Princeton economist to address health care crisis at April 5 lecture
Uwe Reinhardt, PhD -----
Uwe Reinhardt, PhD, an expert on health policy, will speak at UCSF on Thursday, April 5, as the third speaker in the UCSF Chancellor’s Health Policy Lecture Series. The event is free and open to the public.
Reinhardt’s presentation is titled “Sailing into the Perfect Storm: Who Will Come to the Rescue?” He will be introduced by UCSF Chancellor J. Michael Bishop.
Reinhardt, an internationally known expert on financing and organization of medical care, is the James Madison Professor of Political Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He has served on a number of government commissions and advisory boards, including the Physician Payment Review Commission, the National Council for Healthcare Technology and the Special Medical Advisory Group of the Veterans’ Administration. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences and past president and distinguished fellow of the Association of Health Services Research.
In addition, he is the chair of the health reform commission for the state of New Jersey, a trustee of both Duke University and the Duke University Health System and a senior associate of the University of Cambridge, England.
Reinhardt will speak at 513 Parnassus Ave., Health Sciences West (HSW) 300, from noon to 1 p.m. In the event of audience overflow, a live video transmission of the lecture will be broadcast in HSW 301.
The Chancellor’s Health Policy Lecture Series, established in 2006, brings a major figure in health policy to the UCSF campus several times a year to raise awareness in the community of the important health policy issues of the day.
In his lecture, Reinhardt will discuss how the inequities in American health care will take its toll on its most vulnerable citizens.
“I believe that the United States health care system faces a ‘perfect storm,’” Reinhardt says. “In the coming decade, Americans in the bottom third of the nation’s income distribution will find themselves systematically priced out of mainstream American health care. The nation’s pathetic inability to respond to its much lamented health-care crisis is manifestation of a carefully camouflaged but tenacious wrestling match over the question of which distributive ethic should govern American health care. As in our other wars, lower income Americans will disproportionately bear the scars from this battle.”
The UCSF Chancellor’s Health Policy Lecture Series is organized by a committee with representatives from each of the schools and UCSF Medical Center. Committee chair Steven Schroeder, MD, UCSF professor of medicine, says the lectures have broad appeal across the university because health policy is relevant to all, noting that “The activities represented within the UCSF community—scholarship, education, clinical service, community outreach—exist within a complicated and turbulent health policy context.”
UCSF is a leading university that advances health worldwide by conducting advanced biomedical research, educating graduate students in the life sciences and health professions, and providing complex patient care.