Letter from the Editor

This issue of RAND Health Quarterly includes three articles on health policy and health economics. Chapin White led a team that compared the impacts and feasibility of four options for financing health care in Oregon. Andrew Dick and colleagues assessed an expansion of Vermont's Dr. Dynasaur children's health insurance program that would cover all residents through age 25. A team led by Courtney Gidengil pilot-tested a set of proposed nonpayment codes that physicians would use for post-operative visits.

In military health, a large team led by Rosalie Liccardo Pacula created the framework of an analytic tool that can help the military predict future trends in prescription drug misuse based on current demographics of active-duty service members and rates of injury and prescribing of prescription drugs. Terry Schell and others evaluated the Air Force's Deployment Transition Center, which allows airmen returning from combat missions to decompress and share lessons learned before returning to their home stations. A group led by Carrie Farmer identified the unmet education, employment, health care, housing, financial, and legal services needs of veterans in Massachusetts.

In mental health, Joie Acosta and two colleagues share recommendations for an integrated agenda to promote transdisciplinary resilience research and practice, drawing on proceedings from a 2016 Resilience Roundtable and a supplementary literature review. Dana Schultz led a team that partnered with community-based sites to evaluate interventions to reduce violence's harmful effects on children and analyze outcome data.

In health promotion and disease prevention, Brian Stucky and colleagues evaluated the psychometric characteristics of a screening tool to identify high-risk mothers in Los Angeles County who are eligible for supportive services. And in research methods, a team led by Sarah Novak used a general agent-based model for studying social learning to explore the relationship between micro-influence and macro-dynamics for broad classes of problems.

Lisa S. Meredith, Ph.D., Editor