What Is the Price Elasticity of Demand for the H1N1 Vaccine?
Ms. Eclectic and I lined up with hundreds of other local residents last Monday when the county health authority came to town to provide swine flu shots for us. It was windy, cold, and there was mix of rain and snow blowing as we stood outside the Legion Hall, waiting to join the queue inside the hall. Overall, people were in good spirits, and the organization was pretty slick. Nevertheless, the wait (especially when we were in the portion of the queue that was outside the building) was uncomfortable. From the time we arrived until the time we left, the total elapsed time was about an hour and a quarter, in contrast with about twenty minutes earlier in the fall when we received our seasonal flu shots. [note: both times included about a ten-minute waiting period following the shot]. As I proceeded from health bureaucrat to health bureaucrat at the H1N1 vaccination site, I asked each of them how long they thought the line would be if people were charged $5 each for the vaccine. Everyone I
