Health Care Politics and Policy
Research on health politics and policy for the near future will be driven by immediate attention to the 2010 health reform bill and by a set of short-term issues that require immediate attention and a set of issues that have long been on the agenda. Federalism is an important component of the 2010 reforms, especially the now-rejected claim of some states that the bill violates the states’ rights to not require insurance coverage, and continued claims that the bill will impose even greater Medicaid costs on the states will receive some research attention. The need for im-proved research designs to get a better understanding of how health policies affect access to care, improved understanding of how state health politics and policy institutions operate, better under-standing of the relationship between behavior and health, and between health and race and eth-nicity are among the longer-term items that are now receiving increased attention among re-searchers.