Breaking the Health-Care Reform Gridlock: What the Next President Needs to Know

Hosted by Boston University School of Public Health

Medical economist Rashi Fein advocates overhauling a broken health-care system amid the nation's crumbling financial market, but acknowledges that such a change may not be a top priority of the next president. Fein was the keynote speaker at the 2008 William J. Bicknell Lectureship at the BU School of Public Health.

“There will be a temptation, if not a pressure, to place health care at a low priority,” says Fein, professor emeritus of medical economics at Harvard Medical School, in laying out the challenges facing the next administration. “I fear the next months, the next years, will be very difficult ones for this nation. . . . It doesn't mean curl up and die, but it means the battle becomes much more difficult.”

Fein, an advocate for a reform plan that would provide universal health insurance through a single-payer, Medicare-like system, says he is skeptical that such a program is “in the cards, at this time,” given the economic turmoil. Health-care reform advocates may have to take smaller steps to achieve their goal, he says, suggesting that a first step might be a Medicare-style program that covers all children and later could be expanded to adults.

His talk was followed by a panel discussion featuring Dolores Mitchell, executive director of the Group Insurance Commission, a quasi-independent Massachusetts agency established to provide state and certain municipal employees, retirees, and their dependents with access to health benefits, and Alice Coombs, a physician at South Shore Hospital and chair of the Workforce Diversity Committee for the American Medical Association Commission to End Health Care Disparities and the Massachusetts Sub-Committee of the States Commission to Eliminate Health Care Disparities.

September 26, 2008
Boston University Medical Campus

About the speaker:
Rashi Fein is a professor emeritus of medical economics at Harvard Medical School. Before joining Harvard, he was a senior fellow in the economics study program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., from 1963 to 1968, a member of the senior staff of President Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisors, and an associate professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He served on the staff of President Truman’s Commission on the Health Needs of the Nation in 1952. He is the author of numerous books and articles in the health field, including The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It and What It Will Take to Get Out (Harvard University Press, 2005), which he cowrote with Julius B. Richmond.

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