CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Princeton University, will talk about the future of health care April 3 (Monday) during a lecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The free, public talk is scheduled to begin at 4:30 p.m. in 228 Natural History Building, 1301 W. Green St., Urbana.
"The Future of Health Care" will examine the nation's health-care crisis, which Krugman has identified as a combination of three policy crises. The first crisis, according to Krugman, has been the unraveling of employer-based health insurance; second, the plight of Medicaid, the government program that has picked up the costs of uninsured Americans; and third, the long-term problem of the federal government's solvency.
In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Krugman wrote: "The good news is that we know more about the economics of health care than we did when (President Bill) Clinton tried and failed to remake the system. There's now a large body of evidence on what works and what doesn't work in health care, and it's not hard to see how to make dramatic improvements in U.S. practice."
Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist and continues as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He is the author or editor of 20 books, most recently, "The Great Unraveling" and "Economics," a textbook co-written with his wife, Robin Wells, also a Princeton economist.
The lecture is sponsored by the Illinois department of economics and Worth Publishers, which published "Economics."