Although health care access and affordability now ranks as Americans’ top domestic policy issue according to an April 2026 Gallup poll, a consistent definition remains elusive.  More

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health organizations periodically create lists of significant public health achievements in the United States and globally.  More

Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists have been adopted faster and more widely than any anti-obesity therapy prior.  More

For almost 40 years, Janice cared for Vincent, her son with a developmental disability, at their home in upstate New York.  More

Federal, state, and local governments have increasingly focused on innovation, hiring Chief Innovation or Technology Officers to find solutions to improve the delivery of benefits and services and to address unresolved health care issues.  More

I’ve been examining how public policies have facilitated the transformation of America’s health and medical care systems into today’s financialized and commercialized realities.  More

When I arrived in Geneva for the World Health Assembly in late May, the World Health Organization (WHO) was scrambling to contain two extremely…  More

For more than three decades, I have worked alongside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during many of the world’s most consequential biological threats—from the containment of SARS-CoV-1 and the West African Ebola epidemic to the global responses to Zika and COVID-19.  More

For patients who have exhausted evidence-based therapies—including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), atypical antipsychotics, and cognitive behavioral interventions—access to experimental treatments should be no less available than it is for individuals with refractory cancer or Parkinson’s disease.  More

Four decades ago, I and Gerald Markowitz published an article in the American Journal of Public Health that attracted a fair amount of attention. The article was about the history of the introduction of tetraethyl lead into gasoline in the 1920s.  The article detailed the controversy over putting lead, even then a known industrial poison and neurotoxin, into the gasoline that was powering the new automobile, particularly those that were produced by the General Motors Company.  More