Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: First, I demonstrate the potential of improving school-aged children’s health as a way to reduce inequality in both adult health and lifetime consumption. I then suggest missing links in the evidence chain to measure the aggregate benefits of various specific interventions that might achieve this primary goal.
METHODS: I first develop a formal model, using chain-rule methods, to show how improving school-aged children’s health can improve lifetime adult health and lifetime wealth. The first step shows how improved health can improve educational attainment. Standard economic methods show how improved educational attainment (IEA) can improve lifetime wealth, reduce reliance on social welfare programs, reduce medical costs in public programs, and increase both income and sales tax revenues for federal, state and local governments. The next step shows how IEA can increase people’s adult health by reducing health-harming and increasing health-protecting behaviors. These are combined using standard chain-rule methods of mathematics.
RESULTS: A large educational literature demonstrates strong links between children’s health and IEA. Completing high school (HS) has a 84 percent probability for children with highest and 65 percent for those with lowest health self-rated health. Labor economics data show that lifetime wealth increases by a factor of 2.3X for men and 3.3X for women going from lowest to highest levels of attainment. Epidemiological data show that almost half of all annual deaths are due to health-related behavior choices that improve with IEA.
CONCLUSIONS: Since poorer children’s health falls most-heavily on lower income populations, appropriately-focused health improving programs for school-aged children can reduce inequality in both health and wealth, since higher educational attainment improves both lifetime health and wealth. Better understanding of the effects of specific health-related programs, e.g., screening, treatment of children’s chronic diseases, and pregnancy control can clarify the most cost-efficient ways to achieve this goal.