Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Innovative Investigations of Health Policy and Public Preferences

(Health Policy)

This panel brings together four papers addressing the sources of beliefs and attitudes about health policy problems and solutions in the United States. The papers cover diverse topics – prescription opioid abuse, minimum wage policies as a social determinant of health, nurse practitioner gatekeeping in group care models, and the ACA – and examine the beliefs of both mass publics and policy-makers. They are united in their investigations of the underlying, often unconscious, motivations for policy choices that affect population health in the United States, with three papers using innovative survey-experimental methods and the fourth examining the content of local television, an under-examined but dominant source of information for Americans. The authors and presenters include leading analysts of opinions about population health policy as well as younger scholars, hailing from public health, public policy, social work, and political science. Haselswerdt and Rigby examine how state-level health policy advocates’ support for minimum wage increases are affected by policy frames focused on Health in All Policy ideas versus more traditional economic arguments. Kennedy-Hendricks et al. explore the sources of social stigma directed toward prescription opioid abusers, and show that members of the public who hold stigmatizing beliefs are more supportive of punitive policies and less supportive of public health-oriented policies. Lynch et al. examine how political partisanship and ideology are related to the degree of support for limits on insurance coverage of direct access to MDs in group care settings where nurse practitioners are gatekeepers. And Gollust et al. investigate local television news media coverage of the ACA during the first open enrollment period, finding a stronger focus on political controversies about the law than on reporting factual information about enrollment or the effects of the law.