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Rei grew up at the foot of Mt. Fuji, where his is father runs a medical clinic. For Rei, medicine had always been business, rather than science. He has long been surprised to see that many patients pay nothing under the generous social health insurance system. During his medical school and residency programmes, he became increasingly interested in economics, which analyses the allocation of limited resources such as time and money. In ageing developed countries such as Japan, the government conducts economic evaluations for medicines and other health technology, then makes policy priorities based upon them. Policymakers consider not only costs and effectiveness, but also the preferences of taxpayers and patients. Rei seeks to study methods of estimating these preferences and how to use them to realize rational policy-making.