Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
This special issue is the result of a conference organised by Verina Wild and Anca Gheaus, at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich in December 2014. The conference addressed normative issues raised by the use of incentive mechanisms to promote better health, and included papers by most contributors to this special issue. So far, the normative discussion on health incentives focussed on questions of autonomy, paternalism, motivation and responsibility. This resulting special issue responds to a need to expand the normative analysis of such measures to other issues of justice, which have so far been largely ignored.
Recent policies and programmes in health prevention tend to appeal to, and encourage, individual responsibility with respect to lifestyle choices. One way of advancing this goal is via schemes that provide individuals with incentives to live healthy lives. For example, individuals may be offered discounted health insurance rates if they adopt healthy lifestyles or be given vouchers to purchase healthy food or to use fitness centres. Such programmes often use so-called ‘nudging’ mechanisms, meant to motivate people without coercively interfering with their private choices and to improve health outcomes without overregulating the market for products that are detrimental to health. They also raise many normative questions.
Health incentive programmes put pressure on us to rethink how to balance reasons of freedom, solidarity and justice in the design of public health policies. Angus Dawson's article is a criticism to the …
Footnotes
Funding The research leading to this special issue has partly received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 under Grant Agreement no. 602386, Credits4Health.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Request Permissions
If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.
Copyright information:
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Solidarity, justice and unconditional access to healthcare
- Which strings attached: ethical considerations for selecting appropriate conditionalities in conditional cash transfer programmes
- Incentivising safe sex: a randomised trial of conditional cash transfers for HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention in rural Tanzania
- Understanding the dimensions of socioeconomic status that influence toddlers ’ health: unique impact of lack of money for basic needs in Quebec ’s birth cohort
- Health incentive research and social justice: does the risk of long term harms to systematically disadvantaged groups bear consideration
- Disability discrimination and misdirected criticism of the quality - adjusted life year framework
- Does it work to pay people to live healthier lives
- Ethics by opinion poll? The functions of attitudes research for normative deliberations in medical ethics
- Social values and the corruption argument against financial incentives for healthy behaviour
- Impact of a private sector living wage intervention on depressive symptoms among apparel workers in the Dominican Republic: a quasi-experimental study