Question: Did homicide of females aged 15 to 44 years (hereinafter, women of reproductive age) recover uniformly after the COVID-19 surge, or did post-2022 trajectories diverge across state abortion policy environments?

Findings: In this study of US mortality data from 2016 through 2024, national homicide mortality decreased after the COVID-19 surge, but post-Dobbs trajectories diverged between states with and without sustained abortion bans. The fitted homicide rate of women of reproductive age in states with total or near-total abortion bans was 7% higher than the modeled counterfactual in 2023 and 15% higher in 2024, corresponding to an estimated 48 and 87 excess deaths, respectively.

Meaning: The findings suggest that national decreases in homicide mortality may mask widening differences in homicide mortality among women of reproductive age across state abortion policy environments.

In July 2026, the online prediction-market platform Kalshi announced that users would soon be able to bet on the results of in-progress clinical trials. One such “contract” available for wagers, for example, asks whether POLARIS-AD, a phase 3 trial of the experimental Alzheimer’s drug AR1001, will meet its primary end point. Although heavily focused on sports betting, commercial prediction markets have expanded into areas including interest rates, elections, weather, and the Academy Awards. Kalshi is entering the drug-development space with contracts on end points in large, late-stage trials but is considering broadening its scope to include earlier-phase trials and additional outcomes, such as the number of reported adverse events for a drug. Other major platforms, including Polymarket, are also introducing betting on drug development.

Individuals in the US make up less than 5% of the global population but account for half of global drug spending, frequently paying prices 3 to 4 times higher than in peer countries. These high prices strain public budgets and affect patients directly, with 1 in 4 adults reportedly not filling a prescription because of cost.

The Trump Administration has made narrowing the gap between US drug prices and those in other countries central to its health care agenda through what it calls most-favored-nation (MFN) drug pricing. According to the administration, the goal of MFN is not only to lower US drug prices, but also to encourage manufacturers to raise prices abroad so that other countries pay their fair share of the costs of pharmaceutical innovation.

MFN’s emphasis on fairness has powerful political appeal. The pharmaceutical industry has successfully opposed health technology assessment in Medicare by raising concerns about rationing care. It is harder to argue that a drug should cost far more at a pharmacy in Niagara Falls, New York, than at a pharmacy just across the border in Niagara Falls, Canada. The same intuition applies across greater distances: why should a roofer in Frankfort, Kentucky, pay more for cancer treatment than a banker in Frankfurt, Germany?