Pretend you are advising a member of Congress on vaccination policy. He or she asks you...

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?

Solutions

Expert Solution

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.

Rahul Sunny answered 3 months ago

Next > < Previous

Related Solutions

The member of Congress asks you to elaborate an about 2-page brief identifying: a) the situation...

The member of Congress asks you to elaborate an about 2-page brief identifying: a) the situation of the health workforce in the country, particularly its scarcity in rural and other underserved areas; b) feasible initiatives to address the situation;

Pretend for a minute that you are advising your candidate for President of the USA. As...

Pretend for a minute that you are advising your candidate for President of the USA. As you near your first debate against your opposing party nominee, you realize that economic growth is going to be a main topic. The catch is that you are not going to be debating war, health care, etc. You are restricted to showing who did a better job growing our economy and can only use GDP. You can use variations of GDP, like GDP per...

If you were a member of Congress, how would you propose to balance the budget? Do...

If you were a member of Congress, how would you propose to balance the budget? Do you think your proposal could pass Congress? Do you think you'd be able to be re-elected if it did? Defend your opinions. This is in Statistical Reasoning.

1. Pretend you are working for a policy maker and your task is to explain the...

1. Pretend you are working for a policy maker and your task is to explain the concept of moral hazard. Use the space below to formulate your explanation. 2. Economist disagree about the likely extent of moral hazard in the health care system. What are 2 arguments/evidence to suggest that moral hazard does exist? What are 2 arguments/evidence to suggest that moral hazard does not exist?

You are advising a client on the decision of which pension she should take. Option A:...

You are advising a client on the decision of which pension she should take. Option A: A lump sum payment of $210,000 five years from today. Option B: Equal payments of $18,000 every year for 15 years with the first payment five years from today. Assume the client will make her decision solely on the time value of money. Using an interest rate or 3.5%, which option is preferable? Option B is preferable, because the PV of B to your...

Matlab code Here is the command that asks the user if he/she wants to play again:...

Matlab code Here is the command that asks the user if he/she wants to play again: playAgain = input(Would you like to play again? (y/n): ', 's'); Your task is to write a validation loop that only strings that start with a letter "y" or a letter "n", irrespective of cases, are considered to be valid input.

Pretend like someone in another field who uses statistics (e.g. a psychologist, etc.) asks you to...

Pretend like someone in another field who uses statistics (e.g. a psychologist, etc.) asks you to explain the difference between the t distribution and the normal distribution. Explain to them in a way a non-expert would understand, making sure to highlight when you would use each distribution during a hypothesis test.

If you were advising a Congressional candidate on how she should propose chnaged in the payroll...

If you were advising a Congressional candidate on how she should propose chnaged in the payroll tax, what would you recommend? In your explanation address issued of the tax incidence, as well as regressivity or progressivity of the tax.

1 Problem Description If someone asks us what the set of natural numbers is, she/he is...

1 Problem Description If someone asks us what the set of natural numbers is, she/he is interested in the definition of the set of natural numbers. We usually would write 0, 1, 2, 3, . . . as our answer. Since the set is infinite, we cannot write it out completely, even though each natural number is finite. Notice that . . . after 3 is for humans to understand because we (human beings) are intelligent. However, we cannot use...

A family member asks you to explain bipolar disorder and how their loved one got it....

A family member asks you to explain bipolar disorder and how their loved one got it. How would you address?

Subjects