Disease Burden, Mortality, and Life Expectancy in the United States 

Housing is a fundamental social determinant of health and is particularly amenable to policy intervention.   More

The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any peer nation, and its criminal justice system disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.  More

From 2021 to 2025, federal nutrition assistance policy in the United States shifted rapidly from expansion to contraction, with major implications for food insecurity, diet quality, and chronic disease risk.  More

Medicaid Section 1115 demonstration projects are widely used to test innovative policies but are subject to “budget neutrality” limits so that federal expenditures do not exceed what the federal government would have spent if the project was not adopted.  More

In April 2018, a naked man with an AR-15 burst into a Waffle House restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee. Firing at random, he murdered four people and gravely injured five more before escaping into the night.  More

Access to sexual and reproductive health care varies widely by geography, and state-level policies play a major role in establishing the contours that govern the coverage, provision, availability, and costs of services.  More

The US public health system is facing an inflection point characterized by chronic underinvestment, workforce and service delivery challenges, outdated data infrastructure, growing health inequities, and increasing instability within the broader health care safety net including projected Medicaid coverage changes and continued rural hospital closures.  More

Rural and urban areas have diverged significantly in health care access and health outcomes over the last four decades.  More

Health equity depends on data equity: the representation of communities in the data used to identify disparities, target interventions, and hold systems accountable.  More

Beginning in 2025, longstanding opponents of vaccines have held the highest positions of federal public health policy powers.  More

Over the last decade, the United States has encountered numerous infectious disease-related public health threats, observed declines in life expectancy and childhood vaccination rates, and experienced rapid changes and reorganizations to the domestic public health system.  More

American federalism involves decentralized policymaking across federal, state, and local governments.  More

America’s long-term care policy approach is poverty-based, requiring most older adults to spend down their assets to qualify for limited, Medicaid-funded support, which is biased toward institutional care and plagued by bureaucratic complexity and enrollment hurdles.  More

Over the past three decades, mortality from leading causes such as cardiovascular disease and cancer has declined in the United States, but the burden of chronic, disabling conditions, including musculoskeletal disorders, mental and substance use disorders, and obesity, has grown or stagnated, widening the gap between total years lived and years lived in good health.  More

In this perspective, we have reviewed the historical evidence on the association between education and health in the United States, arguing that attention to public policies related to both education and technology are fundamentally important in understanding historical changes in the educational divide in life expectancy.  More