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The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Abstract

[Excerpt] "I am writing in response to Lisa Heinzerling's article “Five-Hundred Life-Saving Interventions and Their Misuse in the Debate Over Regulatory Reform,”1 published in the Spring 2002 issue of Risk: Health, Safety & Environment. Dr. Heinzerling comments on two papers that my colleagues and I, affiliated with the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, produced as part of research funded by the National Science Foundation over a decade ago. The first is the article “Five-Hundred Lifesaving Interventions and Their Cost-Effectiveness,” published in the journal Risk Analysis in 1995. In this article we described the cost per year of lives saved of 587 interventions that reduce the risk of premature death. The second article is “The Opportunity Costs of Haphazard Societal Investments in Lifesaving” published in Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved: Getting Better Results from Regulation (R.W. Hahn ed., Oxford U. Press 1996). In this chapter, we demonstrated that by reallocating resources from interventions that are less cost effective to those that are more cost-effective, additional lives could be saved for the same money. Dr. Heinzerling opines that these papers have “had a large influence on debates over health, safety, and environmental regulation.” She then offers four criticisms of the papers and their subsequent public interpretation. I address each of her concerns."

Repository Citation

Tammy O. Tengs, A Response to Lisa Heinzerling's Article “Five-Hundred Life-Saving Interventions and Their Misuse in the Debate Over Regulatory Reform," 1 Pierce L. Rev. 115 (2002), available at http://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol1/iss1/11

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