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To make a point, the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright (1997) once borrowed a character from the 1960s comic strip Lil’ Abner: a big blobby… More

At the very end of the Clinton Administration, Republican Congresswoman JoAnne Emerson inserted a two-paragraph provision into the 2001 Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act. These paragraphs would become known as the Data Quality Act (as well as the Information Quality Act) and its passage represented a major victory for industries – including the tobacco and chemical industries – regulated by the federal government. More

Affordability pressures increasingly shape health risk in the United States, influencing both the upstream conditions that sustain health and the downstream ability to access health promoting resources. Financial stability is a key driver of health, affecting patterns of health, health care use, and the tradeoffs people must make among competing needs. The economic policy landscape aimed at improving financial security for Americans is expansive, complex, and often difficult to organize, making it challenging to discuss how different policies influence financial resilience and population health. We propose the Earn–Keep–Grow framework as a practical way to organize and guide discussion of these policies in population health research and policy decision-making. More

Public health science gains in the last quarter century in the United States have been formidable due to a focus on structural and social determinants of health, thereby enhancing understanding of the role of inequitable policies in shaping health inequities and inequitable access to ameliorative resources. More

Context: Before the COVID-19 pandemic, persons with pregnancy Medicaid coverage were typically disenrolled after 60 days postpartum, at which point they could retain Medicaid only if they qualified through another eligibility category (most commonly as a parent). The March 2020 Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) extended postpartum Medicaid coverage by requiring states to pause disenrollment in exchange for enhanced federal funding. More

Mental health among US working-age adults notably worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, following a steady decades-long decline. The impact of states’ COVID-19 policies on mental health has received much attention; however, less is known about the impact of a broader set of long-standing and overarching state policy contexts. More

The alarming rise in US maternal mortality and disparities in perinatal, sexual, and reproductive health outcomes underscores the urgent need for effective, equitable, and evidence-based models of care. Care provided by certified nurse-midwives (CNMs) and certified midwives (CMs) has played a critical role in addressing these disparities, yet a comprehensive synthesis of its impact across health care quality domains is lacking. More

The “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement has garnered polarized reactions, with praise among proponents for its core elements while also attracting its fair share of criticism. To be sure, there is much to be concerned about the movement, not the least of which is its disregard for scientific evidence that fails to align with its ideology about disease, wellness, and vaccination. More

Racial disparities—unequal outcomes between racial groups—persist in the United States, particularly with respect to health and economic outcomes. There has been increased focus on the ways in which upstream determinants of health contribute to these disparities; however, little is known about how forced inaction on these upstream determinants affects health and economic outcomes. More

While public health research has examined the macro-level and structural determinants of health, the link between corruption and population health remains underexplored. More