The Yale Global Health Justice Partnership — a collaboration between the Yale Law School and Yale School of Public Health — released a new report, “Confronting a Legacy of Scarcity: A Plan for America’s Reinvestment in Public Health,” which outlines a set of proposals to revive public health in the United States.
- The centerpiece of sustainable public health funding in America should be a new mandatory funding stream insulated from attempts to divert these funds.
- The stability and reliability that mandatory spending offers is critical for progress and growth in the field of public health, and should be used to provide ongoing support to maintain and update foundational public health infrastructure.
- Large, initial outlays of discretionary funds are needed to catch up public health systems and for decades of chronic underfunding to be remedied.
- Discretionary funds should then be allocated as no-year or multi-year to provide further support to public health programs and infrastructure.
- Programs related to social determinants of health such as housing or food security should not be funded directly with public health dollars. Agencies should place increased focus on collaborating across sectors and looking at public health problems more holistically.
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