Outbreaks are expensive. Each measles case, for example, can cost public health agencies $10,000 or more in tax dollars as scientists scramble to track infected people and curb the spread of disease.

Some legal scholars want to make non-vaccinating parents pay for these costs — either by imposing up-front charges, or by sending them a bill if their child infects others.

Up-front charges could be levied through the tax system or by imposing fees, three researchers argued in a paper last year. Alternatively, their report also includes draft legislation that would allow states to send an itemized bill to cover the costs of investigating and containing a preventable disease outbreak, and treating people who got infected.

"We're proposing a menu of options," Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and one of the paper's authors, told BuzzFeed News. "We're putting it out there and states can choose if they want to do any of this."

According to the draft law, people who don't follow vaccination recommendations promoted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are a "public nuisance." It also states that parents could be made to pay even if they qualify for religious or personal-belief exemptions from state-mandated vaccinations.

Imposing these costs is justified, the paper argues, as a deterrent, and to be fair to parents who do vaccinate: It would prevent non-vaccinating parents "from forcing others to pay for the risks created by their decisions."