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The article discusses the advancing Health Equity through the Political Determinants of Health and the Health Equity Tracker. It mentions that Daniel Dawes, Director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute and the author, innovator, and founder of the Political Determinants of Health, a health equity framework, and has dedicated his career to the one-day elimination of inequities in healthcare.

The article discusses several recommended measures on how to improve access and affordability of insulin in the U.S. It offers overview of the challenges faced by people living with diabetes due to the rising cost of insulin, forcing them to choose between purchasing their medications or paying for other necessities. It also mentions the effort of the American Diabetes Association's working group to ascertain the full scope of the insulin affordability problem in the country.

Recent scientific and policy initiatives frame clinical settings as sites for intervening upon inequality. Electronic health records and data analytic technologies offer opportunity to record standard data on education, employment, social support, and race-ethnicity, and numerous audiences expect biomedicine to redress social determinants based on newly available data. However, little is known on how health practitioners and institutional actors view data standardization in relation to inequity. This article examines a public safety-net health system's expansion of race, ethnicity, and language data collection, drawing on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 32 qualitative interviews with providers, clinic staff, data scientists, and administrators. Findings suggest that electronic data capture institutes a decontextualized racialization within biomedicine as health practitioners and data workers rely on biological, cultural, and social justifications for collecting racial data. This demonstrates a critical paradox of stratified biomedicalization: The same data-centered interventions expected to redress injustice may ultimately reinscribe it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing is a fundamental right and a vital determinant of health. Health equity is not possible without widespread access to safe. affordable. high-quality housing. Local housing policy is a central conduit for advancing such ends. However, preemption of local law is a powerful institutional mechanism that state legislatures sometimes deploy to inhibit or nullify municipal efforts to address housing-based inequities. Local housing policies often have high stakes, are ideologically laden, and are politically salient. This makes them a clear target for preemptive action. Political science research to date has focused on broadly explaining the causes of preemption, with scant emphasis on its consequences and minimal attention to the implications for racial and economic equity. This article highlights the political repercussions of state preemption. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews, the article examines how local tenant organizations that work to build power within racially and economically marginalized communities perceive and respond to state preemption. The findings demonstrate how both the reality and the threat of state preemption prompt tenant organizations to adjust (and often minimize) their policy goals and to adapt their political strategies in ways that strain their capacity. By burdening local organizations that are crucial powerresources in marginalized communities, state preemption of local housing policy risks entrenching inequity and eroding democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the Global North, policymakers invest in large-scale integration of health-data infrastructures to facilitate the reuse of clinical data for administration, research, and innovation. Debates about the ethical implications of data repurposing have focused extensively on issues of patient autonomy and privacy. We suggest that it is time to scrutinize also how the everyday work of healthcare staff is affected by political ambitions of data reuse for an increasing number of purposes, and how different purposes are prioritized. Our analysis builds on ethnographic studies within the Danish healthcare system, which is internationally known for its high degree of digitalization and well-connected data infrastructures. Although data repurposing ought to be relatively seamless in this context, we demonstrate how it involves costs and trade-offs for those who produce and use health data. Even when IT systems and automation strategies are introduced to enhance efficiency and reduce data work, they can end up generating new forms of data work and fragmentation of clinically relevant information. We identify five types of data work related to the production, completion, validation, sorting, and recontextualization of health data. Each of these requires medical expertise and clinical resources. We propose that the implications for these forms of data work should be considered early in the planning stages of initiatives for large-scale data sharing and reuse, such as the European Health Data Space. We believe that political awareness of clinical costs and trade-offs related to such data work can provide better and more informed decisions about data repurposing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I All Health Politics is Local i proclaims its argument right from the bold cover, but Merlin Chowkwanyun's judicious and timely framing makes this historical scholarship well worth a deep read by folks far beyond the health policy field. Merlin Chowkwanyun, All Health Politics is Local: Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022, 352 pp. All health politics I is i local, but it coexists with 'larger parallel currents (of) recurrent economic turbulence, parasitic national energy infrastructure, and unforeseen new stakeholders in the health arena' (p. 234). [Extracted from the article]

Recent trends in U.S. health have been mixed, with improvements among some groups and geographic areas alongside declines among others. Medical sociologists have contributed to the understanding of those disparate trends, although important questions remain. In this article, we review trends since the 1980s in key indicators of U.S. health and weigh evidence from the last decade on their causes. To better understand contemporary trends in health, we propose that commonly used conceptual frameworks, such as social determinants of health, should be strengthened by prominently incorporating commercial, political-economic, and legal determinants. We illustrate how these structural determinants can provide new insights into health trends, using disparate health trajectories across U.S. states as an example. We conclude with suggestions for future research: focusing on structural causes of health trends and inequalities, expanding interdisciplinary perspectives, and integrating methods better equipped to handle the complexity of causal processes driving health trends and inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most social determinants of health are shaped by political decisions. However, beyond specific policies, there is limited empirical investigation into the consequences of the changing political context on population health in the United States. We examine a salient political factor—the party of the president and governor—as a determinant of infant health between 1971 and 2018 using a battery of fixed-effects models. We focus on infant health because it has far-reaching implications for future population health and inequality. Our analysis yields three findings: (1) Democratic presidents have a beneficial effect on infant health outcomes, with stronger effects for Black infants compared to White infants. (2) The president's party effect materializes after two years of a Democratic transition, and remains elevated until the end of the party's tenure in office. (3) Specific measurable social policies appear to play a minor role in explaining the beneficial effect of Democratic administrations. Our findings suggest the party in power is an important determinant of infant health, particularly among vulnerable populations, and they invite a deeper examination of mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: There is significant research regarding health‐care preferences in other nations and racial preference for health‐care providers. However, minimal research examines health‐care reform preferences in the United States. Therefore, this study aims to fill this void by demonstrating how a subterranean agenda, or attitudes toward race that manifest themselves into policy, at least partially drove public opinion regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Methods: Drawing from a nationally representative sample in the 2012 Blair Center–Clinton School Poll, this study examines how various "subterranean" elements in addition to economic, demographic, sociological, ideological, regional, and conditional factors shaped attitudes toward the ACA. Results: Testing multiple hypotheses, we found that a subterranean agenda shaped preferences for ACA along with various other factors, such as presidential approval, individuals' perception regarding the role of the federal government, ideology, feeling toward blacks, feeling toward the Tea Party, and a conditional effect between a person's financial status and feeling toward blacks. Conclusion: Preference for ACA is complex and driven by a multitude of factors. Future studies should explore the dynamics of public opinion over time and other state‐level and temporally driven factors that may increase or decrease the probability of individuals supporting health‐care reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When crafting and passing health care reform, did policy makers appreciate and attempt to address potential implementation and sustainability challenges, or were they largely oblivious to the reality that adoption of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would not automatically settle its future? Utilizing in-depth, in-person interviews with the key congressional actors who were most directly involved in the ACA's genesis and approval, I examine this heretofore unexplored matter. I find that the legislative players failed to recognize the significance of the ACA's post-enactment period, and that pre-enactment choices might shape the law's trajectory. After discussing various aspects of policy makers' shortsightedness, I raise five possible explanations for what may appear to be my intuitively illogical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The table of contents for the issue is presented along with information on the journal's Editor Steven N. Durlauf, and its Board of Editors.

Andrew Goodman-Bacon of Vanderbilt University reviews '150 Years of ObamaCare,' by Daniel E. Dawes. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: 'Delineates the development, promotion, and implementation of ObamaCare, examining both the health-care statute and its implications. Analyzes the legal, political, and historical issues impacting the health care law and the process by which it was developed.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]