Is an ounce of prevention really worth pound of cure?

Is an ounce of prevention really worth pound of cure? This is the type of problem that keeps me up at night, because I know in the morning I am going to have to do basic math to answer the question and then I will have to post it to my blog for all the world to check my work. Damn it.

Fine. I will do math, but only for the kids.

Now, when I decided to do this, I realized that I would have to find units that could be shared by both prevention and cure, something that tied both vaccines and health care together. Well, both of these have cost, so I could compare the cost of vaccination versus the cost of hospitalization. I am going to take the vaccine I most recently received, the dTap booster that I got at Dragon*Con. That dose, which I got for free, came to the CDC at the price of $26.25/dose. Therefore, $26.25 is my ounce of prevention.

Now the reason that I got the vaccine is because I do not want to infect any children with the whooping cough. 90 percent of pertussis related hospital stays are infants, so I decided that the average cost of a hospital stay for an infant would be my pound of cure. The average cost of an infant hospitalization for pertussis is $9,586.

$9,586/$26.25 = 365 ounces of prevention in every pound of cure.

Divide that by 16 oz per lb and you find that:

An ounce of prevention is worth 22.82lbs of cure. Exactly.

HJ