Joseph White, Ph.D., Department Chair – Department of Political Science, Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy, Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the Director of the Center for Policy Studies at Case Western Reserve University

Friday February 26, 2010
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Crawford Hall – Room 9
Inamori Center
Case Western Reserve University

Dear Colleagues,

It’s a big week for health care reform. The Obama administration issued an outline for the plan it would like to see Congress enact. A “bipartisan health care summit” is scheduled for Thursday. Democrats appear to be rallying around use of “reconciliation” to try to enact legislation. Republicans are accusing the Democrats of ignoring public opinion and violating procedural norms.

So it seems a good time to ask what’s going on. Joe White will give his best guess, and then we can talk about it together.

This topic is a change from the original schedule, due to unavoidable circumstances. We apologize if anyone is disappointed, and are working on programming about the original topic, deindustrialization, for later in the term.

As usual, we will gather in Room 9 of the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence, on the lower level of Crawford Hall, for free cookies, beverages, and brown bag lunch.

Best regards,
Joe White

About Our Guests

Joe White came to Case in 2000 and became Department Chair in 2003. He previously was Associate Professor of Health Systems Management in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University, and before that was first Research Associate and then Senior Fellow in the Governmental Studies Program of the Brookings Institution. He received his A.B. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. White’s most recent book is False Alarm: Why the Greatest Threat to Social Security and Medicare is the Campaign to “Save” Them (The Johns Hopkins University Press, paperback with new postscript, 2003). He also wrote Competing Solutions: American Health Care Proposals and International Experience (Brookings Institution, 1995) and coauthored, with Aaron Wildavsky, The Deficit and the Public Interest: The Search for Responsible Budgeting in the 1980s (University of California Press and The Russell Sage Foundation, paperback with postscript 1991). Among his works on budgeting are three articles in Public Administration Review, the most recent in March/April 2009, and numerous other articles and book chapters.

Most of Professor White’s work while at CWRU, however, has focused on health care finance, costs, and reform. He is currently working on a book about health care cost control. Among his articles about health care since coming to CWRU are “The Obama Administration’s Options for Health Care Cost Control: Hope vs. Reality,” with Theodore R. Marmor and Jonathan Oberlander, in Annals of Internal Medicine 150, No. 7 (7 April 2009); “American Health Care in International Perspective,” in James A. Morone, Theodor J. Litman, and Leonard S. Robins ed., Health Politics and Policy 4th ed. (Florence, KY: Cengage Delmar Learning, 2008); “Markets and Medical Care: The United States, 1993-2005,” in The Milbank Quarterly 85:3 (September, 2007); “Protecting Medicare: The Best Defense is a Good Offense,” in Journal of Health Policy, Politics, and Law 32:2 (April, 2007); and “Three Meanings of Capacity: Why the Federal Government is Most Likely to Lead on Health Insurance Access Issues,” in Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 28:2-3 (April – June 2003). During the health care reform debate of 2009, he has also posted assorted blog and web publication analyses of issues, including in Roll Call, the Health Affairs blog, the Health Care Cost Monitor blog, and http://ourfuture.org/healthcare/white. Some of this material is available on the Center for Policy Studies website.

He has taught courses in The American Political System; Health Care Politics and Policy; Bureaucratic Politics in the U.S.; Interest Groups in the Policy Process; The Public Policy Process; Legislative Politics; Comparative Public Policy; and Politics, Policy and Tobacco. As Director of the Center for Policy Studies Professor White convenes the Friday Public Affairs lunch discussions (http://fridaylunch.case.edu) and has also organized CPS events on topics ranging from Iraq and Vietnam to the teaching of “intelligent design” theory in Ohio public schools.

Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:

March 5: Ohio’s State Budget: Now What? With Zach Schiller, Research Director, Policy Matters Ohio.

April 23: TBA

The Friday Lunch discussions are held on the lower (ground) level of Crawford Hall. Visitors with mobility issues may find it easiest to take advantage of special arrangements we have made. On most Fridays, a few parking spaces in the V.I.P. lot in between Crawford Hall and Amasa Stone Chapel are held for participants in the lunch discussion.

Visitors then can avoid walking up the hill to the first floor of Crawford by entering the building on the ground level, through the garage area under the building. The further door on the left in that garage will be left unlocked during the period before the Friday lunch. On occasion, parking will be unavailable because of other university events.

For more information about these and other Center for Policy Studies programs, please see http://policy.case.edu.