An Ounce of Prevention

Joseph Newhouse

No 27553, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: I look at prevention through an economic lens and make three main points. First, those advocating preventive measures are often asked how much money a given measure saves. This question is misguided. Rather preventive measures can be thought of as insurance, with a certain cost in the present that may or may not pay off in the future. In fact, although most medical preventive measures improve expected health, they do not save money. Various lifestyle and early childhood interventions, however, may both save money and improve health. Second, preventive measures, including medical and lifestyle measures, are heterogeneous in their value, both across measures and, within measure, across individuals. As a result, generalizations in everyday discourse about the value of prevention can be overly broad. Third, health insurance coverage for medical preventive measures should generally be more extensive than coverage for the treatment of a medical condition, though full coverage of preventive services is not necessarily optimal.

JEL-codes: I1 I12 I13 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Joseph P. Newhouse, 2021. "An Ounce of Prevention," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 35(2), pages 101-118, Spring.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27553.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: An Ounce of Prevention (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27553

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27553

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().