Reporter Martha Bebinger brings us the latest from the State of Massachusetts, where a recent law requires all residents to have health insurance.
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Host Margot Adler talks with policy analyst Diane Rowland about the benefits to and obstacles facing mandatory state healthcare programs.
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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 at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Rowland is a noted authority on health policy, Medicare and Medicaid, and health care for low-income, elderly, and disadvantaged populations and has published widely on these subjects.
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Two advocates debate the pros and cons of the Massachusetts plan and whether it could serve as a model for a national health care effort.
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Stuart H. Altman
is dean of the Heller School for Social Policy & Management and Sol C. Chaikin Professor of National Health Policy at Brandeis University. He is an economist whose research interests are primarily in the area of federal and state health policy. He served as the chairman of the congressionally legislated Prospective Payment Assessment Commission for twelve years. He is also the chair of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-sponsored Council on Health Care Economics and Policy.
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John R. Graham
is the director of health care studies at the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), a free-market think tank in San Francisco. He is the primary author of PRI’s series of monthly articles on national health reform, Health Policy Prescriptions, and of its Healthy California series. He has worked as a management consultant and investment banker in Canada and Europe. He is author of a number of papers and articles on the consequences of government intervention in health care and reforming health policy.
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Host Margot Adler speaks with Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll.
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Frank Newport
is the editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll and vice president of the Gallup Organization in Princeton, New Jersey. He is in charge of the Gallup Poll assessment of American public opinion, which has been continuously measuring public moods and attitudes in this country since the 1930's. He is the co-author (with Stuart Rothenberg) of The Evangelical Voter: Religion and Politics in the U.S. and contributed to both the 1996 and 1997 editions of Where America Stands, published by John Wiley.
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Host Margot Adler interviews public policy expert Karen Davis on the demographics of American health care.
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Karen Davis
is president of the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation engaged in independent research on health and social policy issues. She is a nationally recognized economist, with a distinguished career in public policy research. She served as deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the Department of Health and Human Services from 1977–1980, making her the first woman to head a U.S. public health service agency.
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Host Margot Adler speaks with Tonya Jones, owner of a Nashville construction company that can no longer afford to offer health care coverage to its employees.
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