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Background  Societal preferences have to be taken into consideration to ensure difficult healthcare decisions are legitimate and acceptable. It has been interesting to ascertain whether attitudes towards the principles of public healthcare resources allocation are homogenous. In particular, it has been thought provoking to ask whether advancement in medical technologies, and growing accessibility issues due to scarcity of healthcare resources, have influenced the beliefs of the general public with regard to allocative principles in recent years. The objective of this study was to compare preferences towards the distribution of healthcare resources between younger and older members of society.    Methods  Discrete choice experiments using the equivalence of numbers technique and the social welfare function were conducted in Poland. Public preferences towards disease severity, and potential to benefit, as well as aversion to inequity, were elicited. In order to ensure full understanding of questions by the older respondents, a pilot study with ten respondents aged 65+ was conducted.    Results  In total, 52 adult respondents (seniors) and 45 students (juniors) were interviewed. While the first were unwilling to trade between different patients, the latter chose a higher number of individuals to compensate for the loss of ten patients with a more severe disease and a higher potential to treat everything else being equal. Juniors were more inequality averse compared to seniors as well.    Conclusions  While the revealed preferences of seniors were egalitarian, juniors were more willing to differentiate between disease severity and potential to benefit. Differences in opinion between juniors and seniors should be considered in open dialogue regarding healthcare rationing. Insight into the preferences towards health maximization of the former group and the egalitarian beliefs of the latter group could be useful for decision makers in the search for public acceptance of allocation of scarce healthcare resources.    Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-015-1210-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Does it matter whose opinion we seek regarding the allocation of healthcare resources? - a case study