A blog written by Dr Stephen Bryen Policy Issues Dissected

With prevention, action is usually long-term, more complex to control, less visible, harder to measure and more likely to involve controversial choices, making it more difficult to make progress without building coalitions. Some actions to reduce social risks may be politically opposed by those who regard it as ‘social engineering’. Public (and private) administrative data offer the prospect of large amounts of information at relatively low cost. These data are created when people interact with public services and can be linked with rich survey data. Tanden, born to Indian immigrants, was raised in Massachusetts, and a Massachusetts housing policy played a pivotal role in her upbringing. It involves a systematic process of policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation, drawing upon research, stakeholder consultations, and political considerations.

• President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office on January 20, leaving less than a month for the Biden administration to tie up any loose policy ends.
• The constant changes created by different stages of the policy process mean that there can be different coalitions of both supporters and opponents as the issue moves over time.
• The debate has offered a test run of the highly anticipated 2025 tax debate, when the Trump-era tax cuts are set to expire.
• Public policy encompasses a wide range of areas, including economic development, social welfare, education, healthcare, environmental protection, and more.
• With the 2024 presidential election behind us, the United States will enter 2025 with a new administration and governing approach.

When you face the different types of problems you should also expect your policy influence strategy to look differently. A policy cannot be implemented right away in all cases, but that does not mean there are no other ways of influencing. There are several pharma-specific areas that could be impacted by the MAHA movement, including vaccine policy, the FDA’s drug regulatory process and a potential ban on pharmaceutical ads on TV. Here are some of the biggest health policy issues to look out for this year, according to Beltway experts.

The Policy Issue Itself

For more complex problems, it may not entirely be clear what is driving a problem, and feedback loops make it difficult to disentangle cause and effect. As societies have become more heterogeneous and diverse, with people’s lives and choices flanked by many different factors, policies aimed at the ‘average’ person tend blog written by Dr. Stephen Bryen not to work well. The program kicked into gear this year, with CMS unveiling the final prices of the first 15 drugs negotiated by Medicare in August, cutting the price of some drugs by up to 79%. Once a deal is negotiated, in this case lowering the cost of some drugs by 50 to 70%, her team drafted a proposal, and Tanden, as director, advised the president on it. White House director of the Domestic Policy Council Neera Tanden discusses the challenges, successes, and future of policymakers in national government. As lawmakers consider bipartisan legislation to prohibit PBMs from engaging in certain drug-pricing practices, pharmaceutical companies have been taking on PBMs with high-profile ad campaigns.

Key Public Policy Issues Today

“The Inflation Reduction Act, for the first time, granted Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices,” she said. One powerful way to raise awareness about a policy issue that’s important to you, get the attention of legislators, and even change public policy is by creating a petition. Even in the recent elections, Harris advocated for expanding Medicaid coverage for low-income communities across the country. While Trump is currently no longer calling to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act, research shows that the incoming president is likely to deprioritize health care coverage as he did in his previous term. It is not feasible to tackle the different types of problems in the same way and the policy influence you are likely to observe might look very differently in each case. For example, tackling a well-structured problem such as deploying a vaccination program is quite different from reaching an international agreement on climate change, an unstructured problem.

What Lies Ahead for the Federal Debt, Interest Rates, and the U.S. Economy

Longitudinal studies play an important role in research and policy because of the unique data they offer. They collect structured information on children, adults and households, often across multiple generations, and over many years and decades. Their explanatory and predictive power comes from their design, tracking the same people over time, rather than providing a snapshot of people’s lives at a point in time. The Nurse Review (2015) called for more emphasis on multi-disciplinary research, and a recent survey of civil servants on how they could deliver better public services found that the top issue was cross-team collaboration. Given the accent on policy delivery, when it comes to service delivery making sure each part of government’s ‘supply chain’ is not overwhelmed by policy initiatives is also critical. Many social policies can be difficult to formulate and implement well because they depend on a level of knowledge, mobilisation, governance and policy control that is rarely possible in real life.

The Trump administration’s industry-friendly approach is already partially playing out, with the president-elect recently meeting with the CEOs of Eli Lilly, Pfizer and industry lobbying group PhRMA at Mar-a-Lago. Since their meeting, Trump has spoken about targeting pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) rather than calling out Big Pharma directly. The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world that allow pharma companies to advertise branded drugs directly to consumers.