)determine the utility value of those attributes considered in long-term care services choice, (iii)simulate the market share of individual preference, and (iv)calculate willingness to pay in different types of long-term-care services. Our findings will provide insights into consumers' preferences and willingness to pay of long-term care services, which in turn will serve as useful information for policy discussions.