State Health Policy

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

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

In response to the high cost of state-run Medicaid programs, the 1993 Medicaid estate recovery policy was established to enable states to recover assets from the estates of beneficiaries after death. Estate recovery may trigger behavioral responses from older adults who may no longer view real estate as an attractive asset, may borrow money from home equity to cover the cost of increasing care needs, or may avoid enrolling in Medicaid altogether. 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

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

The number of older Americans who are food insecure is growing, yet a recent Trump administration decision to terminate data collection of the annual Food Security Supplement will make it impossible to fully track this growth. More

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

The potential adverse effects of social media use for adolescents have received substantial attention. In response, a growing number of state-level social media regulations are emerging in the United States. These policy interventions are being implemented in the context of mixed scientific evidence, forcing policymakers to weigh the need for proactive regulation against the limitations of extant research. We explore policymakers’ publicly stated rationales for social media regulations and contextualize their claims within extant scientific literature. More