American health policy in the year 2000

While predictions of future health policy in the United States cannot be fully prescient, they can be informed by two important relationships. The most consequential of these is that policy is inevitably developed to achieve policy objectives. If future objectives are known, predictions of policy prescriptions to achieve them can be more rational. Secondly, since future policy is likely to build incrementally upon past policy, a grasp of the evolutionary path of the nation's health policy can enlighten projections. These relationships are used to predict a possible scenario of health policy in the United States through the 1990s. Health policy in the year 2000 is predicted to be barely distinguishable from that of the present. An admixture of regulatory and market-based policies are predicted to continue to be used as policymakers seek simultaneous achievement of access, quality, and cost-effectiveness objectives.