Health Law, Ethics & Policy Seminar Series Thursday, November 1, 2012 12:30 – 2:00 p.m. Faculty of Law, University of Toronto 84 Queen’s Park, Falconer Hall, Solarium (FA2) Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2C5 Everyone is welcome to attend, no registration is required. A light lunch will be provided. ABSTRACT Disputes about US health policy are once again at the top of the domestic political agenda. The most prominent topic is unsurprisingly the reforms President Obama and his Democratic allies in the Congress just managed to pass in March of 2010. The constitutionality of the reform legislation itself—known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by its supporters and as Obamacare by its critics—was on the Supreme Court’s schedule for oral argument in March. But beyond that, the ACA has been remarkably controversial. It is best described as a complex mosaic of reform, the product of a series of political calculations and compromises that in the end neither created a coherent policy program nor achieved the political agreement that reformers anticipated. Almost daily, some pundit somewhere would intone about the extraordinarily high costs of American medical care and the disputed wisdom of Obamacare. Almost as frequently, there is related alarm expressed about how the ACA will help or harm Medicare’s financial future or Medicaid’s currently dire fiscal circumstances To be sure, economic troubles—high unemployment, slow economic growth, and the miseries of housing foreclosures—typically receives even more media attention. But the health policy agenda is crowded and contentious, with the character and fate of the reform package at the center of controversy. Put boldly, the health reform is a set of seeming contradictions. BIOGRAPHY Theodore (Ted) Marmor is a Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Management & Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University. His scholarship primarily concerns welfare state politics and policy in North America and Western Europe. He particularly emphasizes the major spending programs, which is reflected in the second edition of The Politics of Medicare (Aldine de Gruyter, 2000) and the book written with colleagues Mashaw and Harvey in the early l990s, America's Misunderstood Welfare State (Basic Books, l992). The author or co-author of eleven books, Marmor has published over a hundred articles in a wide range of scholarly journals, as well as being a frequent op-ed contributor to U.S. and Canadian newspapers. Ted regularly writes op-ed essays for the Philadelphia Inquirer with long-time Yale law colleague, Jerry Mashaw. Professor Marmor began his public career as a special assistant to Wilbur Cohen (Secretary of HEW) in the mid-1960s. He was associate dean of Minnesota's School of Public Affairs, a faculty member at the University of Chicago, the head of Yale's Center for Health Services, a member of President Carter's Commission on the National Agenda for the 1980s, and a senior social policy advisor to Walter Mondale in the Presidential campaign of 1984. He has testified before Congress about medical care reform, social security, and welfare issues, as well as being a consultant to government and non-profit agencies. Marmor lectures frequently on health policy, management issues, and law to both management and law students. He has been an expert witness in cases ranging from the constitutionality of the Canada Health Act to asbestos disputes and drug pricing fraud. He has also been a commentator on a variety of television and radio programs. |
|
