Original Scholarship

Context: Before the COVID-19 pandemic, persons with pregnancy Medicaid coverage were typically disenrolled after 60 days postpartum, at which point they could retain Medicaid only if they qualified through another eligibility category (most commonly as a parent). The March 2020 Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) extended postpartum Medicaid coverage by requiring states to pause disenrollment in exchange for enhanced federal funding. More

Mental health among US working-age adults notably worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, following a steady decades-long decline. The impact of states’ COVID-19 policies on mental health has received much attention; however, less is known about the impact of a broader set of long-standing and overarching state policy contexts. More

The alarming rise in US maternal mortality and disparities in perinatal, sexual, and reproductive health outcomes underscores the urgent need for effective, equitable, and evidence-based models of care. Care provided by certified nurse-midwives (CNMs) and certified midwives (CMs) has played a critical role in addressing these disparities, yet a comprehensive synthesis of its impact across health care quality domains is lacking. More

Racial disparities—unequal outcomes between racial groups—persist in the United States, particularly with respect to health and economic outcomes. There has been increased focus on the ways in which upstream determinants of health contribute to these disparities; however, little is known about how forced inaction on these upstream determinants affects health and economic outcomes. More

While public health research has examined the macro-level and structural determinants of health, the link between corruption and population health remains underexplored. More

About 280,000 older adults experience the “Medicare Cliff” each year, becoming eligible for Medicare and losing Medicaid coverage when they turn age 65 years due to discontinuities in financial eligibility criteria. More

We broaden our understanding of community power by going beyond traditional measures of voting and voting rights. Our objectives are to (1) create county-level measures of community power that are more expansive than voting and (2) explore the descriptive and geographic patterns of community power. More

The United States lags far behind other comparable nations on health indicators. To promote population health in cities, we argue for the right to Universal Basic Neighborhoods (UBN). More

Ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) now dominate the global food supply and are strongly associated with risks for heart disease, cancers, metabolic disease, diabetes, and obesity. UPFs are likely associated with rates of neurologic issues such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease and predict premature death. More

Inadequate descriptions of rurality limit comparisons across rural areas and can lead to overgeneralizations in health policy research. Single indicators of state-level rurality, such as rural population percentage or population density, are often used in isolation and fail to capture the multidimensional nature of rural character, obscuring important differences among states. More