From the 1960s to the present, advocates have introduced various criteria to highlight their diseases’ impacts, from mortality to health spending. These competing claims encouraged policymakers to seek formal ways to rank and compare diseases, creating pressure to standardize the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget across disease categories. NIH officials worried that the pursuit of narrow, disease-specific goals would funnel resources away from basic science and untargeted research. But while the proportion of the NIH budget targeting these goals declined slightly, the overall amounts increased dramatically, suggesting that specialized campaigns do not draw resources away from broader goals. The push for disease data did change how the government distributes money, bringing the funding distribution more in line with mortality rates. The effects of advocacy go beyond securing funding or passing favorable laws; advocacy also changes how policymakers define issues and judge policies, with concrete effects on funding distributions.
The impact of inequalities and health expenditure on mortality due to oral and oropharyngeal cancer in Brazil
