Health Care Reform: Proposals, Politics, and Prospects

As of October 12, the U.S. Congress has passed out of committee five health care reform bills, and members are poised to begin debating and reconciling these bills into one that may emerge for signing by President Barack Obama within the end of the year.

This panel features five experts in the area of health care and health insurance reform. The panelists span the fields of public policy, medicine, sociology, political science, economics, and public health. The invited panelists will focus on their own areas of expertise to answer two questions: (1) what are the most important things that we need in health care reform, and (2) why getting to any kind of health care reform has been and continues to be so difficult in our country, and what they see as the prospects for reform in this round.

Moderator:
James S. House, Angus Campbell Distinguished University Professor of Survey Research, Public Policy, and Sociology

Introduction:
Matthew Davis, MD, MAPP, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Internal Medicine, and Public Policy

Speakers:
John W. Kingdon, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Michigan

Catherine McLaughlin, Senior Fellow, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Professor of Health Management and Policy, School of Public Health

David Mechanic, Director and Rene Dubos University Professor, Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research, Rutgers

Marianne Udow-Phillips, Director of the Center for Healthcare Research & Transformation, University of Michigan

Cosponsors:
The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the School of Public Health, and the FORUM on Health Policy