The RAND Blog

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Why ACA Enrollees Need Support After They Sign Up

Providing support for Affordable Care Act enrollees to connect with care they are happy with can help minimize the risk that they will stop seeking routine health care.

Laurie T. Martin

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Adding Shots on Target: Wargaming Beyond the Game

Figuring out what the future may look like—and what concepts and technology we should invest in now to prepare—is hard. How can the wargaming community build a cycle of research to help understand what these paths might be?

Elizabeth M. Bartels @elliebartels

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The Rorschach Test of New Nuclear Powers: Analogies for North Korean Command and Control

Is Pyongyang more like modern Islamabad or Soviet Moscow? The answer must draw on the expertise of scholars of civil-military relations as well as nuclear strategy. Even then analogy is only a starting point—North Korea may be more or less like previous cases, but will certainly be unique.

Austin Long

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Doing More with Less: Lessons from Cuba's Health Care System

High U.S. health care costs do not yield corresponding health outcomes for its citizens. But Cuba, for less than a tenth of U.S. costs, has attained comparable outcomes on many indicators, such as life expectancy and infant mortality. Cuba prioritizes primary care and prevention and addresses social determinants of health.

Claire E. O'Hanlon, Melody Harvey

q&a

Policy Challenges in the Arctic: Q&A with Abbie Tingstad

Abbie Tingstad discusses how the opening of the Arctic by climate change could strain relationships among Arctic nations, how these changes will affect indigenous communities, and what to make of Russia's military buildup in the region.

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On North Korea, Past Foreign Policy Fiascoes Show U.S. What Not to Do

Foreign policy disasters are often the sum of two basic errors: embracing exaggerated claims about the need to act, and inventing a conceptual magic wand to wish away potential consequences. Both are apparent in U.S. policy toward North Korea's nuclear aspirations.

Michael J. Mazarr @MMazarr

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New Options for Funding the NHS and Social Care in the UK: What Can We Learn from International Experiences?

International experiences show the complexity of policy choices around funding health and social care. What models are most feasible and appropriate to fund the UK's health and social care systems, both among policymakers and the public?

Jennie Corbett, Jon Sussex

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An Uneven Future: An Ageing Population Needs Innovation, but Not at the Expense of Equal Care

Expected increases in life expectancy together with increasingly complex physical and mental illness will continue to exert huge pressures on health systems. How should the UK prepare for the challenges ahead?

Camilla d'Angelo

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Decertifying the Iran Nuclear Deal Would Not Increase U.S. Leverage

The Iran nuclear agreement is not perfect, but it is working. Iran is no longer on the brink of being able to produce a nuclear weapon as it was two years ago. The suggestion that decertifying would increase U.S. leverage to renegotiate and strengthen the agreement is unrealistic.

Dalia Dassa Kaye

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King Salman and Putin Deals Leave the U.S. Out in the Cold

Riyadh plans to invest in Russian energy assets and possibly arms. The deals will lead to the manufacture of arms in Saudi Arabia and likely the transfer of military technology. These agreements thwart the U.S.- and EU-led sanctions regime and send an important signal to Washington.

Becca Wasser, Howard J. Shatz @HowardJShatz

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How Young Kids Causing Sleepless Nights Drove Me to Sleep Research

RAND's Marco Hafner discusses how sleep troubles related to raising two young children spurred him to study how insufficient sleep impacts productivity at work, mortality, academic performance, and even national economies.

Marco Hafner

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All That Could Go Wrong When Jihadists Return Home — to China

About 300 of Western China's Uighurs, the Sunni Muslim indigenous ethnic minority, went to Syria to join ISIS. Now that the caliphate is collapsing, Beijing could soon find itself in the crosshairs of a religiously motivated, battle-hardened crop of returning terrorists.

Colin P. Clarke, Paul Rexton Kan

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The Intersection of Algorithms and an Individual's Rights

Data collection, and our reliance on it, have evolved extremely rapidly. The resulting algorithms have proved invaluable for organizing, evaluating and utilizing information. How do individuals' rights come in to play, when data about their lives is compiled to create algorithms, and the resulting tools are applied to judge them?

Dan Grunfeld

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Female Drivers Can Put Saudis on Road to Enhanced Growth

Allowing women to get behind the wheel will likely lead to significant long-term changes in Saudi Arabia's economy and the participation of women in the labor force.

Shelly Culbertson @SC_Culbertson

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Why Sleep Matters to the World's Bottom Line

Sleep and sleep loss matters to all aspects of society, from an individual's health to the success of the global economy. Insufficient sleep costs five of the largest economies more than half a trillion dollars per year, but improving sleeping habits and duration can have major impacts.

Marco Hafner