Public choice and public health.

Public choice scholars have attended only modestly to issues in public health. We expect that to change rapidly given the Covid-19 pandemic. The time therefore is ripe for taking stock of public-choice relevant scholarship that addresses issues in public health. That is what we do. Our stock-taking highlights three themes: (1) Public health regulations often are driven by private interests, not public ones. (2) The allocation of public health resources often reflects private interests, not public ones. (3) Public health policies may have perverse effects, undermining instead of promoting health-consumer welfare.

Externality and COVID-19.

Negative infectious disease externalities are less prevalent in the absence of government intervention and less costly to society than is often supposed. That is so for three reasons. (1) Unlike externality-creating behaviors in many classical externality contexts, such behaviors are often self-limiting in the context of infectious disease. (2) In market economies, behaviors that may create infectious disease externalities typically occur at sites that are owned privately and visited voluntarily. Owners have powerful incentives to regulate such behaviors at their sites, and visitors face residual infection risk contractually. (3) The social cost of infectious disease externalities is limited by the cheapest method of avoiding externalized infection risk. That cost is modest compared to the one usually imagined: the value of life (or health) lost to the disease if government does not intervene. We elaborate these arguments in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.