2.1 Policy Autopsy Framework | Masters in Health Economics
Why It Matters
Understanding policy failures through the five‑lens autopsy enables governments to allocate resources wisely, build political consensus, and ensure equitable, sustainable health outcomes.
Key Takeaways
- •Policy autopsy uses five lenses to diagnose health policy outcomes.
- •Economic lens evaluates cost‑effectiveness, opportunity cost, and market impacts.
- •Political lens maps stakeholders, visibility, advocacy collisions, and policy windows.
- •Equity lens assesses access disparities, vulnerable groups, and distributional fairness.
- •Implementation lens checks capacity, governance, monitoring, and adaptation strategies.
Summary
The lecture introduces the policy autopsy framework, a systematic method for dissecting why health policies succeed or fail. By applying five analytical lenses—economic, political, fiscal, equity, and implementation—students learn to assess decisions, resource use, and barriers in a structured way. Key insights include the economic lens’s focus on cost‑effectiveness, opportunity cost, market impact, and sustainability; the political lens’s emphasis on stakeholder mapping, political visibility, advocacy coalitions, and policy windows; the fiscal lens’s scrutiny of budget impact, funding mechanisms, financial sustainability, and fiscal space; the equity lens’s concern for access disparities, vulnerable populations, social determinants, and distributional effects; and the implementation lens’s attention to capacity, governance structures, monitoring systems, and adaptive strategies. Illustrative examples—such as a nutrition program that failed despite ample funding, a free vaccination rollout hampered by poor outreach, and a universal health coverage case study requiring 5‑8% of GDP—show how each lens reveals distinct strengths and weaknesses. The instructor also walks through a step‑by‑step process: data collection per lens, identifying overlaps/conflicts, synthesizing an integrated summary, and crafting balanced recommendations. The framework equips policymakers and health economists with a diagnostic toolkit to learn from past initiatives, anticipate obstacles, and design more cost‑effective, politically viable, fiscally sustainable, equitable, and implementable health interventions.
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