The UK are spending a huge amount of money on a new healthy living strategy targeted in particular at obesity. Among the tactics include incentives for people to go to the gym. Worth keeping an eye on this
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7204257.stm
3 comments:
For the past six months I have been thinking about similar policies. How do you encourage positive health behaviour and what are the costs and benefits of doing so. To me, in my early stage thinking, its appears like one of those clearly obvious, yet stunningly not seriously considered, win-win situations. The mechanism I had in mind, not surprisingly perhaps, was a tax-credit. Ireland, along with most developed countries, have long used the tax system to deter deleterious health behaviour like smoking and drinking but, with the exception of health insurance, have done little in the way of systematically incouraging health promoting behaviour. With consideration of the undisputed psychological fact that positive reinforcemnet is superior to negative reinforcement in terms of learning and behavioural change we should begin to think, as the British are, about how we might make better use of the fiscal carrot. A subsidy to gym/health club membership in the form of a tax credit is a simple example with powerful possibility. The benefits of exercise and club membership are well documented and i would hypothesis that even with the consideration of crowding out, such a subsidy is likely to be not only self-financing but over time cost- and life-saving. This rationale is difficult to argue with.
Helping people help themselves --
This is the undoubtedly a sign of the future and an area that i will be monitoring closely.
tax credits in general sound like a good idea. one thing to keep an eye on is whether the behaviour under concern is price elastic and secondly whether the market is competitive. if little competition in the market and inelastic demand then the tax credit might just bump up the price of the product.
Peter,
This would be a terrific experiment if you could get a joint DoF/DoH committee to back it...
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