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By Donald Barr It is time to build a bridge across the health care chasm that divides our country. Without that bridge, we risk losing access to affordable, quality health care. This deep divide first began to appear in 2010, following adoption of the...

In The Political Determinants of Health, author Daniel E. Dawes examines how policy and politics influence the social conditions that generate health outcomes. The following passage is an excerpt from the book. Moving beyond Merely Nibbling at the Edges...

What makes a person healthy? Before 2020, most people in high-income countries would have said: good personal choices and good health insurance. After 2020, people everywhere—rich and poor alike—realize that their own good choices were not enough. Now, the...

For more than 20 years, the “Narrative Matters” section of the health policy journal Health Affairs has showcased some of the most compelling personal stories in health care. I have edited the section since the fall of 2012, following in the footsteps of Ellen...

I started researching trafficking and its attendant forms of child exploitation in the late 1990s. Back then, if I mentioned that I was working on “trafficking,” most people assumed I meant drug trafficking. A few even responded by telling me about their...

Among the most powerful artifacts I know of early American women’s work isn’t an artifact at all. It is the darkened wood around some eighteenth-century flooring, shown to me many years ago now by an architectural conservator at work in the Porter-Phelps...

The central theme in Prevention First: Policymaking for a Healthier America is that policymakers must place disease prevention at the center of our nation’s health policy. This is critical to improving the health of the United States – which is declining...

When we think about disparities in health status, it is common to view these inequities in terms of race. For example, we often look at infant mortality as an issue of race. In 2016, for every 1,000 babies born to black mothers in the United States, 11.4 died...

By the time of publication of the first edition of Governing Health: The Politics of Health Policy in 1996, the possibility of national health care reform – which had not long before seemed so bright – had severely dimmed. The Clinton Administration’s proposed...

Cesarean section is the most commonly performed surgery in the United States today, a stark turnaround from the 19th century when physicians dismissed cesareans as “sacrificial midwifery,” for good reason. The maternal death rate associated with the operation...