Costs of Waiting

Using data from the American Time Use Survey, Alan Krueger puts a valuation on time lost due to waiting around - a collective time of 847 million hours. When he includes all time spent, the economic time valuation stretches to an aggregate 240 billion dollars. Assigning dollar values to time spent in non-market activities is an issue with a lot of nuances but this is something we should look at over here. As krueger points out, just focusing on monetary cost efficiency can be severely distorting if we dont take these non-priced factors into account

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/a-hidden-cost-of-health-care-patient-time/