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Research on the disconnected worlds of academia and policy often highlights the potential for intermediary organizations to serve as research brokers incorporating academic research in the policy-making process. Yet, we know little about how this process plays out in practice. This article examines the degree to which the extensive academic research on the effects of the Affordable Care Act was incorporated within the high-profile legislative advocacy campaign aimed at blocking the law's repeal in early 2017. In this campaign, advocates gathered and produced information to support their legislative and mobilization efforts, making it a good case for examining the evidentiary basis underlying applied policy analysis. We identified little direct dissemination of academic studies and only a minor role for academic studies in this advocacy effort. Even so, we identify several pathways by which academic research was incorporated into the debate, primarily through the efforts of academics to publish timely analysis in venues more accessible to advocates than traditional scholarly journals. We conclude that academic research can play a role in advocacy, but it is typically an incomplete one. Instead, advocates tend to rely on research that is either produced or packaged by an array of governmental and nongovernmental policy organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) passed with no Republican votes and was accompanied by intense criticism that the reform was "rammed through" the legislative process by the majority party. By contrast, many Democrats emphasized the extensive yearlong debate over health care reform and argued that the final bill represented a compromise of good ideas from both parties.We undertake a policy-centered analysis to help reconcile these conflicting reports of this legislative episode. Drawing on real-time accounts published in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, we compare the success of Democratic and Republican Parties' policy proposals in terms of centrality to the policy agenda and inclusion in the enacted legislation. Our findings indicate that Republican-backed proposals were more present on the policy agenda than in the final legislation-although both were dominated by Democratic policy proposals. In this case, the major limit on majority party power seemed to be intraparty conflict, rather than opposition from the minority party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fact that disadvantaged people generally die younger and suffer more disease than those with more resources is gaining ground as a major policy concern in the United States. Yet we know little about how public values inform public opinion about policy interventions to address these disparities. This article presents findings from an exploratory study of the public's values and priorities as they relate to social inequalities in health. Forty-three subjects were presented with a scenario depicting health inequalities by social class and were given the opportunity to alter the distribution of health outcomes. Participants' responses fell into one of three distributive preferences: (1) prioritize the disadvantaged, (2) equalize health outcomes between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, and (3) equalize health resources between advantaged and disadvantaged groups. These equality preferences were reflected in participants' responses to a second, more complex scenario in which trade-offs with other health-related values -- maximizing health and prioritizing the sickest -- were introduced. In most cases, participants moderated their distributive preferences to accommodate these other health goals, particularly to prioritize the allocation of resources to the very sick regardless of their socioeconomic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]