Obama, Daschle, and Lambrew
In a press conference Thursday on the adminstration’s plans to address health care reform, President-Elect Barack Obama officially announced Tom Daschle as his choice for both Secretary of Health and Human Services and director of the new White House Office of Health Reform.
He also named Dr. Jeanne Lambrew, who worked on health policy at the White House from 1997 to 2000, as the deputy director of Health Reform.
According to a story in the New York Times, Daschle wants to establish a Federal Health Board, an independent entity like the Federal Reserve. Details of this plan are described in a book that Lambrew and Daschle recently co-wrote entitled, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.”
While Senator Daschle is well known for his work on Capitol Hill, Lambrew is less well known. She was an assistant professor of public policy at Georgetown University and joined the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas faculty in the summer of 2007 as associate professor of public affairs.
She served at a senior level at both the Office of Management and Budget and the National Economic Council. During the Clinton administration, she helped lead the creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Obama called Lambrew “a leading thinker on this issue, nationally recognized for her research on Medicare, Medicaid, long-term care, and the uninsured.”
According to a recent web post at the Center for American Progress, where Lambrew is a Senior Fellow, Lambrew has advocated for plans that allow Americans to keep their existing coverage, while offering affordable options to those who need them. The plan would simplify Medicaid and extend coverage to those below a certain income level.
In a Dallas Morning News opinion piece that appeared last spring, she made the case for using Medicare, rather than Medicaid, to leverage long-term-care insurance.
The piece began: “America is in desperate need of a long-term care solution. On the verge of the baby boomers’ retirement – the 65-plus population will increase by some 30 million over the next 20 years, a three-fold increase over the previous two decades – the United States is utterly unprepared to finance their long-term-care needs.”
What is your reaction to the selection of Daschle and Lambrew? Add your comments below.
Jeanne Lambrew is an excellent choice. We worked with her at UNC where she was a fellow in Health Services Research. She has a depth and breadth of knowledge in health care access, cost and quality, a sensitivity of workforce issues, and a lot of political savvy. This is a promising start to health care reform.
The creation of a Federal Health Board sounds somewhat reminiscent of DHHS’ National Center for Health Care Technology (1979-82) whose charge was to assess the value of established and new technologies. Although its tenure was short-lived, one should learn from the reasons for its demise.