Addressing Financial Toxicity in Cancer Care Through Medical Financial Assistance (MFA) Policy
This policy brief by Alyce Adams and Mateen Ghassemi examines the financial burden experienced by cancer patients and their families, impacting around half of cancer survivors.
Stanford Health Policy’s Maria Polyakova, PhD, and colleagues set out to measure how much doctors earn and, crucially, where their incomes fall within the overall income rankings of four wealthy countries: the US, Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands
Public Preschool Aids in Developmental, Learning-Related Diagnoses
New research by SIEPR and SHP scholars Adrienne Sabety and Maya Rossin-Slater shows how early exposure to public preschool benefits low-income children with behavioral and developmental conditions.
Study Finds Gaza Violent Death Toll Likely 35% Higher Than Official Estimates
A Study by Eran Bendavid in The Lancet Global Health finds the number of violent deaths in the Gaza Strip in the first year of the conflict with Israel was underreported
Post COVID-19 Hypertension: A Longitudinal Study of 40,000 Incarcerated Adults
SHP researchers and colleagues at the California Correctional Health Care Services find that COVID-19 is associated with significant increases in hypertension incidence in the large, racially and ethnically diverse prison population.
When AI Algorithms Decide Whether Your Insurance Will Cover Your Care
In this Health Affairs study, Stanford researchers examine the promises of efficiency and risks of supercharged flaws in the race to use artificial intelligence in health care.
In this NBER working paper, SHP courtesy faculty member Marcella Alsan, MD, PhD, shows that beneath the polarization over gun violence, owners and non-owners share a common objective: safety. But they disagree sharply about whether lethal firearms achieve it.
"Financial toxicity" describes the financial burden experienced by cancer patients and their families, impacting around half of cancer survivors. High treatment costs and associated expenses contribute to cancer being the leading cause of medical-induced bankruptcy among patients and caregivers. This policy brief concentrates on the implementation and impact of Medical Financial Assistance (MFA) programs as a key intervention to reduce financial toxicity for patients and their caregivers.
Marcella Alsan, an SHP courtesy faculty members, writes in this STAT opinion piece that mental illness and addiction can be curbed with proper funding.
Private equity (PE) firms have increasingly influenced U.S. health care, posing risks to health equity—the idea that everyone should have a fair opportunity for optimal health. While PE investors claim to improve efficiency, raise capital, and leverage economies of scale, evidence indicates that their involvement often leads to reduced access to affordable high-quality care, particularly for rural populations, older adults, low-income communities, and marginalized racial and ethnic groups. Without strong regulation and enforcement, PE practices are likely to continue transforming health care in ways that could harm patients and burden clinicians.
Children deprived of their liberty in the US juvenile justice, criminal justice, and immigration detention systems face profound and evolving health risks that demand a creative, sustained, and urgent pediatric response. These risks unfold within distinct but overlapping systems that share structural gaps in oversight, inconsistent standards of care, and a legacy of harm to children’s health and development. A promising opportunity lies in linking expertise across these systems to strengthen care, safeguard rights, and address the vulnerabilities of this often-overlooked population, which is disproportionately composed of racially and ethnically minoritized children.
The New England Journal of Medicine,
December 22, 2025
This New England Journal Medicine article highlights the research of Adrienne Sabety, PhD, assistant professor of health policy, about how she measured the loss of primary care physicians.
SHP's Maya Rossin-Slater, PhD, an assistant professor of health policy, writes in this Boston Globe editorial that the Brown University mass shooting renewed headlines about the debate over gun laws and blame. But after the headlines fade, the students who lived through it will be left to cope with the aftermath.
Stanford Law’s Lisa Larrimore Ouellette and SHP’s Josh Salomon co-author report to address a persistent flaw in the U.S. health system: prioritizing treatment investment based on market potential rather than medical necessity.
Researchers analyzed three decades of sanctions on foreign aid to assess their impact on health. They hope the work can help government officials better understand and address how foreign policy decisions affect the well-being of local populations.
Many U.S. states have legislated to allow nurse practitioners (NPs) to independently prescribe drugs. Critics contend that these moves will adversely affect quality of care.
Compartmental infectious disease (ID) models are often used to evaluate non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and vaccines. Such models rarely separate within-household and community transmission, potentially introducing biases in situations where multiple transmission routes exist. We formulated an approach that incorporates household structure into ID models, extending the work of House and Keeling.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),
September 18, 2023
Extreme air pollution events, like those from wildfires, negatively affect health through physiological responses but may also be salient enough to induce behavioral changes in individuals protecting their own health. The net impacts of these complex tradeoffs are poorly characterized. By joining the near-universe of emergency department visits in California from 2006 to 2017 with spatially and temporally resolved estimates of ambient wildfire smoke, we find total visits respond nonlinearly to increasing wildfire smoke concentrations, but that response differs by cause of visit. Total visits increase at lower concentrations but then decline at higher concentrations, suggesting that populations shift their behaviors following salient smoke periods. Whereas respiratory-related visits steadily increase, visits for accidental injuries and non-respiratory symptoms like stomach pains decline at high smoke concentrations.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, courts have limited the federal government’s ability to impose vaccination mandates; some judges have also questioned whether states must grant religious exemptions to vaccination mandates. The Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision in Groff v DeJoy2 concerning Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 raises new questions about the ability of private employers—including health care organizations—to enforce vaccination requirements for employees who have religious objections.
Low- to moderate-intensity statins were associated with a greater reduction in LDL-C levels in older persons than younger persons and may be more appealing as initial treatment in older adults who are at increased risk for adverse events.
