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Session 6 Controlling Government Healthcare Costs or Expanding Coverage: Can We Do Both?
The Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office have labeled rising health care costs the government’s number one long-run fiscal problem based upon projected growth in Medicare and Medicaid expenditures. Yet the new Administration has pledged to commit significant additional government dollars toward reducing the number of uninsured. This session will examine these apparently conflicting goals within a severe recessionary economic environment.
Presentations
Speakers
Paul Hughes-Cromwick
Altarum Institute
Paul Hughes-Cromwick is a health economist with over 20 years of experience serving state, federal government, and private-sector clients. He is a senior analyst at Altarum Institute, a nonprofit health systems research institute. Until its sale in 2007, he was Chairman of the Board of Care Choices, HMO, Farmington Hills,MI. He is working to develop metrics to gauge the progress of the current US health systemagainst attributes of a transformed future system. He has a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame, and an M.A. in Applied Economics from Clark University.
Henry Aaron
Brookings Institution
Henry J. Aaron is currently the Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. From 1990 through 1996 he was the director of the Economic Studies program.
He initially joined the Brookings staff in 1968. From 1967 until 1989 he also taught at the University of Maryland. In 1977 and 1978 he served as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He chaired the 1979 Advisory Council on Social Security. During the academic year 1996-97, he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
He is a graduate of U.C.L.A and holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the advisory committee of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the visiting committee of the Harvard Medical School. He is a member of the board of directors of Abt Associates and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He was a founding member, vice president, and chair of the board of the National Academy of Social Insurance. He has been vice president and member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association and was president of the Association of Public Policy and Management. He has been a member of the boards of directors of the College Retirement Equity Fund and Georgetown University.
His publications include: Reforming Medicare: Options, Tradeoffs, and Opportunities (co-authored with Jeanne M. Lambrew); Taxing Capital Income: Do We? Should We? Can We? (coedited with Leonard Burman and Eugene Steuerle); Can We Say No: The Challenge of Health Care Rationing (with Melissa Cox); Coping With Methuselah: The Impact of Molecular Biology on Medicine and Society, (co-edited with William Schwartz); Agenda for the Nation (coedited with James Lindsay and Pietro Nivola); Crisis in Tax Administration (co-edited with Joel Slemrod); The Plight of Academic Medical Centers; Countdown to Reform: The Great Social Security Debate (with Robert Reischauer); and Setting National Priorities: The Year 2000 and Beyond, which he co-edited. Other books include The Painful Prescription: Rationing Hospital Care (co-authored with William Schwartz); Can America Afford to Grow Old?, (co-authored with Barry Bosworth); Serious and Unstable Condition: Financing America's Health Care; Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform (co-edited, with William Gale); and Behavioral Aspects of Retirement Economics (editor).
Robert Reischauer
Urban Institute
Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and nationally known expert on the federal budget, Medicare, and Social Security, began his tenure as the second president of the Urban Institute in February 2000.
He had been a senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institution since 1995. From 1989 to 1995, he was the director of the nonpartisan CBO. Mr. Reischauer served as the Urban Institute's senior vice president from 1981 to 1986. He was the CBO's assistant director for human resources and its deputy director between 1977 and 1981.
Mr. Reischauer serves on the boards of several educational and nonprofit organizations. He is Vice Chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
He frequently contributes to the opinion pages of the nation's major newspapers, comments on public policy developments on radio and television, and testifies before congressional committees.
Mr. Reischauer holds an A.B. in political science from Harvard University and an M.I.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University.
Diane Rowland
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation
Diane Rowland is the Executive Vice President of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Executive Director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. She is also an adjunct Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health of the Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Rowland has directed the Kaiser Commission since 1991 and overseen the Foundation’s health policy work since 1993. She is a noted authority on health policy, Medicare and Medicaid, and health care for poor and disadvantaged populations and frequently testifies as an expert witness before the United States Congress on health policy issues. Her federal health policy experience includes service on the staff of the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress, as well as senior health policy positions in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the Secretary and the Health Care Financing Administration (now Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services). Dr. Rowland is a nationally recognized expert with a distinguished career in public policy focusing on health insurance coverage, access to care, and health care financing for low-income, elderly, and disabled populations. She has published widely on these subjects and is the editor of several books, including Financing Home Care and The Medicaid Financing Crisis: Balancing Responsibilities, Policies, and Dollars, and is a co-author of Medicare Policy: New Directions for Health and Long-Term Care of the Elderly and Health Care Cost Containment: Lessons from the Past and a Policy Proposal for the Future.
Dr Rowland is a member of the Institute of Medicine, a founding member of the National Academy for Social Insurance, Past President and Fellow of the Association for Health Services Research (now AcademyHealth), a Senior Fellow of the Brookdale Foundation and a member of the Board of Grantmakers in Health. She is also co-chair of the Public Policy Advisory Group for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and a member of the Campaign’s Board. Dr Rowland has served as a national expert on the Governor’s Health Reform Task Force in Louisiana, the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Infant Mortality, and the Commonwealth Commission on the Future of Health Insurance and Commission on Women’s Health.
Dr. Rowland holds a Bachelor's degree from Wellesley College, a Masters in Public Administration from the University of California at Los Angeles and a Doctor of Science in health policy and management from the Johns Hopkins University.