In: Economics
Pretend you are advising a member of Congress on vaccination policy. He or she asks you to provide input on whether the government should make vaccinations mandatory. Make sure you address the concept of externalities and are clear in your economic reasoning. Are there other ways to achieve the same result?
Vaccination helps to fight some deadly diseases by building an immunity system for the vaccinated individual. Deadly diseases can often be viral and infectious. Some of such diseases are preventable with vaccination. Thus, vaccination can not only help the individual, but also it provides benefit for the society as a whole. There are other benefits of vaccination other than prevention of viral diseases. Vaccination helps in decreasing the mortality rate by helping individuals to fight diseases. This implies a greater labor force for the country that can contribute in producing output. Moreover, some diseases such as polio may make an individual physically impossible to take part in the labor force. This reduces the health of the productive labor force of the country. The benefits of vaccination outweigh the costs. The social benefit is greater than the individual benefit. This happens due to the positive externalities of vaccination where the society benefits more. In the diagram below we see that the marginal social benefit is greater than the individual benefit by the amount X. Moreover, experience from around the world shows how vaccinations has helped countries to completely wipe out deadly diseases.
Preventive measures can also be taken to achieve similar results. This may include increased awareness about hygiene, more advanced hospitals, cheaper medical costs and other such policies which helps to fight the diseases more effectively.