ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on longevity changes as a substitute for mortality risk or "lives saved" and aims to provide an interpretation of mortality risk that is intuitively accessible to the non-expert. Measures to reduce risk, often in the form of legislative action, are not always imposed with perspective with regard to the benefits to be achieved. Equally important to the policymaker is a tabulation of costs to achieve these ends. With cost information, cost/benefit or cost/effectiveness measures can then be used as an aid to establish priorities in making policy decisions. There are strong incentives to spend greater sums to improve community safety and health. One might expect the longevity change to be a function of the mortality rate, the age distribution of the impact, and the age distribution of the exposed population. The longevity gains again depend on the validity of the correlation and on the assumption that the subgroup has a mortality rate similar to the general population.
