Political Institutions, Policies, and Public Health

Session Submission Type: Virtual Created Panel

Session Description

The papers on this panel consider how institutions—of various forms—shape population health both within the United States and across the world.

Ashley Moraguez examines how the 2010 decennial census may have impacted county-level preparedness for COVID-19 . She finds that population undercounts in 2010 adversely affected local government and hospital responses to the pandemic.

Erin Heidt-Forsythe and Heather Silber Mohamed examine how psychological, economic, and medical experiences with infertility vary by race and socioeconomic status in states with infertility mandates. They use the resulting findings to recommend reforms to infertility-related policy across the states.

Philip Petrov studies how governments allocate limited budget resources across medical treatments, and how they trade off between considerations of “rescue”(providing treatment where needed, regardless of cost effectiveness) and “efficiency” (prioritizing cost-effective treatments) when making these allocation decisions. To study this question, Petrov compares Australia, England, and Germany and finds that each nation has created institutions to help balance rescue and efficiency goals. Petrov discusses the implications of these findings for the allocation of resources to medical treatments in the United States.

Kelly McMann and Daniel Tisch examine whether democracies are less able than autocracies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. They propose that the evidence that suggests, to date, that democracies perform worse than autocracies in their pandemic response is in fact incorrect, owing to uneven reporting of COVID deaths across nations and differing spread of the pandemic across the globe in the early months of the crisis. Their paper reexamines the relationship between regime type and COVID fatalities using more complete and recent data.

Sub Unit

• Division 48: Health Politics & Health Policy

Individual Presentations

• COVID-19 and the Census: How the 2010 Census Affected the Pandemic Response - Ashley Moraguez, University of North Carolina, Asheville

• Infertility Mandates and the Politics of Inequality - Erin Heidt-Forsythe, Pennsylvania State University; Heather Silber Mohamed, Clark University

• Institutional Pluralism and Public Opinion in Healthcare Resource Allocation - Philip Petrov, Stanford University

• Regimes and COVID-19 - Kelly M. McMann, Case Western Reserve University; Daniel Tisch, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University

Chair

• Daniel J Mallinson Penn State, Harrisburg

Discussant

• Kelly B Smith Stetson University