Is the gap between micro- and macroeconomic assessments in health care well understood? The case of vaccination and potential remedies

Vaccination is an established intervention that reduces the burden and prevents the spread of infectious diseases. Investing in vaccination is known to offer a wide range of economic and intangible benefits that can potentiate gains for the individual and for society. The discipline of economics provides us with microeconomic and macroeconomic methods for evaluating the economic gains attributed to health status changes. However, the observed gap between micro and macro estimates attributed to health presents challenges to our understanding of health-related productivity changes and, consequently, economic benefits. The gap suggests that the manner in which health-related productive output is quantified in microeconomic models might not adequately reflect the broader economic benefit. We propose that there is a transitional domain that links the micro- and macroeconomic improvement attributed to health status changes. Currently available economic evaluation methods typically omit these consequences, however; they may be adjusted to integrate these transitional consequences. In practical terms, this may give rise to multipliers to apply toward indirect costs to account for the broader macroeconomic benefits linked to changes in health status. In addition, it is possible to consider that different medical conditions and health care interventions may pose different multiplying effects, suggesting that the manner in which resources are allocated within health services gives rise to variation in the amount of the micro–macro gap. An interesting way to move forward in integrating the micro- and macro-level assessment might be by integrating computable general equilibrium (CGE) models as part of the evaluation framework, as was recently performed for pandemic flu and malaria vaccination.