Health and Social Policy

As a state legislator in Massachusetts since 1985, I have seen the best and worst of state health policy-making. In 1988 the Massachusetts Legislature approved a measure intended to guarantee health insurance to all 600,000 uninsured state residents. The early steps under the law, covering students, the unemployed, and disabled adults and children, were preludes […]

One of the enduring metaphors of American federalism is that states serve as laboratories for the federal government. States are the basement tinkerers that generate ideas to solve big national problems. They are the crucibles for testing the safety and efficacy of new ideas before the whole country adopts them. State leaders, the argument goes, […]

What would happen if we legalized hard drugs? Here are six different plans for what to do after the end of drug prohibition—and why one of them makes the most sense.

Advocates of legalization confuse the effects of criminalizing drugs with the effects of social deprivation. They’re also blithely unrealistic about the impact of legalization on drug consumption and its social costs.

The shift of mentally ill patients out of institutions has not worked out the way supporters of deinstitutionalization wanted. But is the remedy a return to the asylum? Some neoconservatives think so.

With the recent flurry of proposals for universal health insurance, including a new plan submitted on June 5 by Majority Leader George Mitchell on behalf of the Senate Democratic leadership, a struggle that began three-quarters of a century ago in the United States entered another phase. Four times — in the Progressive Era, during the […]

AIDS is only one of many conditions that new diagnostics tests predict. But what is the purpose of insurance if people who might get sick are judged unacceptable risks?