The past 20 years have seen important changes in public policy with the potential for significant impacts on health insurance for children. These changes included both those explicitly intended to expand access to public insurance for children, including expansions in eligibility for Medicaid and the introduction of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), and other changes in ant...

The developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) hypothesis states that environmental influences in utero and in early life can determine health and disease in later life through the programming of genes and/or altered gene expression. The DOHaD is likely to have had an effect in South Africa during the fifty years of apartheid; and during the twenty years since the dawn of democracy in ...

In this paper it is argued that mischaracterization concerning the use of science in the U.S. policy process has lead to unreasonable expectations about the role that scientific information can play in the development of environmental and public health policies. This in turn has lead to implementation of misguided and self-defeating policy initiatives designed to ensure the objectivity or “soun...

Ever since the November 2002—July 2003 SARS outbreak, epidemiologists have worked to refine the use of computer simulations to help public policy decision-makers understand the real world dynamics of epidemic transmission and to assess the potential efficacies of various public health policies. Here we describe our attempt to help novice researchers understand epidemic dynamics with the help of...

Amid growing academic and policy interest in the influence of think tanks in public policy processes, this article demonstrates the extent of tobacco industry partnerships with think tanks in the USA, and analyzes how collaborating with a network of think tanks facilitated tobacco industry influence in public health policy. Through analysis of documents from tobacco companies and think tanks, w...

Background Epidemiological evidence on the social determinants of health inequity is well-advanced, but considerably less attention has been given to evaluating the impact of public policies addressing those social determinants. Methodological challenges to produce evidence on policy outcomes present a significant barrier to mobilising policy actions for health equities. This review aims to exa...

Prudent health care policies that encourage public-private participation in health care financing and provisioning have conferred on Singapore the advantage of flexible response as it faces the potentially conflicting challenges of becoming a regional medical hub attracting foreign patients and ensuring domestic access to affordable health care. Both the external and internal health care market...

Within the discipline of health promotion there has been long-standing understanding of the social determinants of health and life expectancy.1-3 There is also long-standing evidence of the unfair, unjust distribution of these resources within and among societies. It has proven difficult to translate this evidence of the need for the fairer distribution of socially-distributed resources into po...

The focus on public policy and health equity is discussed in reference to the current global health policy discussion on Universal Health Coverage (UHC). This initiative has strong commitment from the leadership of the international organizations involved, but a lack of policy clarity outside of the health financing component may limit the initiative’s impact on health inequity. In order to add...