Creating Accountability for Public Health Impacts of Commercial Products and Services

Commercial products and services significantly – and often negatively – impact public health by shaping the health behaviors of their users. This paper explores a potential path to holding companies accountable for costly, negative public health impacts of their commercial products and services. We share lessons from developing and applying a new methodology for measuring the annual national healthcare costs associated with the products and services of individual companies. Regular accounting for these impacts would create multiple promising policy opportunities, including taxation, which we explore in this paper. We also describe considerations for developing policy interventions associated with measuring health impacts of individual companies, including balancing personal and societal responsibilities, selection of appropriate counterfactuals, corporate data reporting requirements, and availability and quality of scientific evidence. Given both the scientific and political novelty of such approaches to assigning corporate accountability, we recommend strategies for advancing the policy arguments and supporting the refinement and application of the measurement techniques.