Carrots and Sticks to Promote Healthy Behaviors: A Policy Update

If these observations are correct, their cumulative result suggests that penalty-based policies fail one of the most basic criteria by which public health policies and interventions are evaluated, which is whether they produce the maximal balance of benefits over burdens, a value referred to as utility.4 West Virginia's Medicaid policy may be singled out as particularly worrisome because it ensnares children as well as adults.\n Among public health practitioners working within the United States and abroad in developing countries, "empowerment" is widely regarded as a valuable public health strategy. The potential utility of participation for achieving better planned public health interventions with greater community involvement and impact has led some to recommend empowerment and participation as essential strategies for all policies and initiatives to reduce health disparities.11 The value of participation, however, does not lie solely in its potential to reduce health disparities and thereby to advance the distributional goals of justice.