Health
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Prenatal Home Visits Lead to Improved Child Health and Development Outcomes
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Home visiting programs during pregnancy have been shown to measurably improve child health and development outcomes. One such program, the Memphis Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), sent registered nurses to the homes of primarily African-American, unmarried, low-income, first-time mothers. The visits began during pregnancy and lasted until the children turned two…
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Why Don’t People Search for the Cheapest Health Care?
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According to a poll conducted by Monmouth University earlier this year, the cost of healthcare is the top concern for American families. This makes sense in the context of a health system in which the proliferation of high deductible health plans—where patients pay greater amounts before their insurers start contributing—have…
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Digital Health: The Next Frontier in Mental Health Care
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Uber, Airbnb, Seamless, Waze—Twenty years ago these concepts were a distant impossibility. Smart phone technology has given programmers, computer scientists and entrepreneurs tools to revolutionize traditional industries like hospitality, transportation and supermarkets. However, the emergence of new technology need not be limited to satisfying basic consumer needs. The ubiquity of…
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Revisiting Welfare Reform: Effects on Teenage Crime
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In the early nineties, politicians took up the task of reforming America’s welfare system. A bipartisan effort led to the creation of an employment-focused entitlement program: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Popularly known as “welfare reform”, the legislation had two basic goals: to increase financial independence…
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Do People Move to Gain Medicaid Benefits?
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The welfare migration hypothesis proposes the idea that people will move to a location because of the availability of social welfare programs. Frequently studied in international development, it is equally applicable to internal migration in the United States due to the wide variation in social welfare programs across states. This variation…
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Using Social Networks to Predict Gun Violence in Chicago
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As gun violence takes hundreds of lives each year in Chicago, academics, journalists and policy makers continue to debate the merits of viewing gun violence as a public health issue. While organizations like the American Public Health Association advocate in favor, others remain skeptical of extending the term “epidemic” beyond…
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Ethanol Cookstoves and Their Impact on Pregnant Women: Lessons from Nigeria
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In Nigeria and much of the developing world, kerosene and biomass fuels are used to provide energy for cooking, heating, and lighting. Reliance on these fuels leads to high levels of household air pollution (HAP), which causes 4.3 million premature deaths worldwide, according to a 2012 World Health Organization (WHO)…
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Quitting Smoking Can Increase Weight More Than We Thought
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Obesity is a growing health problem in the United States with prevalence rates rising from 13 percent in the 1960s to 35 percent in 2012. The United States has the highest obesity rate in the OECD, but the world is keeping pace: The World Health Organization has declared obesity to be…
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Healthy Habits: Using Behavioral Science in Health Policy
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Encouraging healthy behaviors is a significant policy challenge because efforts to spark conversation around a health topic often fail to translate into strategies that actually change collective health behaviors. Although campaigns might be successful at spreading information, such messages may not inspire people to act differently. For example, when the…
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Is Training Informal Healthcare Providers The Solution to India’s Doctor Shortage?
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India, like other developing countries, is struggling with a scarcity of formally trained medical professionals, especially in rural and isolated areas. This gap has fueled the proliferation of informal healthcare providers, known pejoratively as “medical quacks.” These untrained providers provide more than 70 percent of primary care in rural India.…
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U.S. DEA Report Indicates Tripling of Heroin Consumption Over Seven Years
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Heroin consumption in the United States nearly tripled between 2007 and 2014, and it is now the cause of 10,000 deaths per year, according to an annual report released by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The report, compiled from 1,444 surveys of a nationally representative sample of state, local,…