Career Development : Calendar

San Francisco chapter meeting: Universal health care

09/05/07     Menlo Park, CA

Audio of this event is now available.

AHCJ members and Bay Area health journalists joined our three panelists for a discussion about "Universal health coverage in California and the U.S.: Will it happen, when, and what will it look like?

Our panelists:

Richard Figueroa is a health care adviser in the office of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he is working on the governor's health care reform initiative. Previously, he was the legislative director for California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi. He is also a member of the State of California Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board (MRMIB), which administers the Healthy Families Program (S-CHIP) and other programs.

Larry Levitt, M.A., is vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and editor-in-chief of kaisernetwork.org, the Foundation's online health policy news service. He previously served as a senior health policy adviser to the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, working on the development of President Clinton's Health Security Act. He has also worked on health policy with California insurance commissioner John Garamendi and was a medical economist with Kaiser Permanente, where he worked on insurance reform.

Harold S. Luft, PhD is a professor of health policy and health economics at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. His research and teaching cover areas including medical care utilization, HMOs, quality and outcomes of hospital care, and health care reform. He has formulated a hybrid strategy for providing universal coverage for major and chronic illnesses, under a plan that incorporates aspects of both a single-payer model and a PPO-like approach.