One of the reasons that life expectancy at birth has gone up so much in recent decades is because we’ve gotten better at taking care of childhood illnesses. When you prevent a child from dying, you add on, well, a lifetime of life. That makes a big difference in long-term statistics. There’s a similar effect when you make things better for a child. You can end up adding a lot of value.
This also applies to early childhood interventions. If we do good for children, and the effects last a lifetime, we may be able to make a lot of the money that we spent investing pay off. Do early childhood interventions do that? We continue our deep dive into the RAND Corporation’s comprehensive report on early childhood programs in this episode of Healthcare Triage.
Resources used in the making of this episode:
