Stephen A. Warnke, Esq. (Chair)

What drew me to the healthcare bar was that it’s an area of private practice in which I, as a lawyer, can be intimately involved in matters of pressing policy significance, representing private clients but doing so in a way that advances the public good. The healthcare industry is in a state of perpetual flux and perpetual crisis, so there is never a moment when you can profess to have complete command of all the technical details. The challenge for lawyers who represent healthcare clients is therefore constantly evolving, and, of course, always fascinating.

Sherry Glied

I’m actually one of the few people who think that employer-sponsored coverage is a strong institution and is not likely to disappear any time soon. It offers many advantages even compared with the health insurance exchanges. There is a good reason, especially in very large companies, to retain employer-sponsored health insurance, but I can see it fading out among the smaller firms over time. Employers are pretty innovative, so we will continue to see changes in the way employer-sponsored coverage operates. We don’t entirely know what those trends are going to be yet and I am not enthusiastic about predicting, so we’ll see.

Christopher F. Koller

As a society, we need to consider the role of price transparency as opposed to charge transparency, and the role of public organizations, trusted community-wide efforts, national nonprofit resources like FAIR Health and private initiatives in making that price information more readily accessible to different stakeholders-consumers, providers, researchers and others.

Peter J. Millock

What surprises me most is that the issues have not changed. The three primary issues in healthcare—quality of healthcare, access to healthcare and cost of healthcare—have been the same issues for the last 30 years. The challenges today involve long-standing problems that have not been addressed through law, policy or private initiative. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is an effort to address access, but says very little about quality and cost. The ACA is the greatest achievement in healthcare policy in 30 years, but it is far from a panacea.

Nancy Nielsen

Nothing has been more rewarding than taking care of patients and sharing their lives—that was a real privilege and I feel very fortunate to have had that opportunity. The greatest privilege in terms of my professional career, though, was leading the AMA at a time when there was clearly an opportunity to move toward health insurance for all Americans.

James Roosevelt Jr.

As a volunteer hospital board member, healthcare lawyer and a health plan executive, I have had the opportunity to work on all sides of the healthcare world. That experience has taught me the importance of good, impartial data. My community activism and government service have shown me how access to information improves peoples lives. The chance to work with an organization that focuses on accuracy, value and fairness in healthcare payment is a rare coalescing of personal background and professional goals. I look forward to supporting that work and raising its profile.

Sara Rosenbaum

Those who specialize in civil rights have been extremely active around passage and implementation of the ACA because it is self-evident that gains for low-income Americans are, in effect, gains for minority Americans in the US. The ACA, of course, makes a seminal contribution to the problem. The Kaiser Family Foundation just published a study showing the disproportionately large impact of the Act on minority Americans, who are much more likely to be uninsured. To the extent that a central purpose of the Act is to create more equal access, its benefits for minority Americans should be seen as one of the greatest civil rights achievements of our time.

John W. Rowe

I came to gerontology and geriatrics not through an initial focus on older people but from a science-based interest in the biology of aging. I developed a substantive, broad-based research program in aging and developed a clinical interest in geriatric medicine as a secondary focus. There are a lot of people interested in aging who tell you a story about their grandfather, but that was not me. I was initially interested in the molecules.