The Impact

We're making season 2, and we need your help! We want to know about local policy experiments from around the country. These can be at the state, county, or city level, and can cove...

The United States has an astoundingly high maternal death rate. It is three times higher than the UK, eight times higher than Norway, and still climbing. But California does way be...

What is the best way to care for patients with severe mental illness? The United States has struggled with this question for decades. In 1963, President Kennedy signed a law that w...

American women are changing up their birth control. The use of IUDs and implants has increased 6000% in the United States since 2002.  That's the result of specific policy choices ...

On this episode of The Impact, we’re looking at a possible future for pain treatment. It’s an idea known as “pain acceptance,” and in the wake of the opioid epidemic, it is gaining...

There's a well-known narrative about the opioid epidemic: pharmaceutical companies and dirty doctors pushed misinformation and addictive drugs on patients. But there's also a polic...

Why are fax machines still such a staple of American health care? We talk to a pair of policy makers who hatched a plan to replace paper files and fax machines with electronic medi...

Central line infections can be deadly. And they used to be extremely common: just a decade ago, hundreds of thousands of patients got them every year. Now, that number is closer to...

How does a Band-Aid wind up costing so much money? Why are American health care prices so incredibly high? Vox’s new podcast, the Impact, explores how policy affects real lives. Th...

The Impact is a show about how policy affects people. In Washington, the story often ends when Congress passes a law. For us, that’s where the story begins. We follow the choices t...