Population Health

Recent studies have linked the rising rates and growing disparities in working-age mortality partly to changes in US states’ policy contexts since the 1980s. Yet, such studies largely rely on measures of states’ policy contexts, or “policy indices,” that were created for other purposes, are not regularly updated, and use complex methods that can be difficult to interpret and replicate. Further elucidating the mortality trends and disparities would benefit from a policy index that is designed for population health analyses and a clearer understanding of the utility of such indices. More

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

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

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

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

I recently attended a National Institutes of Health (NIH) meeting concerned with criminal justice interventions. Speakers emphasized the importance of involving people with lived experience—which everyone understood to mean persons who have experienced arrest and incarceration. More

America’s public health system is being eroded. Proposed federal cuts would slash core programs by half, even as communities face rising infectious disease outbreaks, worsening chronic disease, and shrinking access to basic prevention. More

The United States lags far behind other comparable nations on health indicators. To promote population health in cities, we argue for the right to Universal Basic Neighborhoods (UBN). More

Ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) now dominate the global food supply and are strongly associated with risks for heart disease, cancers, metabolic disease, diabetes, and obesity. UPFs are likely associated with rates of neurologic issues such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease and predict premature death. More

The implications of the Department of Justice’s action to eliminate the “disparate impact” test, which provides the legal foundation for removing discriminatory barriers in public health and health care. More