Incentives for Health

Abstract

This article discusses incentives to help make healthy choices the easy choices for individuals, operating at the levels of the individual, producers and service providers, and governments. Whereas paying individuals directly to be healthier seems to have a limited effect, offering financial incentives through health insurance improves health. Changing the environment to make healthier choices more accessible acts as an incentive to improve health. Employers can provide incentives to improve the health of their employees. Producers and service providers can take voluntary action to make their products less harmful, and they can be nudged into marketing healthier products within a regulatory environment. International agreements and monitoring systems can incentivize governments to do more for health. Lessons from climate change adaptation suggest that multilevel governance and policy integration are greater obstacles to policy change and implementation than knowing what has to be done. Policy change and implementation are triggered by many drivers, many of which are side effects of other policy pressures rather than of the direct policy goal itself. Effective action to reduce noncommunicable diseases will require leveraging social networks into a new ways of thinking about health; making better health prestigious and aspirational, and giving health and wellness a brand that encourages positive behavior change.

Organizational Health Literacy in Facilities for People with Disabilities: First Results of an Explorative Qualitative and Quantitative Study

“…In particular, interventions are recommended that make it easier, for example, for clients as well as other stakeholders, to access and find their way to and through the organization. Previous studies unanimously emphasized formal and, above all, organizational or organizationally anchored measures focusing on the living and working settings of staff members, while clients are particularly effective in establishing and strengthening OHL [5,17,23,25,40]. Those interventions include, for example, formal or organizational measures integrating OHL in all planning processes (e.g., new departments in the organization, organizational events), the provision of financial and human resources [33], and interventions tailored to the organization, such as the introduction of a structured feedback culture or a barrier-free guidance system [18].…”

Reframing the science and policy of nicotine, illegal drugs and alcohol – conclusions of the ALICE RAP Project

“…Limits to availability bring a range of co-benefits to educational achievement and productivity, for example, but they can also bring adverse effects – for example, the well-documented violence, corruption and loss of public income associated with some existing ‘illegal’ drug policies 58, 85 . Individual choices and behaviour that drive harm from drug use are determined by the environment in which those choices and behaviours operate 86 . Banning commercial communications, increasing price and reducing availability are all incentives that impact individual behaviour.…”

The UK government's alcohol strategy

“…This will bring significant benefits for public health, reduce crime and demonstrates the positive contribution that industry can make'. The strategy will put into place the correct incentives (Anderson, Amaral-Sabadini, Baumberg, Jarl, & Stucklet, 2011;Anderson, Harrison, Cooper, & Jané-Llopis, 2011) to support this initiative by introducing a new higher rate of duty for higher strength beer and a new lower rate of duty for lower strength beer to align duty more closely to alcohol strength. The aim is that these one billion units are simply not drunk, by anyone.…”