President Trump is expected soon to make his first major announcement on drug pricing. So far, the administration’s most significant actions to address rapidly climbing drug prices have come from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has announced a series of steps to encourage competition as well as greater price transparency. In a new Commonwealth Fund brief, Waxman Strategies researchers say the FDA agenda has the potential to lower prescription drug prices. But the agency could make greater headway by using its authority to foster market competition and curb anticompetitive behaviors.

Read our recent tweetstorm on policy options that could get drug prices under control. These include: promoting “high-value” drugs that provide the most clinical benefit; increasing competition among drugmakers; and cracking down on the misuse of patent protections to block generics. And join the conversation by using the hashtag #DrugSpendingSolutions.

After years of health coverage gains following the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a new study shows uninsured rates are rising. The latest installment of the Commonwealth Fund ACA Tracking Survey, conducted in February and March, found that the uninsured rate among working-age people is 15.5 percent, up from 12.7 percent in 2016, meaning an estimated 4 million people lost coverage.

The uninsured rate is up significantly for lower-income adults living in households earning less than 250 percent of poverty, or about $30,000 for an individual, report researchers Sara Collins, Munira Gunja, Michelle Doty, and Herman Bhupal. It now stands at 25.7 percent, up from 20.9 percent in 2016.

Many analysts believed young men wouldn’t be helped much by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), largely because the penalties wouldn’t be large enough to convince them to buy insurance. But research from the Commonwealth Fund by New York University’s Sherry Glied and Ougni Chakraborty shows that, following the ACA’s enactment, coverage rates rose for all groups — including higher-income young men who aren’t eligible for the law’s premium subsidies.

Bundled payment programs will not be as effective as they could be in motivating behavior change unless they take into account lessons from behavioral economics, report Jeroen Struijs, a 2013–14 Dutch Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice and senior researcher at Netherlands’ National Institute of Public Health and the Environment, and colleagues. Their blog post, based on research undertaken with Commonwealth Fund support, was published in Health Affairs (April 25, 2018).

The U.S. health care system is the world’s seventh-largest producer of carbon dioxide, making it a major contributor to air pollution. In a post on To the Point, the Commonwealth Fund’s David Blumenthal, M.D., and Shanoor Seervai observe that recent environmental catastrophes have shown climate change can adversely affect the health care system’s ability to meet patients’ needs. These links suggest that health care organizations have both an opportunity and an obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A new interactive map allows users to locate and learn about proven care models for patients with complex needs. With this addition to the Better Care Playbook, users can search by state, target population, insurance status, and core model features.

In 1971, a Commonwealth Fund fellowship brought Haroutune Armenian, M.D., from the American University of Beirut to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, where he earned his doctorate in epidemiology. As part of our yearlong celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Commonwealth Fund, we interviewed Dr. Armenian about his globe-spanning career, during which he set up primary care centers in Bahrain, created a health surveillance and monitoring program in Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war, and assessed the health effects of the 1988 Armenian earthquake.

Addressing inequities in health and health care has been a hallmark of Commonwealth Fund philanthropy since the beginning. Former program officer Anne Beal, M.D., M.P.H., now chief patient officer at Sanofi, reflects on the legacy of the Fund’s Program on Quality of Care for Underserved Populations, which she led from 2002 to 2009, and its efforts to reframe national dialogue about health care disparities. In an accompanying Q&A, Pamela Riley, M.D., M.P.H., vice president for the Program on Health Care Delivery System Reform, describes the Commonwealth Fund’s current efforts to make health care work better for low-income Americans.

Read about the latest health policy developments in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and other nations.

Obesity is a grave public health threat that’s still on the rise in the United States. The latest federal data show that nearly 40 percent of adults were obese in 2015–16, up from 34 percent in 2007–08. In a To the Point post, the Commonwealth Fund’s David Blumenthal, M.D., and Shanoor Seervai argue that while solutions emphasizing food and diet may help in individual cases, policy solutions are required to fight the obesity epidemic nationally.