Health Care

In June 2018, the Aspen Health Strategy Group met for three days and took on hard questions related to the complex and nuanced challenges associated with chronic disease.

What would insuring more residents mean for Nebraska, Idaho, and Utah?

To meet its vast responsibilities for more than $2.5 trillion in products, the FDA should operate from a structure that best accommodates rigorous, science-based decisionmaking. This White Paper documents the growing demands on the agency and current barriers to regulatory efficiency, and provides supporting evidence for the Commissioners’ consensus recommendation on a two-step pathway to independence.

“Duty to warn” is when a doctor has a relationship with a patient and he or she has good reason to think that patient will harm a third party—the duty is to inform that third party and/or officials. To say that it extends to people or figures who are not your patient?

Over the last few years, vaccines have made headlines. Polio is on the cusp of global eradication, advances in technology offer the promise of new vaccines, and social media have contributed to the spread of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.

Six former FDA heads met at Spotlight Health and agreed the FDA should be an independent agency. But how would that work? The Health, Medicine and Society Program helped the commissioners to develop a plan to liberate the FDA.

In June 2016, six former Commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration convened at Aspen Ideas: Health (previously Spotlight Health) to talk about the challenges facing the FDA. From that stage, they publicly announced their consensus view that the FDA should be transformed into an independent federal agency.

Spotlight Health placed sharp focus on areas of health and health care that are too often underexplored, like how mass-media imagery affects stress and well-being, why gun violence is still a public-health epidemic, how migration impacts health, and what the prison system means for health care reform.

US Surgeon General Jerome Adams speaks with Alison Kodjak at Spotlight Health in June.