Professor Ertharin Cousin has been fighting to end global hunger for decades. As executive director of the World Food Programme from 2012 until 2017, she led the world’s largest humanitarian organization with 14,000 staff serving 80 million vulnerable people across 75 countries. As the US ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture, she served as the US representative for all food, agriculture, and nutrition related issues.
Prior to her global work, Cousin lead the domestic fight to end hunger. As chief operating officer at America’s Second Harvest (now Feeding America), she oversaw operations for a confederation of 200 food banks across America that served more than 50,000,000 meals per year.
Stanford School of Medicine Senior Communications Strategist Paul Costello will interview Professor Cousin about her experiences, unique pathway, and the way forward for ending the global hunger crisis.
U.S. government aid for treating children and adults with HIV and malaria in developing countries has done more than expand access to lifesaving interventions: It has changed how people around the world view the United States, according to a new study by researchers at the School of Medicine.
Compared with other types of foreign aid, investing in health is uniquely associated with a better opinion of the United States, improving its “soft power” and standing in the world, the study said.
Favorability ratings of the United States increased in proportion to health aid from 2002 to 2016 and rose sharply after the implementation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 2003 and the launch of the President’s Malaria Initiative in 2005, the researchers report.
“Using data on aid and opinions of the United States, we found that investments in health offer a unique opportunity to promote the perceptions of the United States abroad, in addition to disease burden relief,” the authors wrote. “Our study provides new evidence to support the notion that health diplomacy is a net win for the United States and recipient countries alike.”
The Trump administration, however, has proposed a 23% cut in foreign aid in its 2020 budget, including large reductions to programs that fight AIDS and malaria overseas.
The Stanford researchers believe their study is the first to add heft to the argument that U.S. health aid boosts the “soft power” that wins the hearts and minds of foreign friends and foes.
“Our study shows that investing in health aid improves our nation’s standing abroad, which could have important downstream diplomatic benefits to the United States,” Jakubowskisaid. “Investments in health aid help the United States accumulate soft power. Allowing the U.S. reputation to falter would be contrary to our own interests.”
A Policy Debate
Many politicians and economists consider spending U.S. tax dollars on foreign aid as an ineffective, and possibly harmful, enterprise that goes unappreciated and leads to accusations of American meddling in other countries’ national affairs.
The U.S. government, for the past 15 years, has contributed more foreign health aid than any other country, significantly reducing disease burden, increasing life expectancy and improving employment in recipient countries, the authors wrote. Still, this generosity has historically constituted less than 1% of the U.S. gross domestic product.
“Our results suggest that the dollars invested in health aid offer good value for money,” the researchers wrote. “That is, the relatively low investment in health aid (in terms of GDP) has provided the United States with large returns in the form of improved public perceptions, which may advance the U.S. government’s ability to negotiate international policies that are aligned with American priorities and preferences.”
The researchers used 258 Global Attitudes Surveys, based on interviews with more than 260,000 respondents, conducted by the Pew Research Center in 45 low- to middle-income countries between 2002 and 2016.
Their analysis focused on the health sector, which includes several large programs for infectious disease control, but also support for nutrition, child health and reproductive health programs. They compared health aid to other major areas of U.S. investment: governance, infrastructure, humanitarian aid and military aid. They also constructed a database of news stories that mentioned the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief or the President’s Malaria Initiative by crawling through the online archives of the top three newspapers by circulation in each of the 45 countries.
They found that the probability of populations holding a very favorable opinion of the United States was 19 percentage points higher in the countries where and years when U.S. donations for health care were highest, compared with countries where and years when health aid donations were lowest. Using another metric, the researchers found that every additional $100 million in health aid was associated with a nearly 6 percentage-point increase in the probability of respondents indicating they had a “very favorable” opinion of the United States.
In contrast, the researchers found, aid for governance, infrastructure, humanitarian and military purposes was not associated with a better opinion of the United States.
Bendavid, an infectious diseases physician and core faculty member of Stanford Health Policy, said that when he set out to conduct this research, he believed it would result “in a resounding thud” — that the “soft power” of health aid would have no impact on public opinion.
“For me, the notion that this program — hatched and headquartered in D.C. — would have impacts among millions in Nairobi and Dakar, seemed farfetched,” Bendavid said. “I was incredulous until all the pieces were in place.”
The ‘America First’ Agenda
The Trump administration’s “America First” agenda is calling for significant cuts to global health aid, particularly to the highly successful AIDS relief program, which was established by President George W. Bush. The administration’s budget, released in March, proposed a $860 million cut to the program; the President’s Malaria Initiative is facing a $331 million reduction in federal funding. That’s a decline of 18% and 44%, respectively.
The U.S. contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria would also decline by 17%, or $225 million, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Yet beyond the reputational damage to the United States, such cuts could be a major setback to improving health outcomes in developing countries, the researchers said. After all, HIV knows no borders, and having more resilient health care systems is instrumental when facing public health crises, such as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jakubowski said.
“The most direct impact of cutting the United States’ health aid allocations is the potential to undermine or reverse the progress that has been enabled by U.S. aid in curbing mortality and the spread of disease,” Bendavid said. “However, this study suggests there are also repercussions to the United States: the relationships the U.S. has built with recipient nations could also be undermined.”
Other Stanford co-authors are Steven Asch, MD, MPH, professor of medicine, and former graduate student Don Mai.
Stanford’s Department of Medicine supported the work.
Sarita Panday’s personal and professional journey from a childhood in a small village in Nepal to an academic career that has taken her across the globe to Australia, Europe, and now Stanford is a story that speaks to the power of education as a life-transforming and world-changing force. Sarita is our 2018-19 postdoctoral fellow in Asia health policy and her research focuses on improving maternal health service provision in Nepal.
The Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellowship is offered annually by APARC’s Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP). On May 1, Sarita will present her research at a seminar cosponsored by AHPP and the Center for South Asia. We caught up with Sarita to learn about her work, the state of maternal health and education in Nepal, and what’s next for her career.
Q: Your research interests include health service delivery and human resources for global health, and your PhD project explored the role of female community health volunteers in maternal health service provision in Nepal. What is the state of maternal health in Nepal? How does it compare to other areas in South Asia?
While substantial progress in maternal health has been achieved over the last two decades, Nepal still has high rates of maternal deaths compared to its neighbouring countries. According to UN estimates, maternal mortality ratio (number of deaths due to pregnancy-related causes per 100,000 live births) is one of the highest in Nepal (258) compared to India (174), Bangladesh (176), Pakistan (176) or Sri Lanka (30). Maternal deaths in Nepal’s rural areas are three times likely to be higher than in urban areas. Therefore, my research focuses on improving maternal health status in rural area.
Q: Tell us about your current research: What questions/problems you're exploring? What are some of the findings your work has revealed?
As the 2018-19 Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at APARC, I am currently working on publications based on my PhD, which focused on improving healthcare for marginalized women in rural Nepal. My next paper, forthcoming in PLOS One, explores the underuse of healthcare services among Nepal’s marginalized communities. In this paper, I analyze the factors that hinder use of healthcare by certain ethnic groups such as Dalits (the lowest group within the Hindu caste system), Madhesi (people living in the southern plains of Nepal, close to the border with India), Muslim, and Chepang and Tamang (indigenous groups in hill villages). These ethnic groups face barriers to health service use that include lack of knowledge, lack of trust in volunteers, traditional beliefs and healthcare practices, low decision-making power among women, and perceived indignities experienced when using health centers. Therefore, community health programs aimed to improve healthcare use among such populations should consider these specific contextual elements along with health system factors.
My next manuscript (in preparation) focuses on the importance of paying community health workers, which is also one of the key findings of my PhD. I found that women volunteers appeared to be highly dissatisfied by the lack of financial incentives for their services and wanted remuneration. This finding contradicts previous claims that reported community health volunteers were happy with their status. I have just finished a first draft of the manuscript and will soon send it for review.
Apart from my fellowship at Stanford, I am volunteering to form a team of interdisciplinary researchers to improve maternal and child health among marginalized communities in Nepal. I am doing this as part of my role as an honorary research fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield, where I also earned a PhD in public health. I recently organized a workshop in the UK to leverage partnerships across universities and the local NGO PHASE Nepal. During the workshop, I shared my experience of using participatory approaches (such as participatory video methods and policy workshops) to connect communities with policymakers, and I plan to use similar participatory approaches in my future research. The workshop successfully generated support from colleagues and the local partner.
Q: Your personal and professional journey has taken you from growing up in rural Nepal to pursuing a doctorate in Britain and now a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford. How would you describe the situation of Nepal’s higher education system, and the demand for foreign education in the country? What are some of the lessons you have learned throughout your own years of international education?
Although Nepal has a long history of education, the current formal education system was formed only in 1951, after the establishment of democracy. In the short period since then, Nepal has made substantial progress in adult literacy rate (from 20.6 % in 1981 to 64.7 % in 2015), but the quality of the public education system remains questionable, with low opportunities for employment. There has been some improvement since the beginning of technical education as a formal sector in 1980: the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology is responsible for education in Nepal and there are currently a total of nine constituent universities with 90 affiliated universities and 1012 campuses. However, the quality of education in Nepalese universities is often controversial due to their being a playground for major political parties. And despite the government’s promises to increase its spending on public education the education budget appears to be cut each year.
As for my own experience, I graduated with a BSc Nursing degree in Nepal without realizing that I wouldn’t get a placement within the public sector. The government hasn’t yet created a position for graduates like me, which forced me to seek a job in the private sector. While I managed to find a well-paying if strenuous job in remote Nepal, I saw many colleagues who struggled to find jobs that matched their qualifications. Some of them worked voluntarily or in low-paying positions. While the Nepalese government continues to produce graduate nurses there’s no system to retain them, despite a severe scarcity of human resources for health.
Q: What's next for your career? What issues are you going to focus on in your upcoming research project?
I have recently been appointed as a Global Challenge Fellow at the University of Sheffield to work on a two-year research project in Nepal. Starting this July, I will work with rural women in two Nepalese districts (Dhading and Sindhupalchok), conducting participatory co-designed research aimed to raise awareness and understanding of the social, cultural, economic, and political factors that hamper women’s access to healthcare services. I plan to use participatory approaches, such as participatory video methods and policy workshops, to connect communities with policymakers, and to partner with PHASE Nepal to improve utilization of healthcare among the country’s marginalized populations.
I’m excited to share my work with the Stanford community in an upcoming seminar on May 1, and hope to see many friends and colleagues there.
Fourteen years ago, Stanford Health Policy’s Douglas K. Owens and colleagues published a cost-effectiveness analysis that would change the face of HIV prevention. Their landmark study in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that expanding HIV screening would increase life expectancy and curb transmission of the disease — and was cost effective in virtually all health-care settings.
Not long after their model-based results were published, their findings became key evidence in the decision to expand screening by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their work has been used in HIV screening guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — which Owens now chairs — the American College of Physicians and the Department of Veterans Affairs, among others.
Owens and his Stanford colleague Margaret Brandeau, professor of management science and engineering, have led this team of decision scientists who have been at the forefront of developing scientific models for the screening and prevention of HIV for two decades now. This modeling team — which also includes colleagues from UCSF and Yale — has published nearly 250 peer-reviewed studies and is one of the most experienced and respected in the world.
But today, the opioid epidemic is threatening the hard-fought gains in the prevention and control of HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV). In support of their continued work to address the opioid epidemic, Owens received a highly prestigious MERIT award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA),which provides up to 10 years of funding for the team.
“We are extremely grateful to NIDA for this support and to our colleague at NIDA, Dr. Peter Hartsock, who has worked with us for over 20 years to mitigate the harms from HIV and HCV,” said Owens.
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The team will now turn its sights on the complex interplay of the opioid epidemic, and HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission. The transmission of HCV has been fueled by the opioid epidemic, and HCV now kills more Americans than all other infectious diseases combined.
“The unfolding opioid epidemic is a defining challenge for the public health and medical systems in the United States,” Owens, the principal investigator of the team, and his colleagues wrote in their grant proposal. “The reversal of life expectancy growth in the demographic groups most affected by the opioid epidemic represents the aggregation of a complex web of harmful public health and population trends, including a rise in overdoses, suicides, mental health afflictions, economic disadvantages, and infectious disease outbreaks.”
Indeed, for the first time since the 1960s, the U.S. life expectancy has contracted for the second year in a row; drug overdoses have been the leading cause of death for Americans under age 50, with an estimated two-thirds of those deaths resulting from opioids.
Since the last renewal of their NIDA-funding grant in 2013, the team has watched the dramatic rise of opioid overuse, injection drug use, and overdose become a national public health crisis, with more than 60,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States reported by the CDC.
“The growing use of needle-based opioids increases the likelihood of accelerating HIV and HCV transmission,” said co-investigator Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, an associate professor of medicine and core faculty at Stanford Health Policy. “Identifying the best combination of approaches to reduce HIV and HCV transmissions stemming from the opioid epidemic is of critical public health importance.”
The other co-investigators on the team of the project, “Making Better Decisions: Policy Modeling for AIDS and Drug Abuse,” are:
Eran Bendavid, an infectious diseases physician and associate professor of medicine at Stanford who is another a seasoned HIV modeler and outcomes expert;
Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and a former senior policy advisor in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy;
David Paltiel, a Yale School of Public Health professor who pioneered policy options for mitigating the impact of HIV in the United States and abroad;
Gregg Gonsalves, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale and a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow who will focus on developing new algorithms to detect and predict opioid-related outbreaks of HIV and HCV;
James Kahn of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics and an expert on the individual and population impact of prevention and treatment for HIV, HCV and opioid use.
The End of AIDS?
Toward 2012, a series of scientific advances led to calls for “the end of AIDS.” The two big factors were the cost of the “triple cocktail” of antiretrovirals plunging in developing countries and then huge donations from wealthy countries began pouring in to fight the disease.
Yet the researchers say successes have been too few and that the incidence of HIV remains far too high. About 40 million people were living with HIV around the world in 2017; an estimated 940,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses that same year.
"Although it was started by prescription opioid overprescribing, the epidemic has evolved to include significant injection opioid use which is now threatening to significantly increase the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C,” said Humphreys.
The most visible example of an opioid-related HIV outbreak took place in Scott County, IN, in 2014-2015. A single infection introduced into the community resulted in nearly 200 new HIV cases within six months, largely related to oxymorphone injections. In 2017 and again in March 2018, two additional substantial outbreaks occurred in Scott County, likely linked to both risky sex and needle sharing.
In addition, the CDC has identified 220 counties in 26 states that are uniquely vulnerable to HIV and HCV outbreaks related to opioid injections.
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“Developing models that forecast high-risk areas for HIV and HCV is essential for aligning surveillance and public health interventions with risk,” said Brandeau, a leader in designing models for the prevention of HIV and hepatitis, especially in drug abuse disorders.
There have also been striking increases in the injection of opioids and heroin that are closely linked to the spread of viral hepatitis. In the demographic areas most affected by opioids, the researchers found, diagnoses of acute hepatitis have more than quadrupled — reversing trends of the previous decade. And in the country as a whole, the number of new HCV cases has nearly tripled since 2010.
“For any type of contact with an infected source such as a dirty needle, or even cocaine straws, HCV is by far the most rapidly transmissible of the blood-borne infections,” said Bendavid. “One of the challenging issues with hepatitis C is that its major health manifestations do not appear for many years after infection."
What’s the Plan?
In the next five years, the team intends to evaluate how strategies to prevent and mitigate the harms of opioid use can decrease the spread of HIV and HCV and thereby reduce morbidity and mortality from opioid use. They have four specific goals:
Model the effect of the opioid epidemic on transmission of HIV and HCV.
Model the epidemiological and population impacts of individual strategies to prevent and mitigate the harms of opioids and drug injection on HIV and HCV outcomes by evaluating prevention strategies;
Model the epidemiologic and population impact of portfoliosof strategies to mitigate the harms of opioid use and drug injection on HIV and HCV outcomes;
And model the impact of barriers to implementation of effective strategies to reduce the harms of opioid use on HIV and HCV.
“We will perform novel analyses assessing intervention impacts singly and in combination assessing outcomes for HIV, HCV and opioid use disorder,” the researchers wrote in their grant proposal.
Then, the researcher will model new methods for building complex multi-intervention and multi-disease models and developing adaptive testing algorithms for identifying outbreaks.
Finally, the team intends to assess the barriers and intervention approaches “that more realistically reflect implementation issues than current models and hence identify resource needs for system planning.”
The IHEA awarded the 27th annual Arrow Award to Alsan, a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, a senior fellow at FSI and SIEPR, and co-author Wanamaker of the University of Tennessee for their paper, “Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
The infamous Tuskegee study began in 1932 when the U.S. Public Health Service began following approximately 600 African-American men, some of whom had syphilis, for the stated purpose of understanding the natural history of the disease. The government willingly withheld treatment even after penicillin became an established magic bullet for treating the illness.
The medical doctors and staff of the CDC followed the men for four decades, until ultimately the study was halted in 1972 when it was brought to the attention of the media by law student Peter Buxtun.
As noted in this story about the research, Alsan and Wanamaker found that the public disclosure of the study in 1972 was associated with an increase in medical mistrust and mortality among African-American men in the immediate aftermath of the revelation.
“The award is an immense honor for both Marianne and me. First, it sheds light on the importance of history for understanding health disparities. Second, it reaffirms the “expected behavior of the physician” that Professor Arrow eloquently described in his seminal 1963 paper on the distinctive features of the market for medical care and the externalities associated with deviating from those expectations.”
African-American men today have the worst health outcomes of all major ethnic, racial and demographic groups in the United States. Life expectancy for black men at age 45 is three years less than their white male peers, and five years less than for black women.
When their working paper was first published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, it became part of the national discussion about the lasting impact of the Tuskegee study.
“The story that Alsan and Wanamaker uncovered is even deeper than the direct effects of the Tuskegee Study,” wrote Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic. “Their research helps validate the anecdotal experiences of physicians, historians, and public health workers in black communities and gives new power to them.”
The United States is the only country in the 35-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that offers no paid leave to new mothers. The U.S. also has relatively poor infant health ratings, particularly for preterm births and infant mortality.
So why has the federal government been so reluctant to join other industrialized nations in paying new mothers to stay at home so they can nurture and nourish these new citizens?
“There’s opposition from business interests arguing that any type of mandate on employers imposes too large costs, especially for small businesses,” said Stanford Health Policy’s Maya Rossin-Slater. “There’s not much empirical evidence supporting this argument, but I think the strong political opposition from business supporters may be a central reason for a lack of action on the federal level.”
In a policy brief published March 28 in Health Affairs, Rossin-Slater, an assistant professor of health research and policy, lays out the evidence that suggests the introduction of paid family leave (PFL) for up to one year in duration may yield significant child and maternal health benefits, both in the short and long term. Her co-author on the brief is Lindsey Uniat, a predoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
“Existing research suggests that when leave is paid, take-up rates are higher among low-income and disadvantaged families than when it is unpaid, which enables more families to benefit,” they wrote.
Some of the short- and long-term health benefits include decreased incidence of low birthweight and preterm births, increased breast-feeding, reduced rates of hospitalizations among infants and improved maternal health.
Family and Medical Leave Act
The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 provides 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave with continued health insurance coverage to attend to a newborn or adopted child, a family member, or an employee’s own serious health condition. There are strict eligibility requirements for the FMLA, such as needing to have worked at least 1,250 hours for an employer with 50 or more employees during the 12 months before the start of the leave.
The most recent data, according to the authors, indicate that only about 60 percent of private-sector workers are eligible for FMLA, and 46 percent of those eligible report not being able to afford taking unpaid time off work.
Six states and the District of Columbia have passed paid family leave policies, and the issue has been receiving attention at both state and federal levels in recent years. California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island, as well as Puerto Rico, have State Disability Insurance (SDI), which provides partial wage-replaced leave for workers with temporary disabilities and for mothers preparing for and recovering from childbirth. These policies offer up to six weeks of leave postpartum for vaginal deliveries and eight weeks for C-section deliveries.
“In contrast, mothers and children from less advantaged backgrounds particularly benefit from access to paid leave,” they said, noting that one study showed that the introduction of paid maternity leave through the SDI system in five states led to a reduction in the share of low birthweight and preterm births, especially for unmarried and black mothers.
Rossin-Slater and Uniat believe paid family leave may affect population health through multiple channels:
Children of parents who take leave may receive more parental care, breast-feeding and immunizations if parents are able to stay home longer after birth;
Child health may improve from the extra resources that parents get form PFL benefits, such as more nutritious food;
Infant and long-term health outcomes may improve if PFL access lowers maternal stress during pregnancy, perhaps due to increased financial and job security;
Taking time off from work without the financial strain may improve the parental bond with the infant — leading to long-term health benefits for the child.
The Labor Market
Finally, existing research indicates that paid family leave may benefit the labor market by leading to fewer high-school dropouts, thus an increase in children’s future wages.
“Several policy takeaways are evidence from the research to date,” the authors wrote. “Paid leave, in contrast to unpaid leave, increases leave usage and duration, especially among disadvantaged parents who are least able to afford unpaid time off.”
More research is needed, they said, to understand how paid family leave legislation could impact employers.
“We know little about how employers deal with work interruptions due to employees’ taking leave or whether employers respond to PFL mandates by changing their own benefits packages, hiring practices, or other aspects of jobs,” they said.
Most studies that look at whether democracy improves global health rely on measurements of life expectancy at birth and infant mortality rates. Yet those measures disproportionately reflect progress on infectious diseases — such as malaria, diarrheal illnesses and pneumonia — which relies heavily on foreign aid.
A new study led by Stanford Health Policy's Tara Templin and the Council on Foreign Relations suggests that a better way to measure the role of democracy in public health is to examine the causes of adult mortality, such as noncommunicable diseases, HIV, cardiovascular disease and transportation injuries. Little international assistance targets these noncommunicable diseases.
When the researchers measured improvements in those particular areas of public health, the results proved dramatic.
“The results of this study suggest that elections and the health of the people are increasingly inseparable,” the authors wrote.
“Democratic institutions and processes, and particularly free and fair elections, can be an important catalyst for improving population health, with the largest health gains possible for cardiovascular and other noncommunicable diseases,” the authors wrote.
Templin said the study brings new data to the question of how governance and health inform global health policy debates, particularly as global health funding stagnates.
“As more cases of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancers occur in low- and middle-income countries, there will be a need for greater health-care infrastructure and resources to provide chronic care that weren’t as critical in providing childhood vaccines or acute care,” Templin said.
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Free and fair elections for better health
In 2016, the four mortality causes most ameliorated by democracy — cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, transportation injuries and other noncommunicable diseases — were responsible for 25 percent of total death and disability in people younger than 70 in low- and middle-income countries. That same year, cardiovascular diseases accounted for 14 million deaths in those countries, 42 percent of which occurred in individuals younger than 70.
Over the past 20 years, the increase in democratic experience reduced mortality in these countries from cardiovascular disease, other noncommunicable diseases and tuberculosis between 8-10 percent, the authors wrote.
“Free and fair elections appear important for improving adult health and noncommunicable disease outcomes, most likely by increasing government accountability and responsiveness,” the study said.
What Templin and her co-authors found was democracy was associated with better noncommunicable disease outcomes. They hypothesize that democracies may give higher priority to health-care investments.
HIV-free life expectancy at age 15, for example, improved significantly — on average by 3 percent every 10 years during the study period — after countries transitioned to democracy. Democratic experience also explains significant improvements in mortality from cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, transportation injuries, cancers, cirrhosis and other noncommunicable diseases, the study said.
Watch: Some of the authors of the study discuss the significant their findings:
What Templin and her co-authors found was democracy was associated with better noncommunicable disease outcomes. They hypothesize that democracies may give higher priority to health-care investments.
HIV-free life expectancy at age 15, for example, improved significantly — on average by 3 percent every 10 years during the study period — after countries transitioned to democracy. Democratic experience also explains significant improvements in mortality from cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, transportation injuries, cancers, cirrhosis and other noncommunicable diseases, the study said.
Foreign aid often misdirected
And yet, this connection between fair elections and global health is little understood.
“Democratic government has not been a driving force in global health,” the researchers wrote. “Many of the countries that have had the greatest improvements in life expectancy and child mortality over the past 15 years are electoral autocracies that achieved their health successes with the heavy contribution of foreign aid.”
They note that Ethiopia, Myanmar, Rwanda and Uganda all extended their life expectancy by 10 years or more between 1996 and 2016. The governments of these countries were elected, however, in multiparty elections designed so the opposition could only lose, making them among the least democratic nations in the world.
Yet these nations were among the top two-dozen recipients of foreign assistance for health.
Only 2 percent of the total development assistance for health in 2016 was devoted to noncommunicable diseases, which was the cause of 58 percent of the death and disability in low-income and middle-income countries that same year, the researchers found.
“Although many bilateral aid agencies emphasize the importance of democratic governance in their policy statements,” the authors wrote, “most studies of development assistance have found no correlation between foreign aid and democratic governance and, in some instance, a negative correlation.”
Autocracies such as Cuba and China, known for providing good health care at low cost, have not always been as successful when their populations’ health needs shifted to treating and preventing noncommunicable diseases. A 2017 assessment, for example, found that true life expectancy in China was lower than its expected life expectancy at birth from 1980 to 2000 and has only improved over the past decade with increased government health spending. In Cuba, the degree to which its observed life expectancy has exceeded expectations has decreased, from four-to-seven years higher than expected in 1970 to three-to-five years higher than expected in 2016.
“There is good reason to believe that the role that democracy plays in child health and infectious diseases may not be generalizable to the diseases that disproportionately affect adults,” Bollyky said. Cardiovascular diseases, cancers and other noncommunicable diseases, according to Bollyky, are largely chronic, costlier to treat than most infectious diseases, and require more health care infrastructure and skilled medical personnel.
The researchers hypothesize that democracy improves population health because:
When enforced through regular, free and fair elections, democracies should have a greater incentive than autocracies to provide health-promoting resources and services to a larger proportion of the population;
Democracies are more open to feedback from a broader range of interest groups, more protective of media freedom and might be more willing to use that feedback to improve their public health programs;
Autocracies reduce political competition and access to information, which might deter constituent feedback and responsive governance.
Various studies have concluded that democratic rule is better for population health, but almost all of them have focused on infant and child mortality or life expectancy at birth.
Over the past 20 years, the average country’s increase in democracy reduced mortality from cardiovascular disease by roughly 10 percent, the authors wrote. They estimate that more than 16 million cardiovascular deaths may have been averted due to an increase in democracy globally from 1995 to 2015. They also found improvements in other health burdens in the countries where democracy has taken hold: an 8.9 percent reduction in deaths from tuberculosis, a 9.5 percent drop in deaths from transportation injuries and a 9.1 percent mortality reduction in other noncommunicable disease, such as congenital heart disease and congenital birth defects.
“This study suggests that democratic governance and its promotion, along with other government accountability measures, might further enhance efforts to improve population health,” the study said. “Pretending otherwise is akin to believing that the solution to a nation’s crumbling roads and infrastructure is just a technical schematic and cheaper materials.”
The other researchers who contributed to the study are Matthew Cohen, Diana Schoder, Joseph Dieleman and Simon Wigley, from CFR, the University of Washington-Seattle and Bilkent University in Turkey, respectively.
Funding for the research came from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Stanford’s Department of Health Research and Policy also supported the work.
Americans know that choosing a health insurance plan can tough. And once you’re retired and possibly on a limited or fixed income, it can become downright brutal.
Stanford Health Policy’s M. Kate Bundorf and Maria Polyakova and their colleagues set out to develop an online decision-support tool to test whether machine-based expert recommendations would influence choice among Medicare Part D enrollees — and make it easier.
“The use of technology seems like a natural way to address the challenges of choosing among plans,” they write in their study published in Health Affairs.
Medicare beneficiaries have been choosing among Medicare Advantage and Part D prescription drug plans for years, and more recently the Affordable Care Act established health insurance marketplaces for those who are younger than 65.
All that choice is supposed to create incentives for plans to offer a variety of low-cost, high-quality products that allow people to choose the plan that best meets their needs.
But sometimes too many good choices can lead to bad outcomes.
“Health insurance is a complex financial product with complicated cost-sharing rules, and the implications of different benefit designs for out-of-pocket spending and health care use vary across consumers depending on their needs,” wrote Bundorf, chief of the Department of Health Research and Policy and an associate professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine.
Another researcher in the study was Albert Chan, chief of digital patient experience and an investigator at Sutter Health, in Palo Alto, as well as an adjunct professor at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. Ming Tai-Seale, a professor of family medicine and public health at University of California San Diego, was also a principal investigator of the study.
Choosing Health Plan is Complicated
“Consistent with these challenges, researchers have documented that many consumers, both young and old, do not understand the characteristics of their plans,” they wrote in the March issue of Health Affairs, which is holding a public briefing on patients-as-consumers at the National Press Club on March 5th. Bundorf will present their research at the briefing in Washington, D.C., which will be streamed live and will be posted here once it has aired.
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“(Patients) often make decisions that may signal inaccurate evaluation of the costs and benefits of coverage — such as staying in their plan when better options are available, not enrolling in the plan that provides the best coverage for their drugs, or enrolling in plans that are objectively inferior to other available choices,” the authors wrote.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) offers a tool to help beneficiaries choose among plans, but older adults — even those with high levels of formal education — find it difficult to use.
So, the research team developed a decision-support software tool called CHOICE to assist Medicare beneficiaries in choosing a Part D prescription plan. The software automatically imported the user’s list of current drugs from their electronic medical records (allowing users to adjust the list if desired); the algorithm would then crunch the numbers to come up with three recommended plans which were likely to be the least expensive for the user.
The team then conducted a randomized trial of this software tool among 1,185 patients of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), a large health-care provider in Northern California. Fifty-four percent of those patients were women, 65 percent were white, and 54 percent were married. Living in the Bay Area, their income and education levels were fairly high: They lived in areas in which the median income is $106,808 and 54 percent of the population has a college degree or more education.
While not representative of the general population of seniors in the United States, the researchers emphasized that it was important to conduct this study among these potential users, who are more likely to respond positively to an interaction with a computer. If these users didn’t find this software helpful or user friendly, it would not likely be a useful tool to roll out across the country as a whole.
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The study participants received access to one of two versions of the CHOICE tool: expert recommendations or individual analysis. Both versions automatically imported information on patients’ prescription drugs from their electronic health records and combined it with information on plan benefit design to provide individually customized information on users’ likely spending on both premiums and prescription drugs in each of the stand-alone Part D plans available in their area. The version of CHOICE that offered expert recommendations combined this information with an explicit recommendation on which plans were best for the user.
Willing and Able
The researchers found that providing an online tool not only increased older adults’ satisfaction with the process of choosing a prescription drug plan, but they also spent more time choosing that plan.
“The most significant finding of our trial is that individually customized information alone didn’t seem to be enough,” Bundorf, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), said in an interview. “The tool we developed was most effective when individually customized information paired with a clear-cut algorithmic expert recommendation that highlighted three plans that the computer thought were the best for the user based on total spending for prescription drugs.”
She said she was surprised to see that people spent more time choosing a plan and were more satisfied with the process when they had access to the CHOICE tool.
“Prior to our trial, I thought people might spend less time choosing a plan when they had access to expert recommendations because it would make the process easier,” Bundorf said. “But taken together, these results suggest that people are more engaged in decision-making when they have access to a patient-centered tool.”
Polyakova, who is also a faculty fellow at SIEPR, said a key takeaway from the trial is that people who are likely to use sophisticated tools are already more likely be more sophisticated shoppers of health care and prescription plans.
Opioids overdoses now kill more Americans than car accidents or guns, with more than 350,000 Americans having succumbed to the painkillers since 2000.
“The opioid misuse and overdose crisis touches everyone in the United States,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in this recent report. “The effects of the opioid crisis are cumulative and costly for our society — an estimated $504 billion a year in 2015 — placing burdens on families, workplaces, the health care system, states, and communities.”
Now, new research led by Stanford shows that not only have opioid-related deaths jumped fourfold in the last 20 years, but that those most affected by the epidemic, and where they live, has also shifted dramatically. In fact, the District of Columbia has had the fastest rate of increase in mortality from opioids, more than tripling every year since 2013.
“Although opioid-related mortality has been stereotyped as a rural, low-income phenomenon concentrated among Appalachian or midwestern states, it has spread rapidly, particularly among the eastern states,” writes Mathew V. Kiang, ScD, a research fellow at the Center for Population Health Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, in an original investigation published in JAMA Network Open.
The study found the highest rates of opioid-related deaths and more rapid increases in mortality were observed in eight states: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio. Two states, Florida and Pennsylvania, had opioid-related mortality rates that were doubling every two years — and tripling in Washington, D.C.
Kiang and his co-authors, including Stanford Health Policy’s Sanjay Basu, MD, PhD,an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine, used data from the National Center for Health Statistics and corresponding population estimates from the U.S. Census. The other authors are Jarvis Chen, ScD, at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Monica Alexander, PhD, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto.
“It seems there has been a vast increase in synthetic opioid deaths in the eastern states and especially in the District of Columbia because illicit drugs are often tainted with fentanyl or other synthetic opioids,” Kiang said in an interview. “People aren’t aware their drugs are laced and more potent than they expected — putting them at higher risk of overdose.”
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Synthetic opioid deaths now outnumber heroin deaths in these eastern states, which suggests fentanyl has spread to other illegal drugs and is no longer limited to heroin.
“The identification and characterization of opioid `hot spots’ — in terms of both high mortality rates and increasing trends in mortality — may allow for better-targeted policies that address the current state of the epidemic and the needs of the population,” the authors write.
The research suggests the opioid epidemic has evolved as three intertwined, but distinct waves, based on the types of opioids associated with mortality:
The first wave of opioid-related deaths was associated with prescription painkillers from the 1990s until about 2010.
From 2010 until the present, the second wave was associated with a large increase in heroin-related deaths.
And in the third and current wave, which began around 2013, the rapid increase is associated with illicitly manufactured synthetic opioids, such as tramadol and fentanyl.
“The evolution has also seen a wider range of populations being affected, with the spread of the epidemic from rural to urban areas and considerable increases in opioid-related mortality observed in the black population,” they write.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that African-Americans experienced the largest increase in opioid overdose deaths among any racial group from 2016 to 2017, with a 26 percent surge.
“The identification and characterization of opioid ‘hot spots’ — in terms of both high mortality rates and increasing trends in mortality — may allow for better-targeted policies that address the current state of the epidemic and the needs of the population,” the researchers write.
States are trying to combat the epidemic by enacting policies, such as restricting the supply of prescription drugs and expanding treatment and access to the overdose-reversing drug naloxone.
“Treating opioid use as a disorder should be our top priority to curb the problem,” said Kiang. “Similarly, we have the ability that counteract the effects of an overdose — these life-saving drugs should be easily accessible and widely available.”
This study examines the impact of social engagement on elderly health in China. A two-stage residual inclusion (2SRI) regression approach was used to examine the causal relationship. Our dataset comprises 9253 people aged 60 or above from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS) conducted in 2011 and 2013. Social engagement significantly improved the self-rated health of the elderly and reduced mental distress, but had no effect on chronic disease status. Compared with the rural areas, social engagement played a more important role in promoting the elderly health status in urban areas. Social engagement could affect the health status of the elderly through health behavior change and access to health resources. To improve the health of the elderly in China and promote healthy aging, the government should not only improve access to effective medical care but also encourage greater social engagement of the elderly.
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International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
