 Perhaps the foundational moral question at issue in public health’s commitment to prevention is whether preventing disease and injury is more important, as important or less important than treating disease and injury. If prevention and treatment are morally equivalent, such that preventing heart disease in one person is the moral equivalent of treating heart disease in one person, then because it is generally cheaper to prevent disease than to treat it, prevention would, at least from an ethics standpoint, have a leg up in utilitarian accounts of what justice in public health requires. However, in practice, investments in treatment more often than not swamp investments in prevention. We have already noted the ethically complicated convention in economic analyses of discounting health benefits and costs accrued in the future relative to current health benefits and costs, paralleling the convention of discounting future financial costs and benefits. But it is not only in economic analyses that this bias exists. Although in recent years there is arguably more emphasis on prevention in health policy, preventive public health interventions continue to receive less funding and public support than medical treatments. For example, despite the increasing focus on wellness in public policy and the workplace, both policymakers and the public still tend to place a higher priority on ensuring that heart patients have access to surgery and medications than on programs to prevent heart disease through diet and  exercise.[9]  Is this privileging of treatment morally justified?