Question

Describe why and how a health policy analyst needs to consider policy problems and health economics to make decisions, using political and legal analysis.

Answer 1

Ans) Determining the evidence of effectiveness of policy change for health is an art and a science that is still in its infancy.

- A systematic and theory-driven approach needs to be applied.

- Demonstrated that insights from political science would allow for better and more profound insights into the reasons why and how policies fail or succeed. This is a perspective that transcends a current tradition merely describing failure or success of policy initiatives.

- Our empirical material shows that policy research, assessment, and analysis needs to be a negotiated process between stakeholders that is seemingly chaotic, but in reality must be driven by the appropriate – and often hybrid – application of theories from the social sciences, notably political science.

- A conscientious and transparent approach to determining what policy is and entails is a critical starting point for the further development of this field. It is recognised that such a determination is frequently impossible as even policymakers, policy entrepreneurs, and decision makers themselves are deliberately equivocal about what they pursue – the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes pointed at the need to keep options open as long as possible by writing "There is nothing a Government hates more than to be well-informed; for it makes the process of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult". It is the responsibility of public health policy analysts to expose any efforts at purposely obscuring the strictures of policy making. Good scholarly process, rigour in research, and theory-based evaluation, should enable us to do exactly that.