Estimating the Fiscal Consequences of National Immunization Programs Using a “Government Perspective” Public Economic Framework

Abstract

Infectious diseases can impose considerable mortality and morbidity for children and adult populations resulting in both short- and long-term fiscal costs for government. Traditionally, healthcare costs are the dominant consideration in economic evaluations of vaccines, which likely ignores many costs that fall on governments in relation to vaccine-preventable conditions. In recent years, fiscal health modeling has been proposed as a complementary approach to cost-effectiveness analysis for considering the broader consequences for governments attributed to vaccines. Fiscal modeling evaluates public health investments attributed to treatments or preventive interventions in the case of vaccination, and how these investments influence government public accounts. This involves translating morbidity and mortality outcomes that can lead to disability, associated costs, early retirement due to poor health, and death, which can result in lost tax revenue for government attributed to reduced lifetime productivity. To assess fiscal consequences of public health programs, discounted cash flow analysis can be used to translate how changes in morbidity and mortality influence transfer payments and changes in lifetime taxes paid based on initial health program investments. The aim of this review is to describe the fiscal health modeling framework in the context of vaccines and demonstrate key features of this approach and the role that public economic assessment of vaccines can make in understanding the broader economic consequences of investing in vaccination programs. In this review, we describe the theoretical foundations for fiscal modeling, the aims of fiscal model, the analytical outputs, and discuss the relevance of this framework for evaluating the economics of vaccines.