CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Health care will be the topic of two talks at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study.
On Wednesday (April 14), David Cutler, a former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, will speak on “Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America’s Health-Care System.” His talk, free and open to the public, will be at 3 p.m. in the second-floor Music Room at the Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana.
Cutler is a professor in the department of economics and in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council during the Clinton administration, and advised former presidential candidate Bill Bradley.
Cutler also is the author of a recent book by the same title as his talk, in which he argues that our spending on medicine is well worth it, and that the nation could do even better by spending more. He suggests ways to improve the system and make it easier to deal with, and to extend coverage to all Americans.
On April 28, a public forum on “Hospitals: To Tax or Not to Tax,” will be held at 7 p.m. on the third floor of the Levis center. The forum was organized in the wake of the recent decision by the Illinois Department of Revenue to revoke tax-exempt status for the property of Provena Covenant Medical Center in Urbana. Panelists and members of the public will have the chance to discuss the ramifications of that decision for all hospitals, as well as other not-for-profit organizations.
Included on the panel assembled for the forum will be John Colombo, professor of law at Illinois; Claudia Lennhoff, executive director of Champaign County Health Care Consumers; Dr. James Leonard, president and CEO of Carle Foundation; Dan Stebbins, from the Champaign County Board of Review; James Unland, president of The Health Capital Group; and Mark Wiener, president and CEO of Provena Covenant Medical Center. The moderators will be Dr. Brad Schwartz, regional dean of the Medical College at Illinois, and Noreen Sugrue, senior research analyst in the Nursing Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Both events are part of a yearlong Center for Advanced Study initiative, “Who Gets What? The Interactions of Health Policy and Social Welfare Policy.” For more information, contact CAS at 217-333-6729 or visit the center’s Web site.
