Quarterly Department

Perspective

Content Type:

  • Quarterly Article

    Alcohol Problems and Policies: The States Have the Power, But Will They Use It?

    August 2025 David H. Jernigan

    Alcohol is a causal factor in more than 200 disease and injury conditions in the human body. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) define excessive drinking as binge drinking (4 or more drinks for women, 5 or more for men on one occasion in the past month), heavy drinking (8 or more drinks for women, 15 or more for men in a week), and any drinking during pregnancy or by persons younger than age 21 years. More

  • Quarterly Article

    Health Equity Benefits All Communities (Including White Ones)

    August 2025 Philip M. Alberti

    For more than 2 years, I have started my speaking engagements with a simple message: “Health equity benefits all communities.” Although the message may be straightforward, health equity–focused scientists and advocates like me have done an inadequate and ineffective job making that point clear and believable through stories, data, and messaging. More

  • Quarterly Article

    From Disappointment to Predominance: Medicare Advantage’s Ascendancy and Transformation of Medicare

    August 2025 Rick Mayes Micah Johnson

    From 2004 to 2024, Medicare Advantage (MA) went from being a “policy disappointment,” covering 12% of all Medicare beneficiaries, to predominance, covering more than one-half (52%), with more growth predicted in the future. Drawing on an extensive review and synthesis of the literature, Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) reports, congressional committee hearings, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) data, this paper analyzes the evolution of Medicare and managed care in three parts More

  • Maximizing the Public Health Benefits of Opioid Settlements: Policy Recommendations for Equity, Sustainability, and Impact

    Quarterly Article

    Maximizing the Public Health Benefits of Opioid Settlements: Policy Recommendations for Equity, Sustainability, and Impact

    July 2025 BRANDON D. L. MARSHALL Kristen Pendergrass Sara Whaley

    The US overdose crisis is one of the most severe and devastating public health problems of the 21st century. Since 1999, more than one million Americans have lost their lives to accidental drug overdose. More

  • Legal Barriers to Safer Smoking Supplies Cause Harm and Should Be Removed

    Quarterly Article

    Legal Barriers to Safer Smoking Supplies Cause Harm and Should Be Removed

    July 2025 Corey Davis Amy Lieberman Czarina Behrends

    The United States continues to experience a nearly unprecedented level of drug-related health harms, with over 105,000 Americans dying of overdose in 2023 alone. Although overall overdose deaths declined slightly from 2022 to 2023, rates for Black people continued to rise. Stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine are increasingly involved in overdose deaths, and xylazine and other contaminants continue to be prevalent in the illicit drug supply. More

  • Laws Governing Substance Use During Pregnancy: Next Steps for Health Equity Research

    Quarterly Article

    Laws Governing Substance Use During Pregnancy: Next Steps for Health Equity Research

    July 2025 Hannah L.F. Cooper Anna L. Mullany Snigdha Peddireddy Simone Wien Melvin "Doug" Livingston Whitney S. Rice Anne L. Dunlop Michael R. Kramer Madison Haiman Lasha S. Clarke Natalie D. Hernandez-Green Angélica Meinhofer

    See all articles in the special issue, Mental Health and Substance Use Challenges Facing the United States: What Can State Policymakers… More

  • Quarterly Article

    No Data, No Problem: Quantifying Latine Individuals Eligible for but Not Enrolled in Medicaid or Affordable Care Act Marketplace-Based Insurance in North Carolina

    July 2025 Gabriela Plasencia Kamaria Kaalund Olurotimi Kukoyi Viviana Martinez-Bianchi Andrea Thoumi

    Populations that identify as Latino/a/e/x or Hispanic (herein referred to as Latine) in the United States continue to face disproportion-ate health… More

  • Integrating Mental Health and Substance Use Treatment With Emergency and Primary Care: The Case of Opioid Use Disorder and Suicide

    Quarterly Article

    Integrating Mental Health and Substance Use Treatment With Emergency and Primary Care: The Case of Opioid Use Disorder and Suicide

    July 2025 Noa Krawczyk Hillary Samples

    The United States is facing an ongoing mental health and substance use crisis. In 2023, 58.7 million US adults had a past-year mental illness, 46.3 million had a substance use disorder (SUD), and 20.4 million had both. More

  • Quarterly Article

    National Analysis of the Requirements and Implementation of State Prescription Drug Price Transparency Laws

    June 2025 Hannah Rahim Aaron S. Kesselheim

    Prescription drug prices in the United States are substantially higher than in other high-income countries, with US prices reported to be an average of 2.78 times those of other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.1 In response to these high prices, along with an opaque supply chain that can lead to substantial discrepancies in prices across different payors, states have passed drug price transparency laws that require manufacturers to disclose information on drug prices. More

  • Quarterly Article

    A Framework for Assessing the Permissibility of Academic Leaders’ Outside Activities

    June 2025 MATTHEW S. McCOY MARTHA E. GAINES STEVEN JOFFE Genevieve Pham-Kanter EMILY A. LARGENT Bernard Lo HOLLY FERNANDEZ LYNCH ALLISON M. WHELAN Michelle M. Mello

    Leaders at many of the country’s top academic medical centers earned—in addition to their institutional salaries—hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as directors of pharmaceutical and device companies. Critics have urged academic institutions to rethink conflict of interest policies governing leaders’ outside activities, which are understood to pose not only individual conflicts for leaders themselves but also institutional conflicts for their academic employers. More