The high prevalence and costs of type 2 diabetes makes it a rapidly evolving focus of policy action. Health systems, employers, community organizations, and public agencies have increasingly looked to translate the benefits of promising research interventions into innovative polices intended to prevent or control diabetes. Though guided by research, these health policies provide no guarantee of effectiveness and may have opportunity costs or unintended consequences. Natural experiments use pragmatic and available data sources to compare specific policies to other policy alternatives or predictions of what would likely have happened in the absence of any intervention.
