When you lose your health insurance or switch to a plan that skimps on preventive care, something critical breaks.

The connection to your primary care provider, usually a doctor, gets severed. You stop getting routine checkups. Warning signs get missed. Medical problems that could have been caught early become emergencies. And because emergencies are both dangerous and expensive, your health gets worse while your medical bills...

Walking around my neighborhood in the evening, I am hit by the smells of summer: fresh-cut grass, hamburgers grilling and a hint of swimming pool chlorine. These are also the smells of summers from my adolescence, and they remind me of Friday evenings at the community pool with my friends and our families gathered around picnic tables between swims. The memories always brings a smile to my face.

As a social psychologist^[1],...

Procuring lifesaving drugs is a daunting challenge in many low- and middle-income countries. Essential treatments are often neither available nor affordable^[1] in these nations, even decades after^[2] the drugs entered the market.

Prospective buyers from these countries face a patent thicket^[3], where a single drug may be covered by hundreds of patents. This makes it costly and legally difficult to secure licensing rights for...