Cost Minimization and Medical Examinations: The Case of Anthrax

In 2001 the United States experienced several anthrax attacks that attracted significant attention from the medical community, policy analysts and many other professionals, but relatively little attention from economists. This paper builds on the work of Hupert et al. (2002) by using an M/G/1 queuing model to analyze the tension between economic cost minimization and the stringency of medical examinations in the aftermath of an anthrax attack. The theoretical analysis displays ambiguous results. Given this outcome, numerical analysis of the aforementioned tension is conducted with two main results. First, for many values of the model parameters that describe the stringency of the examinations, a tension does exist between economic cost minimization and examination stringency. Second, for many values of the parameter that describes the scale of an anthrax attack a tension does not exist between economic cost minimization and examination stringency. Moreover, when medical examiners are charged with the task of making equitable versus ethical tradeoffs in their provision of medical care, the problem of discerning the lower cost examination regime becomes confounded further. It is the goal of this work to extend the literature regarding bioterrorism and medical responses to include an additional goal of economic cost minimization.