Health care economist and Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt, 80, a German émigré and a longtime friend of the Association of Health Care Journalists, died on Tuesday, according to multiple news outlets.
Reinhardt, who earned degrees from the University of Saskatchewan and Yale University, was a giant in his field of health care economics.
He has been a member of the Institute of Medicine and was commissioner of the Physician Payment Review Committee.
Reinhardt was one of the first speakers to attend the Midwest Conference on Health Journalism at Indiana University, a predecessor conference of AHCJ, and later spoke at several AHCJ conferences.
At our first conference Reinhardt refused speaker payments and almost always accepted phone calls from AHCJ member journalists. He was a keynote speaker at several AHCJ conferences, where his keen insights and rapier wit were greatly appreciated.
Reinhardt was married to Tsung-mei (May) Cheng, also a prominent health policy researcher and a co-founder of the annual Princeton Conference on health policy. They were the parents of three.
