| Popis: |
As lifestyle diseases put a heavy burden on health care expenditures, voices are raised and win in sound to hold people responsible for their unhealthy lifestyle. Most of the arguments in favour of responsibility are backward-looking. In this paper, we describe the distributional consequences of these backward-looking measures and show that they are very harsh on those who regret a past unhealthy lifestyle. We demonstrate that it is possible to take policy measures which respect individual responsibility but which are at the same time able to grant fresh starts to individuals who regret their past unhealthy lifestyle (which is an application of Fleurbaey (2005)). This “forgiving” policy is confronted with a moral hazard problem, however. In general the regulator does not observe whether individuals really regret their past choices or if they just pretend to have changed preferences in order to enjoy the compensatory measures for regretful people. In this paper, we argue that the health setting offers interesting opportunities to move beyond this moral hazard problem and offer a solution through the use of redistributive instruments that are conditional on lifestyle changes. ispartof: HUB Research Papers, Economics & Management vol:44 nrpages: 22 status: published |
