Friday, June 11, 2010

Fight AIDS with life insurance

In the face of the AIDS epidemic, African governments have a very hard time convincing their constituents to refrain from risky sexual practices, in particular using condoms, despite wall-to-wall information campaigns. The problem is that life expectancy is very low without AIDS, thus their is little incentive to preserve life. And future potential earnings are dismal as well.

Pedro de Araujo and James Murray come up with a neat idea to overcome this problem: government supplied life insurance policies, which make anticipated income more valuable and thus prolongation of life more interesting. Making life insurance payout conditional on death not being the result of AIDS, people should be making sure not to catch. Only drawback: AIDS carriers would be even more marginalized. But you cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs.

2 comments:

Daisy Williams said...
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Life Insurance Australia said...
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