Politics and the distribution of federal funds: Evidence from federal legislation in response to COVID-19.

COVID-19 relief legislation offers a unique setting to study how political representation shapes the distribution of federal assistance to state and local governments. We provide evidence of a substantial small-state bias: an additional Senator or Representative per million residents predicts an additional 670 dollars in aid per capita across the four relief packages. Alignment with the Democratic party predicts increases in states' allocations through legislation designed after the January 2021 political transition.

Bending the curve through health reform implementation.

In September 2009, we released a set of concrete, feasible steps that could achieve the goal of significantly slowing spending growth while improving the quality of care. We stand by these recommendations, but they need to be updated in light of the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Reducing healthcare spending growth remains an urgent and unresolved issue, especially as the ACA expands insurance coverage to 32 million more Americans.

Biosimilars: policy, clinical, and regulatory considerations.

Purpose: The regulatory background surrounding biosimilars (biopharmaceuticals that are considered similar in composition to an innovator product, but not necessarily clinically interchangeable); equivalence, interchangeability, and unique considerations associated with biopharmaceuticals; the biopharmaceutical protein production process; scientific facts for use in the policy discussion about biosimilars; the European Union system for biosimilars; and the current status of biosimilars legislation in the United States are described.

Summary: An abbreviated regulatory pathway for the approval of biosimilars, and a process for safely demonstrating the therapeutic interchangeability of these proteins, has the potential to provide meaningful cost savings. This economic advantage to patients can translate into important public health benefits.

Bad medicine in the market.

Counterfeit medicines are an insidious threat to global health, and the risks they pose have been largely underestimated to date. Apart from failing to cure disease, they can cause mental and physical damage - and even death. Fake drugs containing insufficient active ingredients breed resistance, which can make standard drugs useless.

Introduction: rethinking child care research.

This introduction summarizes the articles in this collection. It describes how the articles address one or more of the key elements of the child care research model: (a) selecting and measuring the independent variablesto determine the characteristics ("qualities") of the child care environment (and, in some studies, the characteristics of parents and family), (b) selecting and measuring the dependent variablesto determine the child's physical and developmental status after a period of time in a particular child care arrangement (usually a school year) compared with that of children in other arrangements (or simply the same child before spending time in the arrangement), (c) establishing causal linksbetween the independent and dependent variables that are either assumed in randomized experiments or estimated through statistical controls in nonexperimental studies, and (d) assessing impacts across subgroups to see whether the program benefits one particular group more (or less) than others. The collection closes with a proposal to develop a systematic federal research program to pursue improvements in child care and early childhood education programs.