The Governance of Standard-Setting to Improve Health

This article describes recent events in the governance of standard-setting for 2 areas of US health policy — states' decisions about which prescription drugs to cover under Medicaid and other public programs and making health an aspect of foreign policy — and whether these events offer lessons for policy making. In prescription drug coverage, methodologic advances in research that evaluates health services and the politics of restraining the rate of growth in health expenditures enabled policy makers in most states to establish new public processes for assessing and applying evidence about the effectiveness of competing drugs. Their counterparts in foreign policy, in contrast, made few changes in existing processes for choosing which interventions to support. The history of governance in each area of policy making for health explains the selection of standards to evaluate evidence about interventions and whether and how to use this evidence to guide policy.