ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF PREVENTIVE HEALTHCARE: A COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF A PARENTING PROGRAM

Abstract

The positive impact of parenting programs on the health and wellbeing of individuals and their immediate community has been confirmed in many studies. Often, and especially during the Covid-19 pandemics, prevention health programs are stalled due to other policy priorities. Costbenefit analysis (CBA) can be used for the economic evaluation of public health programs to support evidence-based health policies and allows the comparison of the monetized effects of programs across different societal domains. However, CBA requires a variety of data that are typically difficult to obtain. Using the Incredible Years (IY) parenting program case, we illustrate how CBA can be practically applied. For parenting programs, the positive effects arise exclusively in non-monetary form as benefits arising from avoiding adverse effects in society. We show how to monetize them by estimating the avoided costs of healthcare, educational, and other societal costs due to the program's implementation. At a 4% social discount rate, the economic net present value is positive and high, showing that the present value of the program's benefits exceeds the costs of the program by almost €800 thousand. The benefit-to-cost index of 5.6 confirms that every € invested in the program brings benefits of €5.6 in monetary terms. Cost-benefit analysis provides a convincing foundation for distributing public funds as it allows for a comparison of fieldrelated programs and programs from different fields. Consequently, they increase any public policy's effectiveness and efficiency, but especially preventive health policy.